iPhone/iPod Touch and writing Chinese Characters

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It might help, but we've got handwriting recognition working full-screen in our experimental builds at least, and in that mode it's quite possible to draw even fairly complicated characters with one's finger.
 

ruisi1

Member
I'm very glad to hear that you're working on an iPhone version. My experience is that iPhone dominates Windows Mobile, but I'm so keen on Pleco that I'm sticking with my Windows Mobile phone.
 

ikelw

Member
pleco sure was useful for that handwriting feature! but surely there's enough space on the screen of an ipod to use one's finger to semi-accurately write a character. I think as long as the iphone can keep track of the number of brush strokes, I think it would work. But I haven't developed apps for the iphone.

the pleco radical index was useful too, but less popular for some reason. perhaps it's because radicals are not always easy to match up to their respective characters.

if you could implement a third feature - that feature discussed in 'chinese character fast finder' by tuttle, isbn 0-8048-3634-5, that would sure be useful to have for users of this software, because it would help some people to find characters that are hard to find. the book organizes entries according to common graphical patterns (similar to radicals, but more clear and distinctive). this is not a prop for that book, but a recommendation that this feature would really be good to include electronically. I would never take this book anywhere with me for travels, cause it's a big clunky trade paperback book, but it's method for finding a character based on a graphical features in the character is really really useful and perhaps revolutionary (oh yeah, like a 'killer app' usefulness).

all three methods, or even the first two (which you included on the older versions) would work fine, man... I CAN'T WAIT for you to make this iphone feature, and BLAST the rest of the competition (if you could even call it that) from the waters!:)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yes, in our testing at least the recognizer seems to work pretty well, even for fairly complicated characters like 幾 and 謝.

Major new features like a Fast Finder-style component search aren't really a possibility until after we get the iPhone version out, but we'll certainly be looking at a lot of things like that for 2.1.
 

tyang54

Member
A nice thing to do on these forums would be to post a locked thread that only Pleco admins can post to regarding iPhone development updates. Interested users could then subscribe to this thread and get notification if there were any updates. I would like some kind of email when there is an official update on the availability of plecoDict on iPhone. Since Pleco is my must have app, I am holding off switching from my Treo to iPhone until the iPhone port is available....
 

jugdish

秀才
I'm in the same boat as you, tyang54. I want the iPhone so bad, but Pleco is more important than having songs, pics, contacts, email, etc. that I could probably get on my Treo but it'd be a big pain in the rear. PLEASE hurry, Mike! And I like the idea of not having to check back for updates all the time.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
You can use the regular e-mail announcement list for a release notification - if we end up doing a beta test we'll announce that on the list too. But it's highly unlikely we'll be saying anything about release dates until the software's finished / submitted / approved - we've been wrong on those too many times before and there are even more variables this time around thanks to Apple's approval process.
 
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