Palm webOS and Pleco

[FengLeien]

really? i had the impression the Pre was doing well, its all over tv adds and stuff..

i just checked out the Pre from a friend of mine and i really like it! It would be really nice, if there were a native Pre Pleco! im really thinking about getting one and pleco is the major point of argument for me. it was the reason i got a touch-phone (winmo) in the first place and it still remains almost the only reason not to change back to a normal cellphone, as i have to admit that i dont like very much how windows mobile complicates easy processes. Pre on the other hand makes things so much easier than on any other (except maybe iphone) device..

as for the handwriting problems on PRE.. i just saw the iphone demo, were fingerwriting seems to work just like a charme! why does it not for pre, as the touchscreen is also very good (compared to, say, the Samsung Omnia WinMo, which is what im having at the moment and it drives me nuts!!!).
so is this big difference due to the fact, that the pleco version running on pre is the normal palm version which was designed for stylus intead of finger? for example, on the Omnia i can hardly do anything without the stylus, it likes to ignore my finger..

 

[Dr.Grace]

Maybe, we'd have to see that development kit. Though webOS' sales and market share numbers are kind of discouraging at the moment, to be honest.

Right now that's true. But app sales will improve, now that Verizon and ATT have announced that they'll carry the Pre, and eventually paid apps will be distributed in other countries. Also, the market for the Pre should improve as more developers release apps, which in turn will encourage more app development.

Also, maybe after the PDK is released you'll find that it's not TOO difficult to port the app over to the Pre, since you have the foundation established on the iPhone.

 

[mikelove]

FengLelen - I like the Pre too, it's just still too early to tell whether it'll survive / mature enough to be worth developing for. Palm is advertising it plenty, but as far as market share or "mindshare" it's still pretty tiny compared to iPhone.

At the moment, stroke capture actually seems to be iffy relative to other capacitive-touchscreen devices like iPhone, so at least until they get that working more smoothly it'd be tough to offer a decent handwriting recognizer in a webOS version of Pleco; it's theoretically possible to do handwriting well on those screens, as our iPhone software demonstrates, but in practice there's still a lot of variation between how smoothly individual devices / platforms interpret finger movements. (see the widely-discussed study of this at http://labs.moto.com/diy-touchscreen-analysis/)

Dr.Grace - sure, sales will improve and it's certainly possible the Pre will reach a point both sales- and maturity-wise where it'd make sense to put Pleco on it, we just aren't sure enough of that yet. It may end up presenting the same sorts of problems for porting that Android does, even with the PDK.

 

[ipsi]

Looks like the PDK (Plugin Development Kit) for doing C/C++ development is now available: http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2000&Itemid=333. Looks like it will be about as easy to develop a GUI application for WebOS PDK as it would for Android (maybe a little easier).

 

[mikelove]

That's promising, but Palm has to show they have a lot more staying power before we develop anything specifically for webOS. If, however, this and the Android NDK start to overlap to the point that we could essentially develop a single app that targets both, that would certainly improve the Pleco prospects on both platforms.

 

[radioman]

Just saw this....


StyleTap Platform for iPhone Now Available
Posted: 22 Mar 2010 09:30 PM PDT

StyleTap Platform for iPhone® is now available for download and purchase at the StyleTap website!
StyleTap Platform for iPhone Now Available

Posted: 22 Mar 2010 09:30 PM PDT
StyleTap Platform for iPhone® is now available for download and purchase at the StyleTap website!

We are very happy to finally announce the immediate availability of a full implementation of StyleTap Platform that runs on Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices.

StyleTap Platform for iPhone supports standard features that include TCP/IP networking, audio recording and playback, the ability to use the multi-gigabyte storage as a virtual memory card, and cut/copy/paste of text between native and Palm OS applications. It also provides innovative capabilities such as giving Palm OS applications access to the iPhone GPS by providing location information in standard GPS NMEA format.

With this release, StyleTap-compatible applications can now run on all Palm OS devices, all Windows Mobile devices, all Symbian smartphones, and now on Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices – more than any other type of mobile applications.

See the news release for the full details.

