Google Android

micahboland said:
Is it just a coincidence that the time on the screenshots and the time of your last post differ by only 10 minutes?!?! (cue conspiracy theorists)
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I took them off of the device I had sitting next to me and then promptly uploaded them, yes :)

micahboland said:
on another note: http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/29/andr ... s-are-now/
is this good news for pleco on android?
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It was actually bad news because around the time they first announced this, Google also started cracking down on Market apps that were distributing add-ons through their own systems... they didn't seem to object as much before. In general we'd much rather sell add-ons through our own system - lets us deal with order processing issues (if you don't have a credit card and want to walk into a bank branch and send us cash we can help you do that) and we don't have to pay Google 30% - so the response to the beta is going to dictate whether or not (and how soon) we potentially launch a Market version.

micahboland said:
also, I am drumming up business for you with my students. I was wondering about the prospect of an eng>eng Advanced Learners Dictionary? (wrong place to ask, i know)
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Not likely to show up in our app anytime soon, unfortunately.
 
Great news! I have preordered LG Optimus 2X and I should get it withing a month, hopefully. I will be happy to test Pleco extensively :)
 
mikelove said:
The clear button is the X button to clear the input field - not a standard thing on Android like it is on iOS, but we're inclined to ignore Android convention on this since it's something we've been doing for a long time.
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Mike,
you would not be alone with the X, it is used in the Hanping CE dictionary on Android too. Hanping is free from the market if you want to check it (if you haven't already).
By all means, keep the X button.
 
yesss, this is the news i've been waiting for. Do you need to have previously purchased pleco to beta test it? i haven't bought a new phone in years.... now, finally, android will get my business.
 
bunny87 said:
Do you need to have previously purchased pleco to beta test it? i haven't bought a new phone in years.... now, finally, android will get my business.
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No, we're planning to open up a new online store along with the launch of the beta (part of the reason for the delay).

Though if you're buying a phone primarily to run Pleco you might want to consider an iPhone - the iPhone version will likely continue to surpass the Android version in features/polish for quite a while (very hard to get things to work as well on a platform with so many different versions / devices), and Google hasn't exactly been moving in a positive direction lately openness-wise.
 
Fully open and fully closed have their pluses and minuses. I hope that both sides move towards the middle ground. Google seems to be realizing that the wild wild west nature of Android is starting to hurt itself, so they're becoming more "Apple-like" and closing things off. Of course, if they keep doing that, why not just stay with Apple? Truth be told, I have always felt that iOS certainly looks alot nicer and more refined visually. My biggest pet peeve is the scrolling in an Android browser. It seems too accelerated, or the kinetic motion is off somehow. It's also jerky at times. This is in comparison to the iOS. Small touches to be sure, but something I and my friends have noticed (if I ask them about it). I am interested in Android because of the pre-paid market. I was very impressed with a test drive of and the value proposition of the LG Optimus, which isn't an iphone 4. But at $25 a month with data included, is all that I'd need. I am with iOS solely for Pleco. I'm hoping that the Android version of flashcards will follow soon after the dictionary beta.
 
mikelove:

It looks like Google is starting a war to stop fragmentation, at least with Honeycomb. One interesting article here: http://www.mips.com/blog/?p=46

As for beta - are you planning to make some scripted tests? Something that everyone could launch and submit results later? Like loading times, search times, and dunno what else [some screenshots to compare by users and see if all is displayed properly could work too]. You could make then a list of devices that 'should' support Pleco, based on that.
 
pufftissue said:
Fully open and fully closed have their pluses and minuses. I hope that both sides move towards the middle ground. Google seems to be realizing that the wild wild west nature of Android is starting to hurt itself, so they're becoming more "Apple-like" and closing things off. Of course, if they keep doing that, why not just stay with Apple?
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That's my concern; the lack of Honeycomb source code is a very very bad thing (makes our life considerably harder in terms of bug fixing / subclassing / making our custom UI act like Google's / etc) and has me worrying that Google may consider deviating from other long-held principles too... banning other app stores, for example. I'm all for reining in fragmentation, but they can't really do that without reining in hardware variation / standardizing drivers and OS updates (unlikely since it would mean little left for manufacturers to use to differentiate themselves) - withholding source code is doing the Android community a lot of harm for the sake of reining in a few fringe OEMs who wouldn't have moved very many units of their putative Honeycomb-based phones anyway.

