iPhone SDK

[mikelove]

So we've reviewed Apple's iPhone SDK announcement, and while we're disappointed that they've chosen to lock down the platform and require all applications to be sold through iTunes, we think we've worked out a way we can still support it.

Basically, there would be a "one-size-fits-all" version of Pleco for iPhone. Since there's no mechanism for us to sell upgrades / customized packages, we'll come up with one solid bundle of dictionaries and sell that. It'll probably cost a bit more than the equivalent on Palm/WM, since we need to offset the fact that Apple's charging us 30% while our merchant account processor charges 3%, and unfortunately there likely wouldn't be any way for us to provide discounted / free platform switches for people using the Palm or WM versions since there's no system for that built into Apple's store. There also wouldn't be any educational discounts unless Apple's store provided a mechanism for offering those.

If jailbreaking remains an option after the new firmware comes out, we'd probably also sell a jailbreak version of Pleco for iPhone (which seems to use the same API) on our website with the same options / pricing / etc as our other products.

It's not definitive yet that we'll be developing an iPhone version yet at all, but basically we think there's enough promise to this as a platform that we're willing to consider it in spite of our strong objections to their business model.

 

[ipsi]

Hmm... 30% is a pretty hefty fee, on top of your existing licenses. And don't forget the cost of a Mac to develop the thing on!

I like how Steve Jobs says that "But to be clear, we don't intend to make money off the App Store." while only allowing people to develop apps on a Mac, and taking 30% of the price. Sure, that's fine for most developers, but I suspect it'll far outpace the costs of running the store...

I also don't think you're the target group of developers Mike, sad to say, as they mostly seem to be targeting Multimedia/Game developers...

EDIT: While Apple will almost certainly make this a bannable offence, you could theoretically just offer the basic demo version, and then if people want to buy the full version, they come to your website, thus neatly avoiding Apple's 30% (you'll still need to pay the $100 they charge for the ability to sell on App Store).

 

[mikelove]

Oh I know we're not the target type of developer, but I also know that if we don't develop a Chinese dictionary for iPhone, someone else will, and given people's fanatical devotion to these things we could end up losing a big chunk of our market to a product which (though likely inferior ) happened to be on the right platform for everyone.

From an initial review of the SDK this also looks like it would be a pretty easy port, so that's another argument for doing it. And given that the vast majority of our tech support e-mails involve installation problems, if Apple's managed to make that a one-tap process then that's worth a good 10% or so right there

 

[ipsi]

I suppose you'll just have to hope there's sufficient volume to make up for for the actual 27% extra that Apple'll take over what you're paying now.

And porting ASAP to ensure that you're the first Chinese dictionary people start seeing is probably pretty important .

 

[garysaville]

iPhone SDK is out

Apple just released an SDK for the iPhone / iPod Touch. Developers get 70% of the revenue and Apple pinches 30. The SDK looks amazing. It's really well laid out. I think this is the mobile platform of the future. They demo'd some games and apps at the Cupertino release event today. The apps look amazing.
Any thoughts Mike?

GaryS

 

[mikelove]

Well yeah, they probably would ban us for that. Though who knows, if they genuinely don't care about making a profit maybe they'd let us distribute the demo version as a "free" program and do all of the order processing ourselves At the very least, given the amount of access they're allowing to the OS it seems like it'll be almost impossible for them to lock out jailbreakers, so there'll probably still be an unofficial distribution option out there.

And yes, being among the earliest ones out would be a big plus, aside from the PR potential ("Tonight we take a look at the first wave of innovative new applications using the iPhone SDK") I'm sure there'll be some sort of "popular downloads" list which would give us a boost for racking up early downloads. (we were in the top 50 on PalmGear for a while back when we first launched Oxford 1.0 and it definitely brought us some sales)

 

[ipsi]

One can only hope . I don't think they really care about jailbreakers anymore. The big, big plus about the App Store is that all iPhone users have access to it, and can happily search through it and whatnot. I suspect that most people won't bother looking anywhere else for applications that they want. As such, Apple's going to get a nice big chunk of money from that. I also wouldn't be surprised if most people ignored applications that required something more than "download my trial, enjoy it, buy me with a click"...

You get a fair few downloads as it is, and you're not even listed in the major Palm / PPC download sites anymore. Being top of the list for everyone (all several million of them) who searches for 'popular dictionary software' has gotta be good for you .

While they'll be talking about innovative software for the iPhone, I suspect they'll be looking for people who've developed applications that take full advantage of everything the iPhone can offer (acceleromater, pinching, etc), and not so much at those which have been ported from elsewhere.

