iOS 9

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Some nice little changes:
  • Split-screen mode on newer iPads: this should be easy for us to support - our UI layouts are all programmatically generated anyway and will accommodate whatever size the system throws at them - but won't be usable until Apple lets us start submitting iOS 9 optimized apps in September.
  • Related to that, there's a neat new feature where you can swipe in a mini version of an app in an iPad sidebar that should be rather magnificent when you're looking up Chinese translations while composing a message in WeChat or whatever (among other things).
  • New "Share" command in the system text selection menu - this will link to the sharing App Extension we're working on anyway. So now you'll be able to get at Pleco definitions with just one more tap than the system "Define" command.
  • Gorgeous new Apple-designed Chinese font 《蘋方》which we'll definitely offer as an option in Pleco and may even consider making the default once we start requiring iOS 9.
  • French-English dictionary in the system "Define" command, which is great because it'll save us the trouble of adding our own version of this for Grand Ricci.
  • Some quality improvements to system TTS (including a male voice though we haven't confirmed if it's app-accessible yet) which may make it a better counterpart to (or replacement for) our add-on one.
  • Still no offline voice recognition (even though Mac OS X has had it for a year now and Android for almost as long) so I think we're going to move forward on another solution for that.
  • The speedy WKWebView embedded web browser now supports offline documents, meaning we can finally use it in our document reader in place of UIWebView. So that should all get a good bit faster.
  • Support for deep indexing of app content with Spotlight - this doesn't look like it would let us embed an entire dictionary, but we might be able to make flashcards searchable that way at least.
We haven't even started requiring iOS 8 yet, but I think we're going to turn around and start requiring iOS 9 very quickly - it works on every device 8 does and is by all accounts faster / more stable than 8 was on them, so all users on iOS 8 will be able to upgrade and I expect that nearly all of them will.
 

etm001

状元
I was going to post about this but you beat me to the punch. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm very excited about the first three features (split screen, slide-out side bar, and the new share command).

My biggest disappointment was no 3rd party Siri integration. That will come one day (Apple is already being left behind by Google in this regard), but I thought for sure it would be with iOS 9 (if only due to Apple Watch).
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
@etm001 - they may be waiting on a minimum spec bump for Siri integration; they seem to have (not unreasonably) decided that iOS 9 needed to be a "make things right for all of the users who were unhappy with iOS 8" release, but I expect that iOS 10 will have 1 GB of RAM and a 64-bit processor as minimum requirements, and a lot of new things will become feasible from that.
 
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