pufftissue said:
I am interested in Android because of the pre-paid market. I was very impressed with a test drive of and the value proposition of the LG Optimus, which isn't an iphone 4. But at $25 a month with data included, is all that I'd need.
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I really do expect Apple do something about that soon... mentioned here before that I thought something with the internals of an iPhone 4 in the cheaper 3G/3GS case might be in the offing, if they can sell an 8 GB iPod Touch with that stuff for $230 it stands to reason they could sell something similar for $350 with a 3G chipset and a bigger battery.

pufftissue said:
I'm hoping that the Android version of flashcards will follow soon after the dictionary beta.
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That one there's some debate about... we really really want to give the flashcard system a thorough redesign before porting it over to Android, but we gave into pressure to release a port of quickly on iOS (we're still not happy with it) and may be forced to do so on Android as well if the beta proves popular. It wouldn't have as pretty a UI as the iOS one, though, and we might drop a few particularly programing-intensive features at first (certain test modes, e.g.) if it let us get it out the door faster.

Zeldor said:
It looks like Google is starting a war to stop fragmentation, at least with Honeycomb. One interesting article here: http://www.mips.com/blog/?p=46
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I didn't know that MIPS was trying to get into the Android game, but an emphatic NO on that front - we are absolutely NOT going to re-license our handwriting / OCR libraries for a new processor architecture, re-optimize everything around that, include two NDK libraries, etc... I can guarantee right now that a MIPS-based Android device will not be able to run Pleco at any time in the foreseeable future, at least not without some sort of wacky ARM-emulation technology that's unlikely do make much sense on a power-limited mobile device. And given the push towards native development for Android games etc, I doubt other developers are going to be eager to support another architecture either... nor will manufacturers be eager to use it, since it won't be able to run any current NDK-based apps. So that particular fragmentation issue hopefully won't be rearing its ugly head anytime soon...

Zeldor said:
As for beta - are you planning to make some scripted tests? Something that everyone could launch and submit results later? Like loading times, search times, and dunno what else [some screenshots to compare by users and see if all is displayed properly could work too]. You could make then a list of devices that 'should' support Pleco, based on that.
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No plans for anything as rigorous as that - I think we'd rather go with subjective impressions.
 
Hi Mike

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/07/nove ... id-device/

Just wondering if you saw this, and if for android pleco its good/bad/indifferent...

I know it will make life easier for quite a few people, but will it be better than the previous tool you used to make your old code transferable?
Will it allow closer integration with androids API's? Or would you still recommend the other tool?
I am asking from the aspect of porting old windows mobile apps across to android.

Thanks,
Micah
 
micahboland said:
Just wondering if you saw this, and if for android pleco its good/bad/indifferent...

I know it will make life easier for quite a few people, but will it be better than the previous tool you used to make your old code transferable?
Will it allow closer integration with androids API's? Or would you still recommend the other tool?
I am asking from the aspect of porting old windows mobile apps across to android.
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Won't make much of a difference for us - we don't do anything in .NET, our Windows Mobile app was written entirely in native code (by necessity - couldn't get the performance we needed otherwise). And the tools we're using now are working fine anyway, so it's not really necessary - our cross-platform code has been working fine on Android for a while, the time-consuming part is putting a UI on top of it all and implementing OS-dependent stuff like OCR and handwriting.
 
mikelove said:
the time-consuming part is putting a UI on top of it all and implementing OS-dependent stuff like OCR and handwriting.
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is google working on native chinese handwriting for android?
I just got a desire S for my wife, and the htc keyboard has very nice chinese handwriting built in.
 
micahboland said:
is google working on native chinese handwriting for android?
I just got a desire S for my wife, and the htc keyboard has very nice chinese handwriting built in.
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Probably not - they wouldn't want to open-source the code for that. But we've got it working pretty nicely now anyway so it's a moot point, it's just an example of the type of complicated UI that takes a while to implement.
 