 

[mikelove]

Well yeah, mass marketing hasn't really been a big factor in our business - TIME magazine (with 4 million plus subscribers) had a blurb on us in their latest issue and we haven't yet seen any increase even in website traffic, let alone sales, so word-of-mouth and more targeted marketing are definitely the way to go.

As far as innovative software, though, I think Chinese handwriting recognition would definitely qualify - drawing a character with a fingertip on an iPhone display makes for a cool demo, even if it is something you could also do on a late-90s-vintage Palm.

 

[mangochutney]

There are only a few words I have to say to this:

1. WANT!

2. BOUGHT.

Ok, just a few more :wink:
If you can't offer any platform switching, then I'll be ok with it. I'm a student, but Pleco is just so damn good and I want it on my iPod touch.
As a propostion: Maybe you could offer some kind of refund for (poor students like me ) people who return their Palm/PPC licenses and buy the iPhone version.
But that is just me wishing :wink:

Another think that striked me was that the basis of the iPhone is so similar to MacOS X.
Only the top cocoa layer is largely different.
So there would be another option that could justify the purchase of the iPhone version for me:
The possibility that I could get a MacOS-version along with it.

I don't mean to be impudent, but this is just such good news.

 

[koreth]

From what I can tell, Apple is not going to ban people for selling add-on upgrades after the fact. That's basically the only way shareware apps can work, after all (download the free version from the store, then buy a license somewhere else and enter the reg code) and they haven't given any indication that they're going to ban shareware developers.

I don't have any inside info; that's just my take based on what I've read.

 

[mikelove]

mangochutney - offering a refund for previous Palm/PPC purchases would be tricky, actually, since on top of the 30% we'd be paying Apple I don't think we'd be able to avoid having to pay two separate sets of royalties (we only get to do it on Palm<>PPC switches because those are free). But at the very least we could probably offer free switches for iPhone users who subsequently decided they wanted to switch Palm or PPC (you never know, Windows Mobile 7 could really blow everyone away). And at whatever point we launch Pleco Online we might be able to trade in those licenses for a credit towards service on that. Or on the desktop version, though a lot of those license agreements are separate from the handheld ones and hence wouldn't carry over.

An OS X port is certainly a possibility but we'd have to see how the desktop Windows version sells first; we'll try very hard to get that working in Wine, though, so while it might look a little awkward it would hopefully work reasonably well under both OS X and Linux using that.

koreth - the Pleco Online product I just mentioned would probably be the best way for us to get more money out of iPhone purchasers, actually; designs for that are still very sketchy but we're hoping it'll add enough value to be worth paying for even if you already have an offline version of Pleco. Though we'll probably make at least a few parts of it (like online flashcard backup, something we've wanted to do for a while) free. I have to think Apple would want a cut of those upgrade revenues, but you never know - we'd certainly be delighted if we could sell add-ons without going through them, we'd offer a basic version of Pleco through iTunes and if you wanted more dictionaries you could buy those directly from us; might even let us avoid having to raise the price from the Palm/PPC version, and it could also provide us a way to potentially move over at least part of your previous Pleco purchase to iPhone for free.

 

[koreth]

Oh, by the way, if you do end up having to sell a "one-size-fits-all" product, I'm personally most interested in the Linguist bundle. I want the full set of dictionaries including the C-C one.

If there's a way to include Unihan in that bundle too, so much the better; I find it useful for rare characters. For some reason I like to learn all the component parts of characters, e.g., I added 咠 qi4 to my flashcard list when I first learned 编辑 bian1ji2. Very often the component parts are obscure old characters that only show up in Unihan.

But of course the preferable situation would be if we could buy / download additional dictionaries after getting just the software on the iPhone Store. Will be interesting to see how that plays out, since I don't imagine PlecoDict is the only piece of software with optional add-ons that'll want to port to the iPhone.

 

[garysaville]

I've already heard about other developers building Chinese dictionaries for the iPhone/Touch platform. But, I know for a fact they will just be using the crappy, and extremely inacurate CEdict. No matter what, there will be a hundred Chinese dictionaries for this thing. If you are going to develop one (do it, do it, DO IT!DOOO IIIIT!), then I hope you could go all out and make it the ultimate Chinese study tool. People might buy one of the cheepies at first, but if they are long term students, they will find their way to Pleco. I live in Taiwan, and EVERYONE I know has a touch or plans on getting one. People with Palms & PDAs? Just me and around 5 other hard core Chinese students at 師大. This is going to be a mainstream platform with a HUGE market. This is something Palms or other PDAs have didn't achive; They are geek toys or businessmen's tools.
I think the power of Apple's new development platform opens a lot of doors. You could do so much more with the document reader on an Apple version than on other platforms. linking any selected characters to dictionary defenitions and cool animated stroke order popups. Aslo, I'd recomend making the flashcard system, well, flashy. Not for your die hard users, but just to be able to compete with all the crappy but sleek products that WILL be comming out for the Apple platform.


