iSlate

kenianbei

秀才
I was thinking today, if the iSlate comes to be, this could be quite the boon for Pleco, since with a fully developed Chinese reader built-in it would essentially turn Pleco into a Chinese Kindle. One possibility would be buying your Chinese textbook online for the iSlate, and then reading it through Pleco in class. Pretty cool idea! Of course that is assuming iSlate wasn't just a marketing ploy to bump up the year-end stocks for Apple.
 

Eggwind

举人
Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing.

Though the iSlate will likely be beyond my means (MacBook is growing old and weary however), I'm wondering, Mike, how the license situation would work. Since I'd be using the same iTunes account for both my iPhone and iSlate, that would mean my licenses will be available for both at the same time, right?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Oh yes, we're definitely looking forward to hearing more about the Apple tablet. Though it's way too early to make any predictions about licensing yet - it might not even be running iPhone OS, and even if it does we don't yet know how much work would be involved in making our iPhone software run on it or whether it'd be possible / make sense to combine them into the same app and credit users for the same purchases on both.
 

kenianbei

秀才
I would definitely be jumping on the band wagon... my mac mini is 5 years old and ready to be replaced, not to mention how cool it would be to have a Chinese capable reader. I just hope they figure out some way to combine the two OSs or port all the good software like garageband and iMovie over to it.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
My prediction is that it'll basically be running iPhone OS, and be similarly locked-down - Apple's getting too much money / control out of App Store to give that up on a new platform, and it seems clear that that model is working for them sales-wise. Plus it'd give them a huge base of existing apps; games might be tricky to port over, but for Pleco all we'd really need to do is rearrange some screen layouts. Though down the line we could also add some new capabilities to take advantage of the larger screen (a full-on tabbed interface, say, assuming the available RAM permitted it).

They'll almost certainly add a couple of new tablet-centric UI controls, though - something for easy ink capture, say - along with a few other necessary new capabilities. A shared documents directory with USB file transfer support, for example - that might be part of iPhone OS 4.0 for everyone, actually, but on a tablet it's pretty much essential; people are going to want to open the same document / image file / etc on their PC and their tablet and in multiple applications without having to go through some awkward server sync / webDAV-based thing, you're wasting the many wonderful editing capabilities of a large-screen tablet if you don't provide that. (it'd be a HUGE boon for us, in fact I'd say that's the single feature I'd most like to see added to iPhone OS - helps not only with document reader / flashcards but with installing add-on data files too)

I also expect we'll see a built-in eBook reader and an unholy fusion of FairPlay + EPUB - they might support other DRM schemes too, but they're definitely going to want to sell books through iTunes. And there'll almost certainly be ports of a few desktop apps. My money would actually be on iWork to lead the way on this - it's been selling like hotcakes lately, and it provides an excellent mechanism for Apple to raise the bar for new apps in terms of sophistication and pricing; if Apple starts charging $30 or $40 for their office app it'll embolden others to do the same.

With iLife, the only app I'd think has much chance of appearing right away is iPhoto, and that only if they have a good means of getting photos from a digital camera on to the thing. Which is tricky, since it's unlikely they'll include a built-in SD card slot; maybe something using wireless sync, trot out someone from Canon to proudly demonstrate the new PowerShot SD990i with iSlate sync support and / or someone from Eye-Fi to show off a new SD card that adds iSlate support to any digital camera. I suppose iMovie's a possibility too, but probably only something iMovie-branded that was really just a modestly-upgraded version of the movie editing app on the 3GS.

Oh, and multitasking. This thing'll have abundant RAM and battery life, so they've officially run out of excuses. Probably with an elegant little pop-out Dock control of some kind. And along with that a larger persistent menu bar of some kind, not just a status bar but something with a couple of buttons on it for easy music playback control etc.
 

dcarpent

榜眼
Speaking of multitasking, would it be possible with Pleco on a tablet to have the reader open on one side of the screen and the dictionary open on the other, so that the text one is reading is not obscured by the pop-up dictionary windows? This would be great. Being able to run different components of Pleco simultaneously on the same screen would be a real advantage, esp. with the added screen real estate.

Assuming that Apple does announce a tablet on Jan 27 which seems very likely, how will this impact plans to develop a desktop version of Pleco? Will porting to the iSlate (or whatever) come first? If you do develop a tablet version for whatever Apple announces I hope there will be some way to license the iPhone version to run on the tablet without buying the entire application again (as i myself did when the iPhone version came out) and still be able to run Pleco on BOTH the iPhone and the tablet, since I would imagine that most people who owned both an iPhone and an iSlate would use Pleco on both but in different contexts (at home vs. on the road, for instance).
 

character

状元
mikelove said:
Oh, and multitasking. This thing'll have abundant RAM and battery life, so they've officially run out of excuses.
It's an interesting issue -- it might come out of the gate with a low-end processor to make the battery last longer for ebook use. The first MacBook Air was very slow.

