Google Android
- Thread starter westmeadboy
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westmeadboy
榜眼
How can you check how much RAM the iPod Touch has?
westmeadboy
榜眼
@numble - ok, thanks for that.
Completely unrelated but interesting comment: http://mobilephonedevelopment.com/archives/1029
Completely unrelated but interesting comment: http://mobilephonedevelopment.com/archives/1029
RobRedbeard
进士
Location apis may have to be different for every device - that's because it is illegal to use location based services in China.
Mike - here's how I feel in a nutshell. You're right to think about all these things, you've got a business to run. But to some extent you're also making mountains out of a few mole hills.
It would be 100% stellar thing to do for your CURRENT users, to make, if nothing else, a simple version of Pleco that does little more than query your dictionaries. Even if it's missing so many of the features of Iphone and WinMO versions, right now I'm facing an upgrade where I'm going to lose a $169 investment in Pleco. Even still, I'm looking at betting the ABC E-C dicitonary that wasn't out when I started.
If I had, at least, some way to access my awesome, and costly, library of Pleco dictionaries in the future I'd be much happier. Right now we can't write our own app because your dictionaries are encrypted.
My list of necessary Android features for me to switch:
- MS Compat office - DONE
- Exchange server sync - DONE
- Alipay (支付宝) software - DONE
- Outlook sync - DONE
- Touch sudoku - DONE
- Bejeweled - DONE
- SPB Mobile Shell - Comming 2Q 2010
- Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary - DONE
- Pleco - ??
At least lookup access...
Mike - here's how I feel in a nutshell. You're right to think about all these things, you've got a business to run. But to some extent you're also making mountains out of a few mole hills.
It would be 100% stellar thing to do for your CURRENT users, to make, if nothing else, a simple version of Pleco that does little more than query your dictionaries. Even if it's missing so many of the features of Iphone and WinMO versions, right now I'm facing an upgrade where I'm going to lose a $169 investment in Pleco. Even still, I'm looking at betting the ABC E-C dicitonary that wasn't out when I started.
If I had, at least, some way to access my awesome, and costly, library of Pleco dictionaries in the future I'd be much happier. Right now we can't write our own app because your dictionaries are encrypted.
My list of necessary Android features for me to switch:
- MS Compat office - DONE
- Exchange server sync - DONE
- Alipay (支付宝) software - DONE
- Outlook sync - DONE
- Touch sudoku - DONE
- Bejeweled - DONE
- SPB Mobile Shell - Comming 2Q 2010
- Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary - DONE
- Pleco - ??
At least lookup access...
westmeadboy - interesting, but mostly related to mobile app front-ends to websites, I think; more of a branding than a sales question in that case.
RobRedbeard - maybe it's just recent history; easily the single worst business decision I've made in the decade or so I've been doing this was deciding to put Pleco 2.0 on Palm OS along with Windows Mobile. We spent roughly a year getting it working only to have Palm discontinue Palm OS a few months later; we did it for the sake of our customers who loved Palm / had recently bought Palms / etc. If it weren't for that, we might very well be working on Android version now simply for lack of anything better to do with desktop / vastly-improved iPhone versions already out the door.
So my feeling now is that accommodating customers' platform preferences has to take a backseat to making great software; there are $10 iPhone apps that do everything our 2003-vintage software did (albeit with not as nice a dictionary as Oxford's), and by the end of the year they'll probably have caught up to where we were in 2005-6. If we don't keep adding features / refining our design, if we don't stop these endless cycles of porting and porting, pretty soon we're going to be Just Another Chinese Software Company, with nothing but a longer history to differentiate us from the pack. (we've never been a leader in platform support - there are companies that have been doing this almost as long as Pleco that support 5 or 6 platforms now)
I appreciate it's annoying to buy into something only to find that it's not available on your new preferred platform, but this isn't like a music or video file, there's a lot more than DRM involved in supporting our databases; we could decrypt all of our database files and even release format documentation and it'd still take you the better part of a year to get to a point where you could use them, there's 10 years' worth of difficult-to-explain optimizations and tweaks in there.
We certainly might be able to do it in less time than that, but there's no realistic way this would stop at releasing a crappy Lite version - however many This Is Not A Full Version or We Don't Really Give A Damn About Android But Are Doing This Just To Be Nice warnings we might put on it, people would still talk about it, blog about it, show it to their friends, review it, download it, complain about how mediocre / slow / feature-lacking it was compared to our Palm / WM / iPhone software, threaten to abandon us for one of the competitors you're all telling me don't exist... if we're on Android then we're on Android, and we risk irreparably damaging our brand by releasing a crappy and poorly-supported Pleco for Android. Better to stick to one platform and disappoint people who don't like that platform than spread ourselves too thin and ruin a reputation we've spent a decade building.