Gary

 

[koreth]

I agree that the potential market for the iPhone version is huge. But I also suspect that it'll be more work than people think to really do it well.

If the Mac is any indication, people are going to expect iPhone software to act like iPhone software, not like ports of Palm software. That means the UI is going to have to center around the iPhone's metaphors like pinch/expand, flick-to-scroll, etc. Just the "nobody uses a stylus" factor alone will probably require reworking a bunch of UI to be fat-finger-friendly. In some cases I expect that large swaths of UI will have to be reinvented from scratch if the aim is to make an app that feels native. Obviously you can get away with skimping on that to some degree if the quality of the rest of the product makes up for it, but competitors will focus on a highly-native look and feel and it'll have a huge effect on people's first impressions, way out of proportion to its actual importance in day-to-day use.

Obviously I say all this with no notion of what PlecoDict's code looks like. Probably most of the core logic will remain largely unchanged, but doing a clean UI on a new platform is never as simple as it looks, especially when it's a platform that has UI concepts that don't precisely correspond to those on an app's existing platforms. Probably still worth it, but it'll be a lot of work.

 

[garysaville]

I agree that the potential market for the iPhone version is huge. But I also suspect that it'll be more work than people think to really do it well.

Cocoa developers will have an advantage on the iPod/Touch platform for sure, because their famillier with objective-C. Everyone is coming at this new platform blind though. There are a lot of custom APIs and ways of accessing the iPhone's hardware excelleration that everone will have to learn if they are going to program fast code that doesn't kill the battery. But Pleco have been building a crossplatform dictionary for a looong time. The development kit is for Apple is free and well documented. Pleco would be able to eat the competition for 早餐。

 

[daniu]

Re: iPhone SDK is out

I think this is the mobile platform of the future.

Hopefully not. There is a lot to be said against MS but Apple is way more greedy. The only thing that I can see in Apples products is design and marketing. Their products are so much overpriced that I can only hope that some people stay sensible ...

Because I do not benefit that much from marvelous design and Windows that I can see moving and all these fading effects. I do not need those performance thieves and in Windows it is the first thing that I turn off after installing ...

How can a company release a highpriced phone that is not even able to connect through UMTS/3G nowadays?

just my 2 cents ...

 

[lastmika]

just so you guys know.. I'm 24 hours away from an iphone purchase SOLELY based on todays news and the subsequent (yet very expected) positive response here on this forum. No pressure there guys!!! haha
But seriously.. The thought of getting another HTC unit that KINDA gets it right, but not quite.. or some sh*tty palm device -- no more , ever. I've been waiting for this day for a while. It makes the iphone 100x more viable than yesterday, when it was already holding so much more potential than any winmobile device. Uch, WM6-7 are loads of junk. I played with an HTC touch for a day before nearly throwing it against the wall. That's not what i want for a phone/personal-everything-device that i carry with me everywhere

Best of luck and lets see you guys posting plecodict in the first top 10 releases!! haha

 

[mangochutney]

garysaville and koreth are right.
Not only does the iPhone spread like a disease, there are an estimated 400000 unlocked iPhones in China already.
And I know from a reliable source :wink: that at least two Europeans have bought unlocked iPhones over there.

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/rtp20e92/event/index.html?internal=fj2l3s9dm
Check this out if you haven't already seen it.

The coolest thing that I (as a non-developer) can find about this whole situation is that you can basically develop a MacOS version right up until you reach the interface. Then the work is going to get more difficult, because you have two different things to programm.
Also what that Electronic Arts-dev said, that they underestimated the power of the platform.
They thought they would have to impoverish the game more than they eventually had to.
I mean, the iPhone has 700MHz and 256MB of RAM.
The other to got it right when they said that the UI has to be really intuitive, that's the way things work on Apple-devices (kinda dumb to write: "that's the way things work on apples"). But once you have the first version out on the market you can be sure to get alot of feedback, positive and negative. That'll help improve Pleco faster. Constructive criticism is not a rare thing among Mac-developers and customers.

This whole thing makes the iPhone/iPod touch platform THE most powerful mobile platform on the whole market.
As we have seen yesterday Steve Jobs wasn't lying when he said, that the put the power of MacOS X into a small device.

I've wrote this on arstechnica already, but I want to repeat it:
Apple owned RIM with their MS-Exchange deal, and Palm finally got its death-blow.

I really hope that you can solve any licensing/royalty-problems and do this.
Even more I hope that Apple will reach out a hand to you, and make things easier for you.
But again koreth is right. If you can only build a OSFA-version to distribut on the App-Store than make it the ultimate-package.

