Poll: Flashcard sync: online or offline?

[mikelove]

I would love to see an pleco-hosted online backup. i dont know much about apples mobileme, but why rely on a apple-only based solution when you could offer one central api for different platforms/devices? is this more a question of ongoing costs for the hosting? i imagine the implementation of the service itself would not be that hard and also the database design would be rather simple, as i see it its more or less the fashcard-content linked to a dictionary-id (or to custom card).

The hosting costs would be pretty negligible - if we let people back up embedded images / audio too they might get to a point where we'd have to charge a subscription fee, but even then it'd be something like $5-$10 per year.

However, the support and maintenance represent a significant burden - needs to be someone at Pleco keeping an eye on it in case of server outages / security breeches / etc, and we've also got to worry about lost passwords and such.

Plus, there might be other benefits to integrating with an Apple-supplied system - with our own system people would need to register for accounts / confirm email addresses / passwords / etc, but an Apple system could be configuration-free, automatically transferring data to and from a user's linked MobileMe account. Saves us a lot of programming time that we can use to develop something else...

lso i dont know if this could be a copyright issue, but in the future you could think of providing kind of an online review of the flashcards. this is a feature i miss in pleco-flashcards even if i still prefer it over anki who offers that. not sure though if thats something you want to consider since you focus on mobile apps and maybe for marketing reasons wanna stay there

We've been trying to sort out the copyright issues for years, we're still feeling like we're probably going to manage to do so eventually but it's been very very very slow going... honestly, though, since we already do have the licensing lined up for a desktop app, and since it would actually be a lot less work to develop one than a web-based app (even if there was sync with a central server involved), and since there's a TON of interest in a desktop Pleco flashcard viewer / editor, I'm not sure why we'd really want to spend our time doing something web-based instead.

 

[sych]

I'd be happy with either way; but with a slight preference for online sync.

 

[koreth]

I would also love it if this wasn't just flashcard sync. If we could also sync document reader settings (maybe even documents themselves) it'd make it a lot easier to do a little reading practice on the go with my iPhone while using my iPad for the bulk of it. If documents would be too space-intensive to sync, then at least current position and bookmarks would be good (maybe tied to a hash of the document contents or something). Right now I read stuff on the iPad because of the nice big screen but I have to keep my phone handy because it's where I keep my flashcards, so I don't get to take advantage of the nice UI shortcuts in the reader to create new flashcards.

Feature creep!

 

[mikelove]

I would also love it if this wasn't just flashcard sync. If we could also sync document reader settings (maybe even documents themselves) it'd make it a lot easier to do a little reading practice on the go with my iPhone while using my iPad for the bulk of it. If documents would be too space-intensive to sync, then at least current position and bookmarks would be good (maybe tied to a hash of the document contents or something). Right now I read stuff on the iPad because of the nice big screen but I have to keep my phone handy because it's where I keep my flashcards, so I don't get to take advantage of the nice UI shortcuts in the reader to create new flashcards.

This seems like a logical thing to introduce once we've got the basic service going, but much of that is going to depend on what Apple announces cloud-wise at WWDC next month (I've got my ticket...) - if they offer some sort of general-purpose app directory sync feature then we'd probably just rely on that for most of this stuff.