iPhone

[Ma Guo Tou]

I was pretty non-plussed by the unveiling of the iphone. What I wanted when I talked with friends about the possibility of an iphone was a phone with massive music storage capabilities and whatnot. What we get is an expensive smartphone that's not really a smartphone, and just a few gigs of music memory space.

For that kind of money, and maybe a bit less, you can get a much more versatile smartphone that supports music and can hold a few gigs in its memory chip, or a nice ipod and a simple calling phone.

Way to drop the ball on this one, Apple...

 

[panamajack]

Drop the ball ?

Mmm... could it be that Apple wasn't targeting you for this first gen smartphone / tablet ? You say you don't want an Apple branded smartphone anyways, so it seems odd for you to be commenting here.

From a marketing point of view, it makes sense that Apple would release a higher-end smartphone instead of an Apple branded music-phone, which is what you seem to want. But that doesn't mean they won't in the future! They want early adopters to drop as MUCH money as they can this summer.

Rather than dropping the ball, Apple is wading into these waters painfully slowly, clearly learning what works and what doesn't from their competitors as well as their iPod experience.

 

[Ma Guo Tou]

Well, I am a smartphone user and have been for a while. There's really nothing new there, just a bit more power. It doesn't even seem flexible in terms of software or whatnot.
What I mean to say is that I was looking for a breakthrough of the same magnitude of the ipod when it first came out, but all I see is a pretty phone that costs a lot.

 

[sfrrr]

Jim - no problem, I mostly posted that because I realized I hadn't said anything on that subject in a while.

sfrrr - How could you lose a year of flashcards? Don't you back them up regularly? Usually when I hear someone's lost that many it's not because of anything PlecoDict-related but because they forgot to make backups and their Pocket PC was run over by a bus/train/tank/etc.

Yes, I *do* back them up regularly, but no matter which backup I used, I got the current version, which is missing most of last year. In other words, this problem must have been brewing for a while and, well, *@#$$%* it, I have plenty of other good uses for PD. Life is already too uncertain to fret.

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

Sorry, when I think of "backup" I think of incremental backups, like what programmers use; whenever you finish working on a piece of code, you check it in to what's called a "Revision Control System," which retains copies of every revision of every file pretty much indefinitely. So if an error is introduced in one version and you don't notice it until 20 versions later, you can still go back and find the last clean file. But obviously that's not most people's idea of a backup, so I should be more specific about that.

 

[panamajack]

Let there be hope!

Apple Still Considering 3rd Party iPhone App Development?

http://www.macrumors.com/2007/05/11/apple-still-considering-3rd-party-iphone-app-development/

One additional tidbit from Apple's shareholder meeting notes was a revealing blurb that Apple still hadn't completely decided whether or not they will open the iPhone to 3rd party developers.
Jobs did acknowledge that the company is still struggling to decide if third-party developers will be able to create software that will run on the iPhone. It’s a decision Apple “is wrestling with,” according to Jobs.


Apple's choice to limit iPhone development has been the target of a lot of criticism against the iPhone. In the days after the iPhone announcement, Jobs stated that while you will be able to purchase and install additional applications on the iPhone, that this would be limited and in a "controlled environment". As a result, the iPhone has been described as a "closed device" which could make enterprise market penetration difficult.

 

[mikelove]

Well that would certainly help matters - even if they only allowed development through Java or some other system-protecting VM environment it would still make a big difference.

The latest iPhone idea we've come up with is to make a (likely very stripped-down) Flash version of PlecoDict, stick it in internal memory and open it up from within Safari; even if we managed to line up all of the necessary licenses, an actual online dictionary is still going to be a less-than-pleasant experience on the dysfuntional US cellular network, but Flash itself is a pretty rich environment and should be enough to offer at least some reasonable level of functionality.

 

[koreth]

If you can get PlecoDict working in some fashion on the iPhone, that will suddenly make the iPhone an option for me. I will not even consider buying a smartphone that can't run PlecoDict -- most days I use PlecoDict much more than I use the "making phone calls" feature of my Treo!

 

[panamajack]

More promising news ...

Seems like it's more and more a question of when not if there will be 3rd party support for the iPhone.

--
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/05/30/iphone-may-allow-3rd-party-applications

From the D5 conference interview:

"Is the iPhone’s platform closed? And if it is, will it be open to developers in the future?

Jobs says it’s a security issue, but Apple is working to find a way to allow developers to build applications for it. Jobs says he doesn’t want the iPhone to be “one of those phones that crashes a few times a day.” He adds: “We would like to solve this problem and if you could just be a little more patient with us, we’ll do it.”

??

I have a general Palm question: did they allow third party app support right from the very first Palm Pilot?

 

[mikelove]

Promising sign, yes; the fact that he specifically reaffirmed in that interview that it's running full OS X is another good sign. Given the number of talented Mac hackers out there, I suspect that within a week or so of the iPhone's public release someone will have put together a GCC-based developer kit for the iPhone. Unless Apple added some sort of code-signing mechanism to prevent people from doing that, in which case it'll take more like two weeks

The Pilot 1000/5000 did indeed support third-party applications; in fact they're still nominally supported by the latest version of the Palm OS developer kit. The stationery files (basically a template from which you build your Palm app) still include a couple of lines of code to detect whether or not your software is running on the 1000/5000 and, if it is, implement a fix for a continuous-reset bug they had.