I'm hoping it uses iPhone OS or a variant OR they start up a Mac App Store. If it's iPhone OS, I would expect a compatibility mode where iPhone apps are perhaps run in a 640x960 window (quadrupling each pixel of the original app).

One big question I have is display resolution -- in what resolutions are 10.1" 16:9 screens produced in?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
dcarpent - that's part of what we're thinking, yeah; a bigger reader with a full-featured separate dictionary pane would be a logical use for the tablet screen size. As far as desktop version plans, I really can't say anything about that until I know what the development picture actually looks like - if it's just a matter of rearranging our iPhone UI, though, we probably would do the tablet version first in that case. No idea how things might work as far as purchases / license transfers on the tablet, again we need a lot more information about what development / software distribution will look like on it first.

character - processing power wouldn't factor in too much for basic multitasking, I think; the few apps on iPhone now that really use its full processing capacity tend to all be things that take over the interface like games etc. So the processor even on the current 3GS would probably be fast enough provided the RAM and battery life were sufficient.

I don't think it'll be 16:9, that's a good resolution in landscape orientation for watching movies and an OK resolution in portrait mode for reading but for a frequently-rotated tablet you really want something more like 3:2. And I'm not sure if there'll be a compatibility mode either; if Apple gives developers even a month or two of lead time there'll be a vast library of tablet-optimized apps by the time the thing is released. They've demonstrated with OS 3.0 that they're perfectly happy to shed apps that don't work with their latest OS changes.
 

character

状元
mikelove said:
So the processor even on the current 3GS would probably be fast enough provided the RAM and battery life were sufficient.
We'll see -- the system would have to update a lot more screen real estate for the primary app than the 3GS does, for one.

I don't think it'll be 16:9, that's a good resolution in landscape orientation for watching movies and an OK resolution in portrait mode for reading but for a frequently-rotated tablet you really want something more like 3:2.
I agree that would be a better format, but it's my understanding that for a number of years LCDs have been driven by the TV market. LCD manufacturers are only set up to efficiently make certain size/resolution screens, and these days it is 16:9 and fairly low resolution for the most part. Computer screens have been going from 4:3 -> 16:10 -> 16:9 over the last few years due to cost and availability. I guess the good news is that resolution seems to be creeping up now that the screen format is standardizing.

And I'm not sure if there'll be a compatibility mode either; if Apple gives developers even a month or two of lead time there'll be a vast library of tablet-optimized apps by the time the thing is released. They've demonstrated with OS 3.0 that they're perfectly happy to shed apps that don't work with their latest OS changes.
If Apple goes to iPhone OS 4.0 it might make sense to break compatibility, but there could also be developer fatigue -- iPhone OS 3.0 was announced less than an year ago. If their app store is the sole real distinguishing factor (leaving out irrational hatred) between an iPhone device and an Android device, they might be reluctant to not make existing iPod Touch compatible apps available on the slate.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It's true that there'd be a lot more pixels to update, but that's not really the limiting factor in iPhone performance even now, and note that there are already other devices with twice the pixels that are still nice and fast. I'm not sure if I agree about LCDs being driven by the TV market, at least not at phone- and tablet-sized form factors; aspect ratio shouldn't matter much anyway, it's not like it's that big a leap to cut motherglass in one aspect ratio rather than another. Screen size standardization matters more for developers / content authors, who would rather only have to design for one aspect ratio, but if anything that's an incentive for Apple to stick with 3:2.

I don't think iPhone OS 4.0 will break compatibility, just the tablet form factor - most 3.0 iPhone apps will probably run just fine on 4.0 iPhones, but they may not work correctly on tablets without being redesigned / resubmitted / reapproved.

My Android hatred isn't irrational - Google has come along and created an OS which is specifically very difficult for us to develop for, requiring not only extensive rewrites but a forking of our code base that would mean a whole lot of extra work every time we want to add a new feature in the future. From a software standpoint it's hard to think of a way to make a mobile OS that would be less well-suited for Pleco's purposes than Android. (except BlackBerry, but nobody buys BlackBerries to run apps) There's no reason they couldn't have made it possible to write native C apps on Android, they just didnt. My problem isn't that Android sucks (though it does), my problem is that Android especially sucks for Pleco.

There's also my hatred of ports in general - I really really really don't want to have to spend yet another long stretch of time / shell out yet another large batch of license fees just to once again get the exact same app working on yet another platform which will inevitably become obsolete in a couple of years. We're not making better software that way, we're just making the same software over and over and over again. And at that point I'd rather just give up on native development altogether and start doing everything online, at least that way we'd only have to implement each new feature once. In the meantime I'll continue wishing every possible kind of misfortune on Google and on Android.

(probably best to reply to this part in one of the Android-specific threads rather than continuing on yet another Why Michael Hates Android tangent in yet another unrelated thread)
 
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