(the "Lite" version I described earlier was considerably more advanced - and would take considerably longer to develop - than what you've been talking about)
And honestly, if we are launching new platform ports out of a sense of obligation to our customers there's a much stronger case to be made for desktops - we've actually been saying we're going to develop a desktop version for quite a few years now, so advocates of that have a much more legitimate gripe with us than Android users. (and FWIW I got a total of about 5x as many emails in response to my last announcement email complaining about the no-offline-desktop-version part than about the no-Android-version part, though if I'm going to make business decisions based solely on numbers of emails received then Android would have to take a backseat to BlackBerry anyway)
RobRedbeard - maybe it's just recent history; easily the single worst business decision I've made in the decade or so I've been doing this was deciding to put Pleco 2.0 on Palm OS along with Windows Mobile. We spent roughly a year getting it working only to have Palm discontinue Palm OS a few months later; we did it for the sake of our customers who loved Palm / had recently bought Palms / etc. If it weren't for that, we might very well be working on Android version now simply for lack of anything better to do with desktop / vastly-improved iPhone versions already out the door.
So my feeling now is that accommodating customers' platform preferences has to take a backseat to making great software; there are $10 iPhone apps that do everything our 2003-vintage software did (albeit with not as nice a dictionary as Oxford's), and by the end of the year they'll probably have caught up to where we were in 2005-6. If we don't keep adding features / refining our design, if we don't stop these endless cycles of porting and porting, pretty soon we're going to be Just Another Chinese Software Company, with nothing but a longer history to differentiate us from the pack. (we've never been a leader in platform support - there are companies that have been doing this almost as long as Pleco that support 5 or 6 platforms now)
I appreciate it's annoying to buy into something only to find that it's not available on your new preferred platform, but this isn't like a music or video file, there's a lot more than DRM involved in supporting our databases; we could decrypt all of our database files and even release format documentation and it'd still take you the better part of a year to get to a point where you could use them, there's 10 years' worth of difficult-to-explain optimizations and tweaks in there.
We certainly might be able to do it in less time than that, but there's no realistic way this would stop at releasing a crappy Lite version - however many This Is Not A Full Version or We Don't Really Give A Damn About Android But Are Doing This Just To Be Nice warnings we might put on it, people would still talk about it, blog about it, show it to their friends, review it, download it, complain about how mediocre / slow / feature-lacking it was compared to our Palm / WM / iPhone software, threaten to abandon us for one of the competitors you're all telling me don't exist... if we're on Android then we're on Android, and we risk irreparably damaging our brand by releasing a crappy and poorly-supported Pleco for Android. Better to stick to one platform and disappoint people who don't like that platform than spread ourselves too thin and ruin a reputation we've spent a decade building.
(the "Lite" version I described earlier was considerably more advanced - and would take considerably longer to develop - than what you've been talking about)
And honestly, if we are launching new platform ports out of a sense of obligation to our customers there's a much stronger case to be made for desktops - we've actually been saying we're going to develop a desktop version for quite a few years now, so advocates of that have a much more legitimate gripe with us than Android users. (and FWIW I got a total of about 5x as many emails in response to my last announcement email complaining about the no-offline-desktop-version part than about the no-Android-version part, though if I'm going to make business decisions based solely on numbers of emails received then Android would have to take a backseat to BlackBerry anyway)
westmeadboy
榜眼
Interesting article about Android, HTML5 in 2013: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/60388
RobRedbeard
进士
Mike, agreed.
Pen name?
Rob
Pen name?
Rob
mike:
I'm not sure you can compare those two situations though. Smartphone market just matured, or is in the process of doing so. Few years ago it was a product for rich enthusiasts, now they are becoming standard thing for cell phones. Palm was not ready for that change, so they had to suffer. Android is a different story.
I'm not sure you can compare those two situations though. Smartphone market just matured, or is in the process of doing so. Few years ago it was a product for rich enthusiasts, now they are becoming standard thing for cell phones. Palm was not ready for that change, so they had to suffer. Android is a different story.
westmeadboy - that is interesting, yes. Though I could easily see Android Market exceeding iTunes in number of apps by 2013 - not sure if it would necessarily be a good thing, though, Google may even want to follow Apple's lead in rejecting / banning particularly useless apps in order to prevent it (too many apps = too little money per developer = quality suffers, filling in niches is nice but if you're writing games you'd much rather write for a platform with 20 new releases a week than 200).
