Pleco Desktop

[mikelove]

We actually plan to support both - the Mac market may be smaller, but there are far fewer Chinese dictionary apps available on OS X (even mediocre ones), and it's an incredibly easy port from iPhone (about as easy as desktop Windows is from WM - most of the non-user-interface-related APIs are identical).

Android, however, does have to go after all of this stuff because it's such a complicated port. And in spite of all of the buzz about Android it's not yet clear whether that buzz is going to translate into software sales; if Nokia buys Palm and Microsoft gets their act together with Windows Mobile 7, Android could well end up ranking dead last among mobile OSes users-wise. (RIM and Microsoft take corporate users, Apple and Nokia take consumers)

 

[radioman]

You could probably charge for the undocumented banner feature.

Thank you. I'm really looking forward to desktop development, actually, combines the power / ease of what we've experienced on iPhone with the openness of WM / Palm; we can write a Mac OS application with fifty undocumented APIs and a start banner that makes obscene comments about Steve Jobs' mother and Apple can't do anything about it

 

[mfcb]

You could probably charge for the undocumented banner feature.

... and a start banner that makes obscene comments about Steve Jobs' mother and Apple can't do anything about it

if the quotes come up in chinese and can be sent to the reader, that might even make sense, hehe, like "quote of the day" and we could learn something from it ( :lol: )

 

[mikelove]

Actually in all seriousness it would be nice to have a guide to Chinese slang / profanity - couple of dictionaries out there for that stuff now. Not sure if we really need a slang-word-of-the-day (though a word-of-the-day in general seems like a nice idea, and it would make sense to let people link that to a particular dictionary or flashcard list) but support for colorful language beyond what you find in CC-CEDICT might be helpful...

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Hey Mike,

Just so you know, I will buy a Chinese slang dictionary the instant you make it available!

Cheers!

Darrol

 

[Lurks]

Just to chuck my maozi into the ring, I would find a desktop version of Pleco extremely useful. It would be most useful actually syncing up to the mobile version in some way, eg adding cards throughout the day on my to desktop. Having thought about this a bit, and the issue of other platforms like Android yadda yadda... one time Mike mentioned the idea of just doing a web version of Pleco.

That would actually be fine for desktop, perfect really. Depending on how a web version might work... it might even scratch the itch for Android etc - solving my largest connundrum, eg being shacked to a phone I want to get rid of.

Strikes me this might be the best solution as far as licensing dictionaries and what have you also? Obviously I would like all the stuff I've paid for to be on my phone and on my desktop.

There's been some great work in flash apps to do the handwriting stuff already. Proper phones (eg non Apple) can obviously run flash nicely, and on Apple well... you've got your native client. So in terms of hitting all the zones with the minimum of development that seems to be a winning strategy to me.

You've obviously thought about this Mike. Is the online nature a show-stopper do you think? In terms of you as a company... the ability to demo what you're doing in an essentially pirate-free way must surely be attractive. The entire web market is obviously quite big.

 

[mikelove]

An online product for desktops might be quite serviceable, but there are a number of benefits to having a native desktop app; licensing-wise it's really much easier (there's pretty much zero chance we'd be able to offer any sort of license transfer / discount system with an online version, and we'd have to drop a bunch of dictionaries too), and features-wise we'd love to take something like our iPhone "Live Mode" and put it on desktops too. Ordinary mouseover translators are nice enough, but actually embedding a web browser in the app would both let us do a better / smoother version of that and work in some other cool thing like, say, extracting the Chinese text from a page, segmenting it and then letting you automatically add to flashcards any new words it found.

 

[Lurks]

Ah fair enough. It just felt like there might be a synergy to get Pleco onto the desktop and to other platforms like android in the mix. Obviously a native client would be better but then again, storing stuff in a cloud would also be very useful. That's the way desktop computing is going really, with people using more and more computers and wanting access to the same stuff.

 

[McSquatty]

I just saw this new unreleased multitouch handheld PC by Fujitsu running Windows 7. Would the Pleco Desktop version be able to take advantage of the multitouch screen and have an user interface similar to the one on the iphone?

http://www.fujitsu.com/th/en/news/pr/fp ... 91202.html

Also, unrelated, but also about hardware, I will be picking up an HTC HD2 in the next week or two. I will be installing the 2.0.3 version on it to see how it works with the capacitive screen.

