Google Android

[mikelove]

Well yeah, but we needed to do a bunch of Objective-C code (not a particularly intuitive / well-designed language, at least IMHO) for the iPhone front-end - very few platforms left that let you do UI programming in regular old C. So having some Java is OK, just as long as we don't need to rewrite the cross-platform stuff in it. And JNI's not ideal, but the cross-platform and platform-specific bits of Pleco don't really share many objects (have Palm to thank for that - ARM code necessitates jumping between big- and little-endian in the same program so it encourages us to keep things compartmentalized), and the cross-platform code has already been extensively error-checked since it's running (reasonably) stable on three other platforms at this point.

 

[character]

Glad to see you're more interested in the Android platform. FWIW, an application can store data on the SD card, but that storage isn't protected from other programs (such protection is supposed to be coming eventually).

 

[mikelove]

Not an issue, we're already used to having data files in places where anyone can access them.

 

[matai]

Mike

Hi, I've only very recently discovered pleco and how much my Zire 22 is stretched in handling it. Owning neither a WM device or ipod/iphone I was trying to determine which one was the lessor of two evils. However, after reading the latest android threads I decided to just cram the pleco 1.0 professional bundle minus the NWP dictionary into my Zire (thanks for keeping the 1.0 versions with the manual installs available) and wait for the android version to come out.

I used to have have apple gear, however I just got tired of having to pay for EVERYTHING (including stuff I didn't need). So consider this another request an android version of pleco. I really want to get the linguist bundle, but will be content with my zire until I can get pleco on a platform that isn't so restrictive.

Thanks for making such a great application

Matthew

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! Even if it takes a while for us to release an Android version, we're hoping that Google's support of (some) native code development on a platform which anyone can distribute software for might put some pressure on Apple to ease up a bit on their restrictions - iPhone is a lot more dependent on network effects than Mac OS X, and Apple may feel more pressure to ease up if their mobile market share starts to slip than they did when their PC market share was in freefall.

 

[Slimmage]

Let me start by saying that Pleco is an amazing product. I am a complete promoter and show off Pleco to everyone I know who is thinking about studying Chinese. Even though I use it on my 5 year old Palm it still impresses.

I wanted to add my voice to the chorus asking you to prioritize development of the Andriod PlecoDict. I know that there will be a lot of people who are eager for iPhone enhancements, but there are even more people who can't use iPhone because it is expensive and on the really lousy AT&T network. I have no AT&T service and can't justify spending $250 on a iPodTouch just to use PlecoDict. Ivan Siedenberg and others at Verizon have been very clear that they are going to launch a suite of Samsung and Motorola Android phones in the coming weeks, so I think the excitement over an Andriod PlecoDict will only grow.

I hope you prioritize the Andriod development over adding flashcard and other enhancements for the iPhone.

Have you thought about how you will prioritize your development resources? Have you considered hiring a contractor to help with Andriod development? There is a large PlecoDict community that must include some people who know this language very well.

-Slim

 

[mikelove]

We have to do flashcards etc on iPhone before we can do anything on Android - those things will take much much less time than an Android port, and once we've got an iPhone version it will (we think) pretty quickly be our best-selling product and hence require a lot of attention to keep people excited about it. And we haven't even decided to do an Android port yet, aside from lining up the necessary licenses we'd need to do a lot of preliminary testing to make sure our C code would actually port over / run well before we can announce anything. So we're interested in / optimistic about Android, but it's way too soon to say anything more specific than that.

 

[mikelove]

Of course the exception to this would be if Apple holds us up in review limbo for months and months - then, ironically, we might be able to release an Android version before we release an iPhone one.

 

[RobRedbeard]

I got a chance to use my buddy's new HTC Magic two days ago. One word - smooth, slick, fast! Oh, I guess that wasn't one word.

There are some really cool potential features in Android that would make Pleco more useful. For example, the ability to publish "intents" that can be picked up and used by other software. So, in theory others could right various applications and use pleco database or lookup etc etc features.

If you got your hands on a Magic you would definitely fall in love with it. My HTC Touch HD and Diamond 2 are still so far superior in so many ways, but just using the Magic for an hour made me want to own one. It did everything that it did, very very well. The OS and all software seem so well thought out. The app store seems to be exploding too.

Rob

 

[westmeadboy]

Hi Mike - just wondered, maybe a bit late but have you looked into using PhoneGap at all?

http://phonegap.com

 

[mikelove]

RobRedbeard - inter-app communication isn't as big a deal for us as it used to be thanks to our built-in document reader; as long as an app lets you save text to a file or copy it to a clipboard it should be possible to look up words from it in Pleco reasonably efficiently.

The big questions with Android are whether or not there'll really be a market for us there (at the moment, BlackBerry and Symbian are each generating more email traffic than Android is, though neither of those has much of a chance of getting a Pleco port) and whether or not it'll actually be feasible to port our C code over to it; there are enough technical hurdles involved that even if we do decide to do an Android version we probably won't announce it publicly until it's maybe 3/4 completed and we're confident it'll work. (I'm wishing we'd done the same thing on iPhone just to avoid all of the "when will it be ready" e-mails)

Another thing that would help the Android case, actually, would be if Android showed up on something like an iPod Touch; I haven't seen anything like that announced in the midst of all of the Android phones / netbooks / etc, but for our purposes it's really a huge deal since it gives people a way to use Pleco without having to replace their phone. I'm very much hoping the Zune HD ends up running something like Windows Mobile 7, since even if there's some rewriting involved that'll be a huge new platform for us - it's much easier to tell people to go out and buy something like that than to send them digging around Amazon for an iPAQ 110.

westmeadboy - PhoneGap or other JavaScript-based environments are really only a possibility with Pleco if we offload all of the heavy lifting to a web server, which I think is still a few years away from being a good business move for us.

 

[character]

Mike - Is Dell Building an Android PDA? "The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday the company is developing an Android-based, non-phone device that will run on the ARM architecture instead of an Intel Atom mobile chip."

Also keep in mind that people can buy an Android Developer Phone sans contract and use it as a wifi device. There is some dorking around with a sim card required to register it, so it's not for everyone.

Also also, http://www.androidcentral.com/android-l ... m-x51v-pda

 

[mikelove]

I don't know, that seems a bit far-fetched to me - once Dell's investing the money in recruiting Android engineers / training Android support staff / Android sales staff / etc it seems crazy that they'd limit it to a PDA and not release a phone as well, the software would be almost identical. It could be an Android netbook, though, that would make more sense in general given Dell's occasional dabblings with desktop Linux (and would not tie as closely to a potential phone product).

Honestly, though, even if Dell did release an Android PDA that's unlikely to have the sort of reach that we're looking for on this - it'd still be something people would have to go online and find / order / wait for, we'd still have people confused about whether the Dell model 7089X ran Pleco even though we only mention model 7089Z on our website, etc. Dell doesn't have much of a presence in the consumer electronics market, so we can expect that confusing and primarily corporate-oriented approach from them, like with the also-confusing Axim series or HP's endless varieties of basically-identical iPAQs.

 

[character]

Mike - First, thanks for the link in the other thread to the segmenter.

I don't know, that seems a bit far-fetched to me - once Dell's investing the money in recruiting Android engineers / training Android support staff / Android sales staff / etc it seems crazy that they'd limit it to a PDA and not release a phone as well, the software would be almost identical.

I don't have any insight into Dell's plans, but the article says "The Dell device is more like the [iPod touch], and there will be several companies offering them by next year," McGregor told LinuxInsider. As you say, it can be a problem getting people to replace their phones, so releasing a PMP isn't too crazy, IMO.

It could be an Android netbook, though, that would make more sense in general given Dell's occasional dabblings with desktop Linux (and would not tie as closely to a potential phone product).

Android on a netbook in its current form doesn't make much sense. There are already a bunch of netbook-optimized Linux distros which are much more suited to the form factor.

Honestly, though, even if Dell did release an Android PDA that's unlikely to have the sort of reach that we're looking for on this [....]

If the article is correct, and there may be more than one Android PMP coming out (perhaps based on some Taiwanese reference design?) then maybe one or more will end up in retail stores.

Also, I've read estimates of 18 Android phones out by the end of the year. So by the time an Android version of Pleco is available, there should be lots of new/used hardware from which a customer can choose.

 

[mikelove]

There are netbook-optimized Linux distros, but Android's available for all sorts of Linux distributions now (they even have a LiveCD version), so it's not unreasonable to think that Dell might build on some of the efforts made at getting Android running under Ubuntu et al and release a mainstream netbook with Linux + Android app support. It just seems like it fits with their existing efforts better than a random Android PMP does - if someone's going to release an Android PMP I wouldn't think it would be Dell but rather Sony or Sandisk or some other company with a long history of making music players.

Absent that, though, another big problem with Android is that unlike iPhone I don't see it as really expanding our market as much as just providing an alternate platform for tech-savvy folks who already own Pleco - after all, there are dozens of new WM phones coming out this year too but WM hasn't ever caught consumers' attention the way iPhone has. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, but it complicates the upgrade situation a bit - we may have to go back to charging for platform switches (which would be easier to announce if we already end up having to do that on iPhone) just to cover the costs of developing the Android version.

 

[character]

Dell consumer products VP hints at a smartphone

Good call, Mike.

 

[mikelove]

Ah, that makes more sense. Though this raises the interesting question of how they're going to sell it - do they, say, set up shop as an MVNO and sell it directly, or do they elbow in among the ranks of the many other companies that'll be selling Android phones through carriers?

 

[rumination]

Hi Mike,

First off I'd like to thank you for Pleco Dict, it has been such a great help to me, I'm not sure how I would have gotten by in some of my travels without it.

Secondly, I'd like to put another vote in for an Android port of Pleco, for a couple reasons. Firstly, as linux user I am in a situation in which Windows Mobile and iPhone will not play nicely with my computer. Android, on the other hand, reportedly works well out of the box. I know that linux users are probably a very small portion of your client base, but for the few of us out there being able to put Pleco on a platform that will also play well with our computers would be a massive plus. This, after all, is the whole point of a smartphone.

The second concern I have with an iPhone version of Pleco is that, as far as I know, all iPhones sold in the USA are locked to a specific carrier. This means that if I take my iPhone to China hoping to use Pleco, I will also have to have a second unlocked phone to use with a local sim card. This is a bit inconvenient. Unlocked Android world phones are already available (have you seen the HTC Hero, oh man that thing looks SWEET), and more are clearly on the way.

My old Treo 650 has always been easy to use with linux, and works great as an unlocked world phone, but it's on its last legs and will need replacement soon. The first thing I did before even starting shopping around was to come here and see what the next development of Pleco will be. I'd really like to avoid Windows Mobile and iPhone if at all possible. The old Palm OS was so great because it was so open, easy to develop for, and easy to use on a multitude of platforms. Android seems like it will match this same description, and will be even more flexible I think because it is already showing up on the devices of more and more manufacturers.

Anyways, this is my on my knees plea for Android Pleco. Keep up the good work!

 

[gato]

Firstly, as linux user I am in a situation in which Windows Mobile and iPhone will not play nicely with my computer.

Aren't there enough iPhone and WinMo users out there to develop workable drivers for Linux?

 

[rumination]

One would think so Gato, but sadly that is not the case. There are some workarounds to get partial functionality from WinMo and iPhone but it's far from satisfactory.

From what I understand, the difficulty with coding compatibility with these platforms and linux is that Apple and Windows do not share their code, so developers have to reverse engineer, which can be very very difficult. iPhone presents another hurdle, which is its dependence on iTunes, which Apple has so far resolutely refused to make accessible to linux users.

On the other side of the coin, there are some excellent pieces of software for syncing the old PalmOS devices with linux. Apparently Android users are already happily syncing/sharing files/installing software using their linux computers.