RobRedbeard - nope, real name.
numble - what mfcb said, plus I think the desktop folks got fed up with this type of discussion years ago
BlackBerry emails tend to come from people who heard about Pleco from someone and happen to own BlackBerries - not enthusiastic enough to run out and buy a different smartphone or an iPod, but in need of a portable Chinese dictionary and interested in ours if they happen to be able to use it. Many of them do however have lovely corporate expense accounts and will gladly charge a $200 dictionary to their company if "everybody says this one is the best" - if they're paying $6000 for a business-class ticket to Beijing they're probably not going to balk too much at an expensive smartphone app.
Zeldor - oh I wasn't comparing Palm to Android in that sense, I was just arguing that accommodating existing customers, while a great strategy most of the time, shouldn't necessarily be such an overriding goal that it causes us to launch huge new projects with otherwise-murky business prospects. Android's business prospects in general are miles better than Palm OS' were in 2006, but free and low-cost "app" competition makes the outlook for Pleco specifically somewhat less-than-clear.
RobRedbeard - nope, real name.
numble - what mfcb said, plus I think the desktop folks got fed up with this type of discussion years ago
BlackBerry emails tend to come from people who heard about Pleco from someone and happen to own BlackBerries - not enthusiastic enough to run out and buy a different smartphone or an iPod, but in need of a portable Chinese dictionary and interested in ours if they happen to be able to use it. Many of them do however have lovely corporate expense accounts and will gladly charge a $200 dictionary to their company if "everybody says this one is the best" - if they're paying $6000 for a business-class ticket to Beijing they're probably not going to balk too much at an expensive smartphone app.Zeldor - oh I wasn't comparing Palm to Android in that sense, I was just arguing that accommodating existing customers, while a great strategy most of the time, shouldn't necessarily be such an overriding goal that it causes us to launch huge new projects with otherwise-murky business prospects. Android's business prospects in general are miles better than Palm OS' were in 2006, but free and low-cost "app" competition makes the outlook for Pleco specifically somewhat less-than-clear.
RobRedbeard
进士
By pen name I was suggesting that such a small effort could be put out under a pen name, so as to avoid comparisons with the brand.
Maybe an api would be useful.
And yeah you should be releasing on Blackberry.
Lol you need assistants.
Rob
Maybe an api would be useful.
And yeah you should be releasing on Blackberry.
Lol you need assistants.
Rob
Ah, well yes, but then how would it help people who were transferring platforms? Can't very well keep the fact that we developed it secret if we're openly inviting people to move over their previous Palm/WM/iPhone(?) purchases to it.
Assistants would be nice, yeah - there's still the Mythical Man-Month problem, though, adding one or two programmers doesn't increase productivity nearly enough to justify their cost; it'd take something like a dozen new people to become an aggressively-marketing, every-interesting-platform-supporting company.
Assistants would be nice, yeah - there's still the Mythical Man-Month problem, though, adding one or two programmers doesn't increase productivity nearly enough to justify their cost; it'd take something like a dozen new people to become an aggressively-marketing, every-interesting-platform-supporting company.
Re: iPhone Feature Requests
Bonsoir,
I didn't know where to post this reply : here or on Android topic.
But my point is : there is now 80 millions who can buy Pleco on iPhone OS, next year, same time, should be around the double. In one year, should be very easy to find an old iTouch for 100$.
I don't understand why you should spend to much time and energy now to port Pleco to another platform.
Better concentrate on becoming king of the hill on iPhone OS and maximising your sells.
For this you have a lot of different directions :
- Make Pleco simpler to use : don't drop options, rethink them completely. At the moment, it's really a mess : you need a documentation to set options !
- Make Pleco accessible to beginner : include some basic flashcard tests, some basic texts and sell the rest. If you don't have time to produce the materials, buy it or engage people to do it.
- Change Pleco to a learning tools : a complete method included, include karaoke style for the lessons. You can sell this buy chapter or level.
- Change Pleco to a media hub : I'll be happy to use pleco to buy song with karaoke, Manga with clickable text, Novels with spoken language...