 

[mikelove]

I think so - I haven't looked at the Windows 7 APIs in detail yet, but I believe they added one for multitouch, so assuming they did it should certainly be possible for us to integrate that with our handwriting recognizer library and provide the same sort of multitouch handwriting interface we use on iPhone. (which doesn't require any change to the recognizer, just to our interface for capturing strokes)

I'm very much hoping HTC releases a public interface for multitouch on the HD2, actually, since while we're probably going to wait for more information on Windows Mobile 7 before we do a full-on overhaul of the Pleco interface on WM to use finger-sized controls, in the handwriting recognizer at least it would be quite reasonable for us to add support for a larger / multitouch-friendly interface in a minor update. (as we already attempted to do in 2.0.3 on Palm OS for the sake of the Pre, though that was just larger and didn't also support multitouch)

 

[thph2006]

Mike, Now that the iPhone app is out can you commit to a desktop schedule?

 

[mikelove]

Ask me again in a few weeks - early iPhone sales / bugginess / general feedback are going to dictate how much more work we need to put in on that before we can start spending time on desktop work. (though just as we continued updating the Palm/WM software while working on iPhone, we'll continue updating our WM/iPhone software while working on the desktop version)

 

[charnobo]

How is the desktop version looking now ?

Hope for a universal build for mac

 

[mikelove]

Still not sure how long exactly the flashcard module will take, but hopefully we'll have a better idea about desktops once that's finished.

 

[ciaocibai]

I think you've probably earned yourself a holiday by the time the flashcard module is out, but I wouldn't say no to a Mac version either! Let's see what happens with the tablet too - if its running the iPhone OS, that'd about do the job for me.

 

[mikelove]

A tablet version might replace a desktop version for a lot of people, actually, though a lot of that is going to depend on pricing - if the iPad/iSlate is priced in in the same range as your average netbook ($400-$500) we may put off developing a desktop version for a while, or at least a desktop Mac version, but if it's in the somewhat-sillier $1k range I'd be inclined to wait a while until it gets out of the early-adopter phase before investing serious effort into it.

 

[thph2006]

It might be worth considering that many of us have waited patiently for quite a long time, and at least in my case based a purchase decision on the fact that it was implied multiple times that a desktop version was planned for as soon as the current hot project was completed. Unfortunately the waiting has now spanned years and once again it looks like there is yet another new hot product which will apparently bump the desktop version in priority. Maybe at this point it would be better to simply state that a desktop version is not in the works and there is currently no plan to do one rather than risk alienating customers by continually pushing it out.

 

[mikelove]

I'm sorry you feel that way, but each of the "hot projects" to date has been pretty much essential to Pleco's continued survival. Like it or not, if all we had now was a Windows desktop version, a Windows mobile version, and no iPhone version ready or in the pipeline, we'd be in a lot of trouble; everyone would be expressing astonishment at the fact that we weren't supporting iPhone and predicting our imminent demise / fade into irrelevance. The rate at which manufacturers continue to introduce new mobile operating systems is, frankly, astonishing, and if we'd known the market was going to keep shifting this quickly we never would have even contemplated a desktop version.

That being said, the same licensing imperatives I've alluded to that require that we release a desktop version sometime in 2010 still apply, so tablet or no, if we don't release a Windows desktop version of Pleco by the end of the year it's going to cost us a whole bunch of money. Which means we almost certainly will release one. "a while" was a poor choice of words - if the Apple tablet represents anything more than a minor detour from desktop development, we'd put that off until after finishing the desktop version, since it seems doubtful there'll be enough tablets in circulation to have a meaningful impact on our sales until Christmas.

But at the same time, if pushing the desktop version back by another month or two allows us to be on the tablet from the day it's released, that seems like it might be a worthwhile tradeoff; the marketing value of being among the first crop of tablet-optimized apps could be pretty significant, we continue to regret having been so late to the iPhone game since it allowed a bunch of other products to get more established than we'd like them to be. And after all, the prospects for making money initially on the desktop version aren't that great either - most sales would be to existing Pleco customers who would expect either a free copy or at the very least a discount that pretty much ate up all of the money we weren't paying out in royalties. After a little time had passed and we'd gotten it established in schools etc it could do a lot better, but the initial prospects aren't too spectacular.

 

[mikelove]

I'm curious, though - is your main interest in a desktop version flashcard / user dictionary sync / editing, or did you buy Pleco specifically wanting to be able to get the same dictionaries in a desktop version too (an information-everywhere sort of thing)?

 

[mfcb]

hi mike, even though there might be all sorts of wishes, most of us want a desktop pleco to have a companion to the mobile. i dont insist on the availability of all my (mobile) dictionaries in the desktop version, but i want a comfortable way to organize and edit my own db's and flashcards. many other features (like adding cards while using IE/firefox/any-other-available-browser, automated backup, funky audio-features like speech recognition, ...) would be stuff, i would even consider to invest some additional money in... :wink: