Ivan006 said:
You don't have to watch the whole video, just skip to 54 seconds into the video and you'll clearly see Chinese characters. Now, I don't know if this has to do with the fact that these are international phones, but clearly no developers have to wait till next year to see characters on their devices. Somehow, the person who sent this message in character format, did not know it would be read on a WP7 device. I'm sure seeing a Chinese website or using a Chinese dictionary site on these devices will not be a problem.
Maybe they did manage to get a font built in, but it seems like Chinese text input at least is still lacking, which would complicate matters trying to enter characters on a Chinese dictionary site.
Ivan006 said:
I remember a time when you mentioned that making a pleco version for android was not going to happen because there was too many different android devices for the program to work. If the demand for pleco on WP7 comes in waves, then will you consider making a pleco version for this phone? Because as I see the trend with your software, it's based on popular demand with the development of phones, not just software issues. Would a beta version or a lite version be a consideration for you guys?
It isn't about demand as much as it's about ease of development; unless Microsoft opens WP7 up to to-top-bottom native-code development, it's simply too much work and the results are too uncertain. We spent a
long time trying to rewrite portions of the Pleco engine in Java for use on Android / BlackBerry devices and ultimately came to the conclusion we just couldn't get it to be fast enough, and we'd have to spend a similar amount of time rewriting Pleco for .NET with the likelihood of encountering the same result.
On Android, getting us over the "hump" to announce a port took a combination of partial native-code development support and the appeal of developing for an open platform on which we can release updates / betas / etc whenever we like, slander the company founders in our About box (not that we would, but we could...), and not have to pay anybody a 30% cut, and it still took a lot of persuading as you can see. Not having to release on Android Market also means we can have a short list of specific devices we've actually optimized around and not have to officially support any others - the hardware compatibility situation is only as tricky as we allow it to be, to some extent.
WP7 combines the closed nature of iPhone with an even more difficult programming situation than Android, and on top of that, assuming iPhone and Android are both still alive and kicking and achieving good market share, supporting WP7 would require us to make the leap to actively developing Pleco on three platforms at once; we're a small company in what's still a limited-size market (especially with so much free competition) and it's hard enough to justify even supporting two of them.
These are much bigger problems than what I'm sure is only a temporary lack of Chinese support - I brought up the lack of Chinese support more as a way of illustrating how late to the game Microsoft is on this and how far from "finished" WP7 is at this point.
If Microsoft opens up WP7 native-code development to everyone in the future (and I mean everyone - Microsoft deciding Pleco's big enough to open it to us doesn't make things right, every developer deserves the same opportunity to make his/her app great) and if that proves an easy enough port over from desktop Windows to make it a reasonable project for us, we might consider a WP7 port, but absent that I can only see it happening if WP7 does really really well (i.e., eclipses both Android and iPhone in market share) - the only way you're likely to see Pleco on WP7 in the next year or two would be through a web-based app.
