Flashcard sync, thoughts

[dustpuppy]

Pleco has evolved in ways i couldn't imagine when I first started using it in 2010. Now there is one aspect in which Pleco is still lacking, when I see the ease with which I can sync my decks between my PC, Android tablet and iPhone on Anki, I can't help but feel Pleco is a bit behind on this. I know Mike's plans are to use a future google API for cloud syncing but consider this: users might be willing to pay a subscription for flashcard syncing, or they may be interested in buying an add-on enabling cloud syncing. If Anki can do it, I feel like Pleco can do it better. And I can't imagine there aren't people besides me who want to sync between iphone and android.

Waiting to hear your thoughts on this. For long-lived product such as Pleco, I feel it would be a worthwhile investment to develop a prioprietary flashcard syncing system. Even better would be to have some kind of web-based system allowing me to input flashcards, which would automatically show up on my phone (similarly to how I do it when adding decks in Anki PC, and syncing them to my android phone).

 

[mikelove]

We're actually working on Dropbox sync support on iOS, which would be nicely cross-platform. Once we've got it working on iOS we can consider rolling it out on Android as well, but with Google I/O only 3 months away, it seems silly to do any Android-specific cloud sync work now - even if we do end up supporting Dropbox sync too, we'll want to do it in a way that's compatible with whatever Google rolls out.

One thing we've considered that might accelerate the process is that we'd really like to get conflict resolution (merging changes from two independently-modified versions of the same database) working sooner rather than later, and since that would happen entirely in our cross-platform flashcard database code, it might make sense to put that out as an "experimental" feature in an Android update to get it tested more widely than it would be in an iPhone beta. Not sure what the file sync component of that would be, though.

 

[dustpuppy]

If an Android cloud syncing API is announced at google IO, are you expecting to adopt it for flashcard syncing ? Right now I would love to sync between my android phone and android tablet.
I don't mind paying for a flashcard syncing feature, it would really hepl me a lot.

 

[mikelove]

If an Android cloud syncing API is announced at google IO, are you expecting to adopt it for flashcard syncing ? Right now I would love to sync between my android phone and android tablet.

Most likely yes, but we'd have to see the API first of course.

 

[dustpuppy]

Hi, so did any cloud API get announced at google I/O ? Still anxiously waiting

 

[mikelove]

No, we had already deduced from the lack of rumors that there wouldn't be one and we weren't really happy with iCloud either so now we're rolling our own - already working pretty well in testing.

 

[burdenofhope]

Do you have an estimate on when this might be ready? I would love it.

 

[mikelove]

Do you have an estimate on when this might be ready? I would love it.

Not sure - we'd love to get that feature into a beta ASAP, so that it can get as much testing as possible, but we absolutely positively have to finish our big iOS update by the time OS 7 is released, so the amount of time we can spend on Android between now and then depends on how things go with polishing up the last few bits of that update. (we'll probably know a lot more on that front in 8 days, after the WWDC keynote)

 

[dustpuppy]

Understood, no rush but I would love to have the feature at some point. Thanks for the good work.

 

[russellforrest]

Hi, just want to add my support for a cloud based flashcard syncing. Just like Dustpuppy, I would love to be able to sync between my Android phone and tablet. Keep up the good work!

 

[dustpuppy]

Mike, would love to hear what the latest is on this, even if it's far out. I'm considering buying a 2013 Nexus 7, if I can get pleco flashcard sync in the future, it would be easier to rationalize that purchase.

 

[mikelove]

Mike, would love to hear what the latest is on this, even if it's far out. I'm considering buying a 2013 Nexus 7, if I can get pleco flashcard sync in the future, it would be easier to rationalize that purchase.

Nothing new to say, really - aside from a couple of days for the 2.4.10/11 updates we've pretty much spent the whole summer doing iOS stuff.

 

[dustpuppy]

Understood. have you ever considered doing some kind of crowdfunding for new features ? I love pleco I would not mind funding some of the features i'd like to have.

 

[mikelove]

Understood. have you ever considered doing some kind of crowdfunding for new features ? I love pleco I would not mind funding some of the features i'd like to have.

Crowdfunding only helps if this is something where money is the main limiting factor, rather than time - it would be great for a new dictionary license, but it wouldn't really help with something that involves mostly labor unless it was a) easy to farm out or b) such a huge amount of money that we could hire a new full-time person with it (which very few Pleco crowdfunding projects are likely to be). And of course as with any crowdfunding project it also has to be something that we're reasonably confident that we can finish on time and on budget, which is rarely the case with big programming jobs

We actually did outsource a good portion of our cloud sync system, and we've got a decent prototype now based on that, but there's at least a month or so of programmer time needed on our end to get it polished up and integrated into our Android app - that aspect of it we really can't outsource. And it took twice as long and cost about twice as much as we expected to get to the point with it where we are now, so it wouldn't have been a very good thing to Kickstart. So it's a question of making room for that in the midst of all of the other things that we're currently working on, not just iOS stuff but cross-platform improvements like a new SRS algorithm (about as popular a request as cloud sync, actually, but something we can implement once and offer on both iOS and Android).

We're also holding out for the possibility that Google finally does something with cloud sync in Android 5 - we'd pretty much given up hope of that, but the fact that Dropbox does sync now would seem to force their hands; the last thing they want is for developers to start relying on somebody else's cloud for a basic system service like document sync. We'd still add our service eventually too - it also supports public file sharing / tagging / cataloging / etc so there's a lot of cool stuff we plan to do with it, not to mention the fact that we've got an awful lot of dual-platform users who'd benefit from it - but an official Google solution that's as simple to integrate as iCloud but works more reliably would let us get up and running with some sort of cloud sync quickly.

 

[dustpuppy]

I would love to hear any updates on the flashcard sync system if you have any

 

[mikelove]

Nothing new to say at the moment - we're pretty much just focused on getting our big iOS update done.

 

[dustpuppy]

Hi, I realize you're busy with the iOS version 3, wanted to see if there are more details on when flashcard sync is coming to Android, even if it's a year from now ?

 

[mikelove]

We think we'll give Google one more shot to come up with something at their developer conference in May.