Allow me a bit of boldness here:
Let's say you publish a iPhone/iPod friendly version of Pleco with all available dictionaries built in for let's say $200,- on the App-Store.
Do it like this: People who purchase this SW will get a special, individual rebate of 75% on the Mac-Version.
I'd go for it anytime!

 

[RonLPleco]

The iPhone SDK is released...

As the song says, "Cuando, cuando, cuando." When will Mike have time to start working on an iPhone version? Even though I have been a Treo fanboy since the 180, it seems that Palm is a dying platform and the iPhone SDK will accelerate their death. The hi-res touch screen and multi-touch should do great things for PlecoDict.

雷 朗
Ron LaPedis

 

[mikelove]

Combining all of the various recent iPhone posts into this one thread...

koreth - we'd definitely include UniHan, not really any reason not to given that it's freely distributable and the iPhone has such a massive memory capacity. Though I don't see any reason why free dictionaries at least couldn't easily be added after-the-fact; commercial ones might be specifically restricted but I don't see anything in the SDK that would prevent you from downloading / storing new files obtained online. I would think that paid add-ons would be an option at the store too, extra game levels and such, but you never know how that'll work out. Which dictionaries we might include in a one-size-fits-all bundle will depend heavily on the reaction we get to the dictionaries we release with 2.0; C-C we would probably only include if the Linguist bundle starts to dominate sales after 2.0 is out.

garysaville - at least initially I don't think we'd add a lot of actual functionality beyond what there is in the Palm/PPC version 2.0, so the flashcard system would remain at something like its current level of flashiness. But yes, leveraging our wonderful content licenses would definitely be key to rising above the fray. And re your other message, we're not the least bit worried about performance - if Pleco can run at a decent speed on a Palm, which is running most of it an en emulator and only has 1/4 of the processing power of an iPhone anyway, it'll certainly be plenty fast on iPhone, particularly since Apple have already kindly implemented the most performance-intensive part of Pleco (the SQLite database engine) for us.

koreth - very important issue, but one we've already thought a lot about; in fact back in October when I was on vacation (in Siem Reap) it was miserably rainy one day so I sat around the hotel restaurant (FCC Angkor, highly recommended) with a notebook and sketched out an iPhone-friendly Pleco UI. The basic dictionary looks a bit like the iPhone e-mail client, actually; list of search results with a 1- or 2-line preview, tap on a result to view the full entry / magnified characters along with entries for the same word from other dictionaries and options to do stuff with it like cross-reference, add to flashcards, etc. The core PlecoDict engine code is completely platform-neutral and would literally take about a day to get working on iPhone, and even with the redesign I don't think the interface end of this would be that hard; the extra work for the new UI would be more than canceled out by the fact that the iPhone actually has decent built-in multilingual font support and rich-text fields and hence we don't have to spend the months we've spent implementing those things on Palm and PPC.

daniu - I agree we need more open platforms too, if I wasn't getting half a dozen e-mails a week asking for an iPhone version I'd be somewhat less inclined to bow to Apple on this but as-is I think the sacrifice is worth it. At least with iPhone it's Apple that gets to set the restrictions rather than the cell carriers; Apple genuinely has something to gain in growing a robust software market for the iPhone, while AT&T & co couldn't care less. And as a development platform the iPhone really does look pretty nice, the need to buy a Mac notwithstanding (I may actually have to replace my beloved custom-built Q6600 system with a Mac Pro).

lastmika - WM7's going to be a lot better, actually, but I understand the frustration. Even if we do develop an iPhone version it'll probably be a while off, though, we might have been able to release a beta by the Olympics but without the means to distribute said beta to our customers I don't imagine a potential Pleco for iPhone would be out before the end of '08, particularly not if we continue with our plans to put a rough X86 Windows version out shortly after 2.0.

mangochutney - that's true, but really up until you reach the interface most of what most apps need to accomplish can be done with standard cross-platform C functions, particularly in the mobile world where we're all used to having to support a bunch of platforms anyway. So the Mac compatibility isn't that big a deal unless you already have a Cocoa program you want to port. The processing speed and extra RAM make a bigger difference as far as desktop software ports, since they lessen the amount of time you need to spend profiling / trimming down memory requirements. But Windows Mobile is already fine on that front for most apps (which generally only use a small portion of a modern PC's capabilities anyway), it's really only Palm that requires you to pull your hair out trimming things down.

Some sort of a discount on the Mac version for iPhone purchasers might make sense, but there's no way we could make it 75% or even 50% with all of our various royalty payments. Though since we're planning to release a basic flashcard-manager type desktop version for free on Windows we'd probably put out a similar thing on Mac if we eventually did an official Mac port.