 

[mikelove]

Not too relevant for our purposes since we already have iPhone software (would have been better if they'd developed StyleTap for Android ), but I guess if you really really want the not-available-in-our-iPhone-software Oxford Concise dictionary this would be a way to get that.

 

[Dr.Grace]

For anyone using Pleco within Classic, I'd just like to mention that there's a new patch available in Preware that reduces the "drag radius" from 25 to 10 pixels. This greatly improves the responsiveness of the character handwriting screen in Pleco, as well as improving other kinds of controls on the Pre. With this patch installed, the characters I draw in Pleco actually look like Chinese characters, rather than strange scribbles.

 

[mikelove]

Interesting - it'd nice if Palm would add this as an option officially, or at least if the makers of Classic would enable it in-app.

 

[Dr.Grace]

I don't know how likely they are to do that. They have probably tried to optimize this parameter for tapping on icons, links etc. The reduced radius makes this a little more demanding (I often have to tap on an icon or menu item twice) . It's a trade-off. But I think it would be great to be able to set this value via a webOS preference.

 

[Duke of Shao]

For anyone using Pleco within Classic, I'd just like to mention that there's a new patch available in Preware that reduces the "drag radius" from 25 to 10 pixels. This greatly improves the responsiveness of the character handwriting screen in Pleco, as well as improving other kinds of controls on the Pre. With this patch installed, the characters I draw in Pleco actually look like Chinese characters, rather than strange scribbles.

Just a quick question for you, Dr. Grace: how happy you are with your Pre, and in particular, does PlecoDict work well enough right now to warrant going WebOS?

I love my PlecoDict and am loathe to "upgrade" from my old Tungsten T5 to an iPhone, but I need a new phone, and want to support the development of WebOS and the Pre. Most importantly, though, I want to be able to use my PlecoDict when I'm in China, at least once a year for two-three months at a time.

Cheers,
Charles

 

[misterasset]

Please look into porting Pleco to webOS. Originally there was a statement that the time invested was not worth the return, that the current version of Pleco could run with Classic, and that there weren't even plans to run the program on Android.

Well, the Palm PDK has proven time and again that iPhone programs can "easily" be ported to the webOS platform. Sometimes in as little as a day but usually in about a week! We just got word today that Classic will NOT work with webOS 2.0 so everyone who uses Pleco through classic will, within "the next few months," lose the ability to use the program. And, last but not least, Pleco is now actively being developed for Android.

Please look to an example such as "Angry Birds" where the insanely popular game came to webOS a month before it came to Android because of the ease at which Roxio could port the game using the Palm PDK.

I love my Pleco software mainly for flashcard practice and with talk of the new OCR options that would be amazing. Please please please look into letting us Palm users continue to use the software. With the breaking of Classic in webOS 2.0 everyone will be forced into re-purchasing the software (which to have a native webOS version I'm completely okay with) instead of trying to bring new customers into the fold in order to make your time spent on it worthwhile.

Thank you,
Chris

 

[mikelove]

I love my Pleco software mainly for flashcard practice and with talk of the new OCR options that would be amazing. Please please please look into letting us Palm users continue to use the software. With the breaking of Classic in webOS 2.0 everyone will be forced into re-purchasing the software (which to have a native webOS version I'm completely okay with) instead of trying to bring new customers into the fold in order to make your time spent on it worthwhile.

Thanks for the note.

However, at the moment I'm simply not convinced that webOS has much of a future; HP already announced that smartphones weren't the main reason they bought Palm (they later backpedaled a bit, but the damage was already done), so they need to demonstrate a commitment not only to building great webOS smartphones but to backing them up with marketing / promotional money at the same level that Android and WP7 are getting. If the next webOS phone is a real blockbuster hit and webOS starts to get back some significant marketshare / mindshare, that might justify our considering a port to it, but at the moment I'd describe our future platform support priority list as:

Android (including Android-based desktop app)
Mac Desktops (native Cocoa Mac app)
Windows Desktops (native Windows app)
MeeGo
Windows Phone 7 (assuming Microsoft eventually adds native C development support)
webOS
BlackBerry

webOS would not be an easy port by any means - I'm not even sure at this point if the digitizer is accurate enough to allow for decent finger-driven handwriting input, particularly given the small screen size of the Pre (and even smaller screen size of the Pixi), and its Chinese support is poor enough that we'd pretty much need to roll our own font system from scratch just like we did on Palm OS before it. It'd be easy enough to get our cross-platform engine code working on it, and our handwriting recognizer library for Android should also work on webOS without needing to license a new one, but the user interface coding could still take half a year or more - we can't afford to invest the resources in that unless we're sure people are going to still be buying webOS phones 2 years from now.