- Go for every country market : you don't need to translate Pleco, but you should very actively looking for dictionary for each country. Allready in France, there is more than 1 million iPhone OS machine, thousands of chinese people with iphone, a lot of people interested in Chinese. if you can propose a good dictionary, this market is yours. I think adding a dictionary for a new country is not that hard, problem is to find the dictionary and sign licence : you can engage somebody to do it and pay him with a percentage on the sale of the dictionaries he found.
I suppose there is even more ways to develop Pleco. But for sure, at the moment, moving to another platform will not bring enough return on investissement and will only prevent you to move Pleco forward.
Sorry again for my broken english and if I sound to rash, consider this as a consequence of my poor english.
Merci encore pour ce très beau logiciel.
Bonsoir,
I didn't know where to post this reply : here or on Android topic.
But my point is : there is now 80 millions who can buy Pleco on iPhone OS, next year, same time, should be around the double. In one year, should be very easy to find an old iTouch for 100$.
I don't understand why you should spend to much time and energy now to port Pleco to another platform.
Better concentrate on becoming king of the hill on iPhone OS and maximising your sells.
For this you have a lot of different directions :
- Make Pleco simpler to use : don't drop options, rethink them completely. At the moment, it's really a mess : you need a documentation to set options !
- Make Pleco accessible to beginner : include some basic flashcard tests, some basic texts and sell the rest. If you don't have time to produce the materials, buy it or engage people to do it.
- Change Pleco to a learning tools : a complete method included, include karaoke style for the lessons. You can sell this buy chapter or level.
- Change Pleco to a media hub : I'll be happy to use pleco to buy song with karaoke, Manga with clickable text, Novels with spoken language...
- Go for every country market : you don't need to translate Pleco, but you should very actively looking for dictionary for each country. Allready in France, there is more than 1 million iPhone OS machine, thousands of chinese people with iphone, a lot of people interested in Chinese. if you can propose a good dictionary, this market is yours. I think adding a dictionary for a new country is not that hard, problem is to find the dictionary and sign licence : you can engage somebody to do it and pay him with a percentage on the sale of the dictionaries he found.
I suppose there is even more ways to develop Pleco. But for sure, at the moment, moving to another platform will not bring enough return on investissement and will only prevent you to move Pleco forward.
Sorry again for my broken english and if I sound to rash, consider this as a consequence of my poor english.
Merci encore pour ce très beau logiciel.
In a very short period of time the Android platform has achieved a very important number of apps available. Nevertheless one of the most important drawbacks for their users was the impossibility of installing apps in their SD cards (without rooting their machines).
This limitation made very difficult for most of us to choose what apps to buy to install in our machines because the RAM available space was limited. Now it seems that this limitation is going to dissapear in a next Android update (possibly in the next 2.2 aka Froyo). Now it is official :
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1151
I am sure that this will mean an absolute boost in sales and offer for the Android machines making it more and more appealing to the users. The cheaper price for the different Android PDA's options is also a key issue when compared to i.e. iPhone.
This limitation made very difficult for most of us to choose what apps to buy to install in our machines because the RAM available space was limited. Now it seems that this limitation is going to dissapear in a next Android update (possibly in the next 2.2 aka Froyo). Now it is official :
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1151
I am sure that this will mean an absolute boost in sales and offer for the Android machines making it more and more appealing to the users. The cheaper price for the different Android PDA's options is also a key issue when compared to i.e. iPhone.
westmeadboy
榜眼
Re: iPhone Feature Requests
I agree with your second part, but the first part misses the point of this topic, IMHO.
Even though there are 80 million people who can buy Pleco, there are over 6.7 billion who cannot and this topic is about how effective a port to Android would be in tapping into that market.
Your post is in two parts. The first, about whether to port to Android, is relevant here. The second, about how to improve Pleco is better in the iPhone Feature Requests topic.Pampuk said:
I agree with your second part, but the first part misses the point of this topic, IMHO.
Even though there are 80 million people who can buy Pleco, there are over 6.7 billion who cannot and this topic is about how effective a port to Android would be in tapping into that market.
Pampuk - thanks! Ease-of-use is the main focus of the next significant update (2.2), though certainly the other things you mention are possibilities too - we'd love to license a good textbook series (for iPad especially). We've already found a number of French dictionaries we can license, the problem is whether we'd get enough sales to justify the royalty advance we'd have to pay - German was much easier since HanDeDict is free (there don't seem to be any equivalent free Chinese-French dictionaries, at least we haven't found one).