 

[panamajack]

Google Gears another possibility ?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/30/google-gears-lets-developers-take-apps-offline/

Of course it's far too early to tell, but could a simplified Pleco or other dictionary database be developed for Google Gears ? If it worked for Safari then it could kill two birds by providing support for the iPhone and desktop support for the Mac and other PCs.

 

[mikelove]

It might work, but one of the biggest features in our desktop version design is something that for various reasons pretty much has to run as a standalone application. And as far as the iPhone goes, if Apple opens up the iPhone to a sufficient degree that you could install a Safari plugin like this then it'll probably also be possible for us to create an iPhone-native version of PlecoDict.

On a not-entirely-unrelated subject: no current plans to support the new Palm Foleo, it's not altogether without promise and if the API is sufficiently close to regular Palm OS we'd certainly consider it, but Palm's going to have to prove this isn't some short-lived experiment like the LifeDrive before we invest in another new platform from them. If they put their new Linux platform on a Treo, though, we'll get interested in a hurry.

 

[panamajack]

Understood with the Desktop version ... however, if it indeed could work via an iPhone version of Safari, chances are it would be comparable to the Safari on OSX as well.

As much as I'd love a native OSX stand alone Pleco desktop and the iPhone, I'd happily settle for stripped down iPhone/Safari plug-in that works for both !

 

[LiAnCrow]

Character input with my finger???

So since Steve tought the stylus is ohh so ugly, how is one going to make use of the character recognizer in Pleco??

 

[panamajack]

Job's point about the stylus was that your finger already served the same function more or less. If the multi-touch screen is everything Apple says it is, it should be able to handle something similar to what's in Pleco today.

Various rumor pages now point to the possibility of developer tools being released at WWDC.

 

[mikelove]

Yes, but "developer tools" could still be something very limited, like Widgets (which wouldn't really help us at all) - for there to be any possibility of a PlecoDict port we'd need them to offer a full-blown development environment. If it can run native, Cocoa-based OS X applications then that's very good news for a port, if it runs Java then a port is probably possible but would take considerably longer, since we'd have to basically rewrite all of PlecoDict from scratch.

Honestly, though, even if Apple does allow normal OS X application development on the iPhone, given that the iPhone has a full-fledged web browser, if we get the licenses lined up for a web-based version of PlecoDict within the next year or so we might just skip a dedicated iPhone version and instead simply tweak the web version to work well with an iPhone's screen size. It wouldn't be as nice an experience as a dedicated version, of course, and you wouldn't be able to use it on an airplane or another wireless-lacking environment, but it would let us at least nominally support not only the iPhone but just about every mobile phone in existence, while allowing us to focus our non-web development on just one or two big, popular, standard platforms like Windows (+ Mobile) and Linux (+ Palm's new Linux-based OS).

 

[zarathustra]

It's now official.

iPhone will support Web 2.0/AJAX apps. Perhaps it'll have SQLite just like OS X.

 

[mikelove]

Per Jobs' keynote, the development situation is pretty much as I suspected - you can't write native apps but it supports Web 2.0 online applications, and they apparently have to be run online and can't be locally hosted.

It'll be quite a while (at least a year) before we even get a reasonable number of dictionary licenses renegotiated to allow for a web-based version of PlecoDict (we've only done one so far, though a couple of others are in the works), which means you're not likely to actually be able to run PlecoDict on your iPhone until mid-2009.

Also unfortunately, a lot of the features people generally associate with our software are not yet possible in even a very advanced web-based application. For example, there's not really any way we know of to create a stroke capture / handwriting recognition tool in JavaScript; the few attempts we've seen do it by creating huge numbers of pixel-sized page elements, which is fine for a technology demo but way too unstable / memory-hogging for a commercial app. Now if Apple eventually adds Flash or Java support the iPhone that would obviously change things, but the JavaScript-only environment they're describing really wouldn't do what we need.

So basically, if you're getting an iPhone you should not expect to be able to run PlecoDict on it for at least 2 years, and when you do it will probably be missing a lot of the features that are in the other versions of our software. (not to mention being unusable on airplanes or in other areas where you can't get cellular or WiFi reception)

 

[panamajack]

A disappointing compromise

While not surprising, this is still a little disappointing. Is there any way that Ajax based apps could eventually be locally hosted ?

I suppose I'm underestimating how wifi might quickly expand to places like airplanes. I guess I'm still in the running for a Palm device.

 

[mikelove]

Well the problem is that there still has to be some actual "computer program" behind such an application - there's no way to write something as complicated as a dictionary database in JavaScript, at least not as it's implemented in most web browsers. The real work in AJAX apps is pretty much always being done on a server, by a much more powerful program than anything you can write in a browser, at least not without using full-fledged Java (which iPhone doesn't seem to support).

Now certainly JavaScript can be extended to be used for locally-hosted apps; Google Gears, for example, adds a whole lot of extra stuff to JavaScript, like a SQLite-based relational database, and with the addition of a couple of tools like that it probably would be feasible to create a basic version of PlecoDict that could run locally on an iPhone. (though there would still be some security issues, we obviously don't want everyone to be able to peep around in our encryption / copy-protection code) But there's nothing to indicate that Apple's planning to add those sorts of capabilities to Safari, or at least not to the version of it that's built into iPhone.