 

[mikelove]

I'd also add that HP/Palm actually lost a lot of points with us by phasing out support for Classic in webOS 2.0 - we were still selling a handful of copies of Pleco for Palm OS because of Classic and now we don't get to anymore. So that certainly doesn't help matters in terms of convincing us to do a port - if they can't be bothered to maintain backwards-compatibility then they're really screwing us every bit as much as Microsoft did when they dropped support for legacy WM apps in WP7.

The high ranking of MeeGo, BTW, is because a) it uses nice standard UI frameworks like Qt, meaning a MeeGo version could be trivially easily turned into a native Linux app, and b) it's clear now that MeeGo will powering post-Symbian Nokia smartphones, and we'd be very interested in finally getting Pleco onto glorious Nokia hardware once it's running a less terrible OS.

 

[misterasset]

While I'm pissed they're dropping support for Classic also, I think this INCREASES the desire for a native version of Pleco on WebOS. I'm positive I'm not alone in being a WebOS user of Pleco forced into the Classic route. As I've said before, I speak for most I again assume, we would gladly RE-pay for a native WebOS version and I would argue the fact that you were still selling a "handful" of PalmOS versions means that there is still interest in your software. Which, let's be honest, is not surprising because it is the best friggin Chinese Dictionary/Study system out there.

So please, I ask again, consider looking into a port form iOS to WebOS. It won't be as profitable as the iOS version, no one would dare make that argument, but I can imagine it will at least not be a loss.

And I think it's amazing that y'all have given us updates for free this long, but change the policy. Charge us a nominal fee for updates. Your software has more of an update with new versions than my last update of AutoCAD did... and that was several hundred dollars. I'd rather give y'all my money in all honesty. =)

Thanks,
Chris

 

[mikelove]

While I'm pissed they're dropping support for Classic also, I think this INCREASES the desire for a native version of Pleco on WebOS. I'm positive I'm not alone in being a WebOS user of Pleco forced into the Classic route. As I've said before, I speak for most I again assume, we would gladly RE-pay for a native WebOS version and I would argue the fact that you were still selling a "handful" of PalmOS versions means that there is still interest in your software. Which, let's be honest, is not surprising because it is the best friggin Chinese Dictionary/Study system out there.

So please, I ask again, consider looking into a port form iOS to WebOS. It won't be as profitable as the iOS version, no one would dare make that argument, but I can imagine it will at least not be a loss.

It's more of an opportunity cost issue, really - we certainly might break even on webOS, but we could likely make a lot more money investing those same resources into Android or iOS instead. If we had unlimited resources we'd license 50 dictionaries and support every mobile platform under the sun, but we don't, and the only way for us to stay healthy / keep growing our business is to put what resources we do have into the projects that are the most likely to pay off.

New platforms are particularly problematic since the marginal benefit of each new platform we support goes down even assuming identical market share. We're honored by the fact that a lot of people still choose their mobile device based at least in part on whether or not it'll run Pleco, but every new platform we support means a smaller number of people left who aren't satisfied with at least one of our platforms. Android phones have finally started to appear with Pixi-like form factors, for example, which means that a lot of people who might previously have held out for a webOS version are now more likely to switch to Android; even if they'd be a little bit happier with webOS, as long as they're happy enough with Android to buy our software on that, they're not really providing us with any incentive to support webOS.

