Regarding the Android version, I assume that version isn't specifically targeted at Android phones, correct? I am considering buying a Nook Color (a touchscreen Android device) and I'd be 10x more excited if it, when Pleco is released for Android, could also run Pleco. Any thoughts?
Android! (and OCR!)
- Thread starter mikelove
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bosgood said:
You'd have to root it to run non-Barnes-and-Noble-approved apps, for one thing - I don't think it can run any arbitrary third-party software out of the gate. Beyond that, Pleco certainly might work but if it's not running the tablet-optimized Android 3.0 I doubt it will work very well - you'd probably be much better off waiting and buying an Android 3.0 tablet at this point, the large-screen Android experience in general should be far better on those.
langxia said:
See my most recent few posts in this thread - it's coming along but progress has been slowed a bit by, among other things, our decision to try to include some form of live OCR (which is still selling insanely well on iPhone even after 2-and-a-half months) in the very first public release of it.
Is it possible to have an announcement-only Android status update thread where only mikelove can post? I think there's enough demand for such a dedicated sticky where one can quickly and simply find out the status. By letting everyone respond to this sticky, it has become cumbersome. I mean this sticky now lacks the intended functionality to the degree that mikelove lately referred a poster to the other thread that has 670 replies to get a better idea of the Android version's status. Shouldn't such a popular and repeatedly asked question be easy for us users to find the simple answer?
JimmyTheSaint said:
I'd rather not have thousands of people subscribing to that and slamming our web server every time I post something - our regular email announcement system (subscribe by sending a blank email to pleco-announce-subscribe@pleco.com) is a much more sensible way to distribute status updates, so it's probably best to just sign up for that.
But just in general, there aren't likely to be any real Android status updates until the first beta falls out of the sky one day - the iPhone 2.2.2 release announcement email is unlikely to say much about Android other than some vague suggestion that "we're making good progress" and a reference to the fact that we're now planning to include OCR. I know there's a lot of excitement about this, but we honestly have no clear idea of when it'll be ready - progress in implementing features is meaningless when so much of this is about the thoroughly unpredictable areas of compatibility testing / bug fixing / device-specific optimization. And on top of that, the feature list for the first beta continues to evolve as the market does; OCR was (tentatively) added because it was such huge hit on iOS and we're considering a couple of other new things too.
Like it or not, whatever we release initially on Android is going to be downloaded and criticized by a lot of people, so we have to make it pretty impressive - ironically, if there was less interest in this we could probably get it out a lot sooner, since it'd be enough to release something with a basic dictionary search interface and not much else.
The beta-test version certainly won't require 3.0, and it's very unlikely that even the finished version will either. But we're close enough to the first beta release now that I would strongly advise anyone considering an Android phone purchase to wait until the beta's out and there's feedback from people who already own Android phones; that way you can be a lot more certain that your particular model will run the beta well.
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