WWDC 2011 Keynote Thread

mikelove

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Thought I might as well start a new thread to talk about announcements from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference - keynote is tomorrow (Monday) at 10am Pacific Daylight Time and they've already announced it'll include iCloud and iOS 5 details, hopefully with some neat new features we'll be able to make use of in Pleco. (iOS 4 was instrumental in making OCR possible)

I'm actually going to be in attendance at WWDC this year, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to discuss it as it happens (5k people using the same WiFi network...), but I'll post thoughts here afterwords if not.
 

numble

状元
So looks like no voice stuff (unless they're saving it for iPhone 5), but there are iCloud APIs that you can use, I predicted that! :p
 

character

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The syncing for apps should make keeping flashcard lists (and ideally, settings) the same across all devices easier. May need separate iPhone/Touch and iPad settings for certain things.

The ability to get by without a PC (except perhaps for photos) should sell a lot more iPads, but I'm not sure such customers are prime candidates for Pleco. Limiting the number and time photos are stored may mean that better cameras on the Touch and iPad are coming.

The newstand on iOS in the Fall argues for a retina iPad release for the Christmas shopping season.

Apple definitely seems to be moving toward a converged operating system, if not next year then the year after.

In general, Apple resolved a lot of pain points in the OS that had been somewhat addressed by 3rd-party developers. It would have been nice if they'd offered to hire some of those devs after destroying their businesses.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
No voice stuff, but the two potentially interesting things:

iCloud - not actually clear yet how well this will work for flashcard sync - they didn't say whether or not it can do deltas (rather than transferring over an entire file); in theory, even without that we might be able make it work by downloading the new database from the cloud, syncing it and then uploading the changed version, but that could get rather expensive bandwidth-wise, so we may yet have to rig up a way to do this on our own servers.

Dictionary Popup - demonstrated very briefly in the Mail part of the show. They didn't say whether other apps will be able to provide dictionaries or only tap into Apple's; won't do us much good if it's the latter, but if it's the former you can expect us to get very aggressively into that.

Full APIs have yet to be posted but I won't be able to say anything about them anyway until somebody else breaks NDA.
 

numble

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How is WWDC? First time attendee? Do you think you'll get much out of it? Maybe you can ask about dictionary APIs--I've heard devs get really nice access to Apple engineers at the event.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
numble said:
How is WWDC? First time attendee? Do you think you'll get much out of it? Maybe you can ask about dictionary APIs--I've heard devs get really nice access to Apple engineers at the event.

I've actually established now that we won't be able to make much use of them based on the current design at least, unfortunately - can't say more than that. iCloud is still a maybe - should at least be able to facilitate easy sharing of exported flashcard list files and documents, though.

First time at WWDC, yes - I'm reserving judgement until we get to day 2 and the more nitty-gritty stuff, right now it's all broad overviews.
 

numble

状元
I am playing around with iOS 5. Looks like Pleco's app data takes up A LOT of storage. Nearly 600 mb. I don't have flashcards, but I do have a bunch of word lists and documents. And of course, a lot of add-ons.

This puts a cramper on users that want to use the "Backup to iCloud option" (basically backs up photos, settings, accounts, and app/document data--not including apps themselves or music), since the free (and currently, only) option is only 5 GB of backup.

I really wish there was a "large app" option now instead of the current 20mb one and "large app/document data."
 

mikelove

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Staff member
numble said:
Okay, how was it after day 2?

Better, though I'm still not sure whether I would have been better off spending the money to fly to Paris for a week and get acquainted with the iOS 5 APIs on my MacBook while sitting in a cafe :)

numble said:
I am playing around with iOS 5. Looks like Pleco's app data takes up A LOT of storage. Nearly 600 mb. I don't have flashcards, but I do have a bunch of word lists and documents. And of course, a lot of add-ons.

This puts a cramper on users that want to use the "Backup to iCloud option" (basically backs up photos, settings, accounts, and app/document data--not including apps themselves or music), since the free (and currently, only) option is only 5 GB of backup.

You should file a bug report asking for a mechanism for apps to mark some documents as "don't backup to cloud" (though perhaps there's already an API in there to do that).
 

numble

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I'm not a developer, but I might forward that along to the person with a dev account that added me to the beta.

I think there are 2 things iCloud does.
1) App integration - so you can sync certain docs across devices and computers
2) Replacement for iTunes backup - instead of the old backup to iTunes, it puts that backup file in iCloud and backs all that stuff into iCloud, which can take a lot of space.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
numble said:
2) Replacement for iTunes backup - instead of the old backup to iTunes, it puts that backup file in iCloud and backs all that stuff into iCloud, which can take a lot of space.

Well we could always provide the option to move large data files to the non-backed-up document storage folder; with the move to iCloud, the desire to avoid wasting storage space would probably trump the desire to avoid re-downloading by having those files restored from disk on a device replacement.
 

numble

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So Pleco is pretty wonky with what looks like a new keyboard implementation in iOS 5 (iPhone). Do you think it's just bugs with the current beta, or will it be something you need to address?
 

mikelove

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Staff member
numble said:
So Pleco is pretty wonky with what looks like a new keyboard implementation in iOS 5 (iPhone). Do you think it's just bugs with the current beta, or will it be something you need to address?

It's easily addressable - just tweaking some view hierarchy stuff - but we probably won't even need to, the redesign will have iOS 4 as its minimum requirement and we're using a different and much more reliable system (introduced in iOS 4) to interact with the keyboard in that.
 

numble

状元
mikelove said:
numble said:
So Pleco is pretty wonky with what looks like a new keyboard implementation in iOS 5 (iPhone). Do you think it's just bugs with the current beta, or will it be something you need to address?

It's easily addressable - just tweaking some view hierarchy stuff - but we probably won't even need to, the redesign will have iOS 4 as its minimum requirement and we're using a different and much more reliable system (introduced in iOS 4) to interact with the keyboard in that.
Will Pleco still be backwards compatible with lower iOS versions, just without the iOS 4+ features?
 

mikelove

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Staff member
numble said:
Will Pleco still be backwards compatible with lower iOS versions, just without the iOS 4+ features?

No, I think we'll be dropping them altogether; it's not just a question of adding new features but of rewriting core functionality, having two different versions of - say - the search input field for OS 3 and OS 4 users creates a ton of headaches.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
numble said:
So Pleco is pretty wonky with what looks like a new keyboard implementation in iOS 5 (iPhone). Do you think it's just bugs with the current beta, or will it be something you need to address?

We've now found / fixed the problem and it turns out to be something minor enough that we can easily work it into our next bug-fix update, so this should be fixed in 2.2.4.
 

numble

状元
mikelove said:
numble said:
Will Pleco still be backwards compatible with lower iOS versions, just without the iOS 4+ features?

No, I think we'll be dropping them altogether; it's not just a question of adding new features but of rewriting core functionality, having two different versions of - say - the search input field for OS 3 and OS 4 users creates a ton of headaches.
Have you collected stats on usage and OS version? If there are a ton of people still on iOS 3, you might get a lot of angry e-mails, especially since half of current iPhone models are locked out of iOS 4.
 

mikelove

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Staff member
numble said:
Have you collected stats on usage and OS version? If there are a ton of people still on iOS 3, you might get a lot of angry e-mails, especially since half of current iPhone models are locked out of iOS 4.

Honestly, those devices aren't going to be able to take advantage of most of the improvements in the next big update anyway - they're already locked out of OCR (and we've gotten hardly any complaints about that), won't be able to use iCloud, will probably find merged multi-dictionary search a bit too slow... they'd get the nicer UI but little else.

And it's certainly not half, our numbers have it at under 5% at this point, and other surveys have it somewhere between 2 and 10%. iOS 4 may not run that well on the iPhone 3G / second-gen iPod Touch, but it does run on them, so all we're really cutting off are users of the original iPhone or first-generation iPod Touch.
 

numble

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iOS 5 beta 2 Safari supports WOFF (Web Open Font Format), which can be tested here. Could this somehow lead to more fonts in Pleco?

OaoWxl.jpg
 
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