And I think it's amazing that y'all have given us updates for free this long, but change the policy. Charge us a nominal fee for updates. Your software has more of an update with new versions than my last update of AutoCAD did... and that was several hundred dollars. I'd rather give y'all my money in all honesty. =)

Thanks! However, at least on iPhone there's not really a way for us to charge for updates - the iPhone developers that charge for them do so by releasing totally new apps, which isn't an option for us since a new app wouldn't have a reliable way to bring forward purchases from an old app (could work out something with a shared keychain, but you'd still need to reinstall the old version to reactivate your purchases). We can charge for totally new features like OCR, but beyond that we basically cover the cost of updates by the new customers they bring in, which actually seems to work pretty well - we hear all the time from people who were finally motivated to buy our software by such-and-such obscure new feature we added in a minor update.

It's mainly a matter of market penetration - Intuit and Adobe and Autodesk have to charge a boatload of money for each new version they release because they're all more-or-less monopolies; anybody who's interested in their software probably already owns it, and hence there's little or no benefit for them to adding new features if they can't make their existing customers pay for them. With us, though, 99% of the Chinese learners in the world still don't use Pleco, so roping in a few more of those holdouts is more than enough reason in and of itself to keep improving our software.

 

[misterasset]

I would like to rebump this thread and again make the case for Pleco on webOS. HP just had their huge event earlier this month detailing their commitment to webOS across a wide variety of devices. I bring this up because in a few posts back in this thread you mention Mac Desktop and Windows Desktop as priorities above webOS.

HP has stated their intent to keep webOS going among smartphones (they introduced two new ones on Feb 9th), a slate device which has amazing specs (I of course mean the TouchPad) and to bring webOS to computers. While they did not detail how they would be doing this, most blogs agree that it will be some sort of "in browser" implementation since the OS is, as the name implies, largely web based.

By developing Pleco for webOS, which I still think would not be as hard as believed with the help of the PDK, you will reach the existing webOS market, get to expand to slate devices, and have your Mac and Windows desktop versions. The new development platform scales your software to varrying screen sizes instead of iOS that makes you rewrite an iPhone and iPad version giving you felxibility from the get go.

Y'all seem to be very pro-Apple lately and I would again like to state that there are a wide range of consumers on other platforms that do indeed want to use your software. You can tackle THREE of your listed priorities by developing for webOS. Just something for y'all to consider.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[spherelander]

As a former loyal Palm customer for over ten years I was initially disappointed that new Pleco versions would only be available on an "Evil Apple iPhone". But having converted to an iPhone I'll never go back to Palm. It's simply amazing what Pleco does on the iPhone versus my old Tungsten T3. It's clear Mike Love made the right move. Looking back Palm would have been a poor platform to support given how Palm shot themselves in the foot by providing an inadequate SDK, delivered the Pre late to the market and with severe build quality issues.

Sadly out of my remaining Palm loyalty I bought a Palm Pre, this fall, for my wife to replace her Centro. I cannot begin to express my outrage at HP for it's breaking promises to not update the OS (leaving my wife with an unsupported phone for the next 1.5 years), fragmenting the application ecosystem by introducing Enyo which only supports the new phones, despite the CEO promising to release products in weeks HP says it will release it's new phones this summer or later (well after iPad2 and likely after iPhone5) and has no carriers lined up to sell their phones. Sadly I believe the only people who will be buying HP's new devices will be the few remaining Palm loyalists that have not yet sworn off ever purchasing another WebOS device again.

In the midst of my disgust with HP's lack of support I did have one bright moment... Mike released Pleco 2.2.2 (I absolutely love the Lyrics Reader and the OCR enhancements). If only HP knew how to support a customer, as well as Mike Love does, WebOS could have a future.

 

[gato]

HP has stated their intent to keep webOS going among smartphones (they introduced two new ones on Feb 9th), a slate device which has amazing specs (I of course mean the TouchPad) and to bring webOS to computers.

A good thing about Apple is that when they announce a product, they actually have a ready-to-release product rather than just specs.

 

[mikelove]

A webOS version isn't very likely, I'm afraid. Even ignoring my now somewhat negative feelings towards Palm, two platforms are all we can really afford to support, and we're working with iOS because it's awesome and Android because some people don't think iOS is as awesome as we think it is - the marginal benefit to supporting a third mobile platform just isn't as high as the marginal benefit of putting those same resources into a desktop version (or into a ton of new features on mobiles).