keruibo - I do have a copy of "Fast Finder," though I think most of its appeal lies in how well the data is fit into book form - number tabs, well-designed page layouts, etc. Aside from that it's really not much more than a multi-radical lookup like what I mentioned in my last post.
The Windows Mobile Standard (new name for the touchscreen-less version of WM) edition of PlecoDict would actually be a full-fledged native program, simply because it's so easy to port software from WM Professional (a.k.a. Pocket PC) to that - all you really have to change is the interface design.
daniu - I don't think it's that far away, with 3G mobile internet you really don't need WiFi that much and within a year or two you should be able to get 3G almost anywhere. More and more handhelds are being built around the expectation that you'll be on the internet all the time, BlackBerries aren't really very useful without internet access and the iPhone can't run third-party software at all without it.
And yes, you're quite right about the business issues in this - the Palm OS version of PlecoDict has effectively been subsidizing the Pocket PC version so far. With 2.0 I'm optimistic that this will even out, and by the end of the decade the Pocket PC version will probably have outsold the Palm version several times over, but for a company the size of Pleco, rewriting our software for a new platform almost inevitably means higher prices or delayed upgrades on the old platform(s). So we'd much rather limit ourselves to one or two native platform versions and put the rest of our time into designing a website which both offers some benefits for our existing users (flashcard sync, more frequent dictionary updates, etc) and lets people who can't or won't buy a Palm / Pocket PC still have access to a scaled-down version of our software.
The Windows Mobile Standard (new name for the touchscreen-less version of WM) edition of PlecoDict would actually be a full-fledged native program, simply because it's so easy to port software from WM Professional (a.k.a. Pocket PC) to that - all you really have to change is the interface design.
daniu - I don't think it's that far away, with 3G mobile internet you really don't need WiFi that much and within a year or two you should be able to get 3G almost anywhere. More and more handhelds are being built around the expectation that you'll be on the internet all the time, BlackBerries aren't really very useful without internet access and the iPhone can't run third-party software at all without it.
And yes, you're quite right about the business issues in this - the Palm OS version of PlecoDict has effectively been subsidizing the Pocket PC version so far. With 2.0 I'm optimistic that this will even out, and by the end of the decade the Pocket PC version will probably have outsold the Palm version several times over, but for a company the size of Pleco, rewriting our software for a new platform almost inevitably means higher prices or delayed upgrades on the old platform(s). So we'd much rather limit ourselves to one or two native platform versions and put the rest of our time into designing a website which both offers some benefits for our existing users (flashcard sync, more frequent dictionary updates, etc) and lets people who can't or won't buy a Palm / Pocket PC still have access to a scaled-down version of our software.
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