Hi Mike and all. Am I justified in my excitement over this announcement...

http://www.bgr.com/2011/03/24/rim-opens ... roid-apps/

...and the possibility of the soon-to-be Android version of Pleco running on, say, a Blackberry Playbook or touchscreen Bold? I've tried for years to pry myself from Blackberry, but alas, I just haven't been able to find its virtues on another device, despite trying oodles of them... thus condemning me to lug two devices around, one for Pleco (iPod), one for communication/productivity (BB Bold 9700). Any insights you could share on this development and its potential for bringing Pleco to the BB platform would be most appreciated. (Hope I'm dropping this query in the right place... seems as much Android-driven as anything.)
 
diggyd said:
Hi Mike and all. Am I justified in my excitement over this announcement...

http://www.bgr.com/2011/03/24/rim-opens ... roid-apps/

...and the possibility of the soon-to-be Android version of Pleco running on, say, a Blackberry Playbook or touchscreen Bold? I've tried for years to pry myself from Blackberry, but alas, I just haven't been able to find its virtues on another device, despite trying oodles of them... thus condemning me to lug two devices around, one for Pleco (iPod), one for communication/productivity (BB Bold 9700). Any insights you could share on this development and its potential for bringing Pleco to the BB platform would be most appreciated. (Hope I'm dropping this query in the right place... seems as much Android-driven as anything.)
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It's an intriguing possibility, but there are a lot of technical details we'd need to find out about first - performance, compatibility with native-code Android apps, access to important hardware features like the camera, similarity to popular Android devices in terms of screen resolution / sensitivity... RIM hasn't even announced an Android-app-friendly device yet other than the PlayBook, AFAIK. There's also BlackBerry App World to consider - it seems like they won't allow users to install Android apps unless they're distributed through App World, and some of their policies could present problems for us.

So there's more reason to be hopeful about Pleco on BlackBerry than there was before this announcement, but I'd still put the odds at 50-50 at best, unfortunately.
 
mikelove said:
but I'd still put the odds at 50-50 at best, unfortunately.
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Hi Mike

A friend of mine who is eagerly anticipating seeing pleco on android (almost as much as me) has most recently told me waiting for it is 'like watching paint dry'! :lol:

So, seeing you seem to be in the mood to talk statistics/odds, can i be cheeky and ask: what are the odds of seeing pleco on android by the end of the month? :shock:
 
micahboland said:
So, seeing you seem to be in the mood to talk statistics/odds, can i be cheeky and ask: what are the odds of seeing pleco on android by the end of the month?
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Low, but we're still making good progress, a few false starts notwithstanding... we ended up deciding halfway through that our online store overhaul was going to take too long, so we've now retrofitted rudimentary Android support onto our old online store and we'll likely make do with that for the first beta at least. (anybody who's willing to pay money for a beta app probably won't mind using an outdated-looking online store to do so)
 
While we're talking statistics, Android users are 20 times more likely to buy you a beer in any city in the world you happen to be visiting :)
Keep up the good work!
 
Hi Mike,

I love Pleco thank you.

I'm looking at buying an android device this week (still using a 5 year old palm!) I understand Pleco for android is not yet ready but if you had a choice between the NEXUS S or Incredible S which do you think might be more compatible?

Thank you,

Jeff
 
jwctpe said:
I'm looking at buying an android device this week (still using a 5 year old palm!) I understand Pleco for android is not yet ready but if you had a choice between the NEXUS S or Incredible S which do you think might be more compatible?
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Very difficult to say for certain, but in general the stock Google firmware included in Nexus devices is likely to present fewer compatibility issues than the customized HTC firmware on the Incredible and its ilk.
 
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