So I've been playing around with Pleco's new iPhone a bit for the last week (in between coding/debugging sessions, of course), and I'm actually starting to think that it might not be completely ridiculous for us to consider a native iPhone version. As long as you're not worried about the possibility of frying your phone or voiding your warranty with an unofficial firmware update, it's not really all that difficult to set up an iPhone to install third-party applications, not too much more so than the already-pretty-hairy process of installing software on Palm or Pocket PC anyway. And programming-wise, the interfaces and capabilities are so similar to regular OS X (particularly in the font department, Apple's international text engine appears to be fully intact) that porting from regular Mac OS to iPhone would be no more difficult than porting between Windows and Pocket PC.
The main question is how we get around the legal problems of, first of all, requiring somebody to do something which probably voids their warranty in order to install our software, and secondly, releasing a product which Apple might deliberately and permanently disable the use of in a firmware update. We'd probably handle both with some sort of a very angry-sounding legal disclaimer people had to click through (or, if the lawyers really went crazy, sign and fax in to us), perhaps bundled with a pledge to allow a free switch to another platform in the event that Apple did disable third-party software within, say, one year of purchase. But definitely there'd be a healthy dose of lawsuit-proofing.
Still, if we can get around those problems and if the installation/development tools mature a bit in the next year or so an iPhone port is certainly something we could consider. Design-wise it would probably follow pretty closely from the Pleco Mini interface we're working on for WM Smartphone and its ilk, i.e. a palette-less main screen (tap a button to switch between list and definition, go to a separate screen for character input), fewer options in general, possibly some flashcard modes missing, etc, and since Hanwang most definitely does not make a version of their handwriting recognizer for iPhone we'd have to either port the old Motorola one (which we now have source code for) to it or just release it without handwriting. But in general, assuming we're going to do a Mac OS version anyway a native iPhone port seems like it would really be pretty comparable work-wise to a web-based iPhone version, and in fact probably a good bit easier than a BlackBerry port.
The main question is how we get around the legal problems of, first of all, requiring somebody to do something which probably voids their warranty in order to install our software, and secondly, releasing a product which Apple might deliberately and permanently disable the use of in a firmware update. We'd probably handle both with some sort of a very angry-sounding legal disclaimer people had to click through (or, if the lawyers really went crazy, sign and fax in to us), perhaps bundled with a pledge to allow a free switch to another platform in the event that Apple did disable third-party software within, say, one year of purchase. But definitely there'd be a healthy dose of lawsuit-proofing.
Still, if we can get around those problems and if the installation/development tools mature a bit in the next year or so an iPhone port is certainly something we could consider. Design-wise it would probably follow pretty closely from the Pleco Mini interface we're working on for WM Smartphone and its ilk, i.e. a palette-less main screen (tap a button to switch between list and definition, go to a separate screen for character input), fewer options in general, possibly some flashcard modes missing, etc, and since Hanwang most definitely does not make a version of their handwriting recognizer for iPhone we'd have to either port the old Motorola one (which we now have source code for) to it or just release it without handwriting. But in general, assuming we're going to do a Mac OS version anyway a native iPhone port seems like it would really be pretty comparable work-wise to a web-based iPhone version, and in fact probably a good bit easier than a BlackBerry port.