Huguete - I don't think the lack of SD card support has affected Android's consumer adoption much; certainly adding them might make some more advanced apps possible, but the number of apps on iPhone that are larger than 10 or 20 MB is actually pretty tiny; even most Chinese dictionaries fall in the < 50 MB range, which would allow you to comfortably install two or three of them on a Nexus One. In Pleco's case, we already download most of our data files with our own system on iPhone so having the size of our application bundle limited wouldn't really affect us at all - we can store data files on an SD card regardless.
westmeadboy - I actually moved that post over from the iPhone forum since it seemed more Android-related, though I suppose it is a new feature discussion just as much as it's an Android post, and my comment above was answering the feature part more than the Android port - Pampuk, you're more than welcome to re-post it in iPhone and/or edit it to remove the iPhone suggestions / re-post them in a different post in iPhone if you like.
Relevance-wise, the tradeoffs do indeed seem relevant though I don't want to hijack the thread even more than I've already done with those... here's an Android-specific question: I was looking through the Android app catalog referenced in your recent Chinese-Forums post and I'm rather surprised the state of Chinese dictionaries on Android is still so poor; iPhone had far more / better ones at this point in App Store's evolution, and the ratio of iPhone to Android Chinese dictionaries vastly exceeds the ratio of iPhone to Android apps in general.
To use a horror movie cliche, the Android Chinese dictionary market isn't just "quiet," it's "a little too quiet" - it could be that there's a great opportunity there that nobody's taking advantage of, or it could just as easily be that that there's some very good reason why nobody wants to write a Chinese dictionary for Android (or why so many people want to do it on iPhone). Can you think of any good explanation for that? Have you encountered any limitations in developing your own Android Chinese dictionary that you can see acting as a roadblock for a lot of developers? (limitations that perhaps Pleco might be able to work around with enough effort, thereby enabling ourselves to charge a hefty premium over other apps that don't)
Couple of things come to mind:
Huguete - I don't think the lack of SD card support has affected Android's consumer adoption much; certainly adding them might make some more advanced apps possible, but the number of apps on iPhone that are larger than 10 or 20 MB is actually pretty tiny; even most Chinese dictionaries fall in the < 50 MB range, which would allow you to comfortably install two or three of them on a Nexus One. In Pleco's case, we already download most of our data files with our own system on iPhone so having the size of our application bundle limited wouldn't really affect us at all - we can store data files on an SD card regardless.
westmeadboy - I actually moved that post over from the iPhone forum since it seemed more Android-related, though I suppose it is a new feature discussion just as much as it's an Android post, and my comment above was answering the feature part more than the Android port - Pampuk, you're more than welcome to re-post it in iPhone and/or edit it to remove the iPhone suggestions / re-post them in a different post in iPhone if you like.
Relevance-wise, the tradeoffs do indeed seem relevant though I don't want to hijack the thread even more than I've already done with those... here's an Android-specific question: I was looking through the Android app catalog referenced in your recent Chinese-Forums post and I'm rather surprised the state of Chinese dictionaries on Android is still so poor; iPhone had far more / better ones at this point in App Store's evolution, and the ratio of iPhone to Android Chinese dictionaries vastly exceeds the ratio of iPhone to Android apps in general.
To use a horror movie cliche, the Android Chinese dictionary market isn't just "quiet," it's "a little too quiet" - it could be that there's a great opportunity there that nobody's taking advantage of, or it could just as easily be that that there's some very good reason why nobody wants to write a Chinese dictionary for Android (or why so many people want to do it on iPhone). Can you think of any good explanation for that? Have you encountered any limitations in developing your own Android Chinese dictionary that you can see acting as a roadblock for a lot of developers? (limitations that perhaps Pleco might be able to work around with enough effort, thereby enabling ourselves to charge a hefty premium over other apps that don't)
Couple of things come to mind:
- Apple makes it much easier for international developers to create / sell apps, currently impossible in Android Market in many regions
- Installation of non-approved apps is much harder on iPhone, on Android everybody sells their awesome Chinese dictionaries outside of Android Market and focuses mainly on 2-RMB-per-copy-paying Chinese users
- iPhone has built-in Chinese handwriting recognition in all markets and a slightly less pathetic default Chinese font than Droid Sans Fallback, so the results for a similar investment of time are more rewarding
- Memory constraints / lack of SD card support on Android, though as I said above most iPhone Chinese dictionary apps are pretty small so that doesn't seem likely to be a big factor
- Some sort of performance limitation on Android I'm not aware of (slow Chinese font rendering, say?) that makes it much harder to develop a high-quality Chinese dictionary