Will the Pocket PC version be ready as announced?

mai

秀才
Hi Mike,

I am about to switch to Pocket PC soon. So I am very much interested if you guys will have a first version of PlecoDict ready by September this year or not.

Please don't get me wrong, I now how hard coding especially for the Palm can be, but so far you have been amazingly wrong about any publishing dates ;)

And can you already say something about the estimated hardware requirements? Will a standard 400 MHz PPCwith 64 MB RAM be as fast as a T3?

Thanks,
mai
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well, given our history with release dates I really don't want to make any firmer a commitment to September than we've already made, but in general September is a pretty generous estimate. We predicted (correctly, it turns out) that the worst-case release date for PlecoDict for Palm would be at the end of April, estimated the development time for the Pocket PC preview release at 2 months, then (since everything seems to take twice as long as we predict) doubled that estimate to 4 months.

It only took us 6 months to get from zero to the first Preview Release of PlecoDict, and this time we're just porting it to Pocket PC, so far less code will need to be written from scratch. Plus, Pocket PC is actually easier to develop for than Palm OS in many respects; for example, it includes built-in support for Unicode text, so our Chinese font/field system (which is comprised of many thousands of lines of code on Palm) is completely unnecessary on Pocket PC and hence doesn't need to be ported or rewritten.

So I'm not promising anything more than what we've already said, but I really do think we'll make our September 1st date.

I don't really have any idea about estimated hardware requirements, since we haven't started writing code yet... about the only thing I know is that it will require Pocket PC 2003 or later, because it's too much work to support PPC '02. But certainly it would be a priority for us to get PlecoDict running well on a 400 MHz processor, since that's what most mainstream Pocket PC's ship with.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
Power PC version or no?

Mike,

I've switched to the XDA 02 from the Palm V.

I really, really, REALLY miss my pleco software.

When will the Smartphone version (Windows CE) be ready please?

Li Jun Ming
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
September 1st is still our official statement, though whether that will be a finished version or simply a usable beta remains to be seen.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
Hi Mike,

will you offer some kind of free cross upgrade to the PPC platform? I bought PlecoDict when it was still in Beta and never got the chance to use the final version on Palm due to a neccessary switch to a chinese Dopod 818 PPC.

BTW, I've always been a faithful Palm user (since the IIIe) but I'm frankly amazed at the ease of use of the PPC.

mai
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It won't be free, I'm afraid, but there should be a generous discount at least. There are some license fees we'll need to pay again for Pocket PC crossgrades, plus we do have to cover our development costs, but we're certainly not planning to make you pay full price again.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
alpha testing

Anytime frame for when you are going to start writing code for the Pocket PC?

I was wondering when you if you would consider me for testing when you get some usable code written for the pocket pc. I have a Axim x50v, and the current dictionaries aren't sufficient for my level of chinese. I don't mind having to hard reset my pda, so if you even get to the alpha stage please let me know.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We're starting work on it next week (in fact my own Axim x50v is arriving tomorrow :D). As far as alpha-testing, there are quite a lot of people who've similarly said that they would gladly put up with crashes and such if it would get them the software as soon as possible, so if we have something usable in July or August we'll probably put it out as a Preview Release much like we did with PlecoDict on Palm.
 

sfrrr

状元
I too am waiting, waiting for the PPC version. I bought a used Cli? so I can use PlecoDict in the meantime, but I am getting tired of using such a tired, old operating system.

There IS an upside, though. Maybe by the time Mike et al. release a usable beta/preview/whatever, there will be new PPC models out to take advantage of all the PlecoDict for the PPC's new features. :p
 

dawu

Member
@mikelove

since I am contemplating of what pda I should purchase to run plecodict, I was wondering if there will be any features in the ppc version of plecodict that won't be on the palm version and vice versa?
correct me if I am wrong, in one of your comments you said that its easier to write ppc code. so is this a hint on where your priorities are gonna be in the future? or am I just reading to much between the lines? I am just not sure if I should get a palm now or wait until the ppc version of plecodict comes out. maybe you can help me out on that. thanks in advance and keep up the good work! jia you :lol:
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
There aren't likely to be any significant new features, but there may be some improvements on Pocket PC simply because it has a lot more built-in functionality than Palm OS. For example, since Windows CE supports scalable fonts, it should be possible to chose an arbitrary font size instead of being stuck picking between Small and Large. And with ClearType turned on the characters would probably look a little sharper than they do on Palm.

Another area you might see improvement on Pocket PC is Instant Access: since Pocket PCs can run multiple programs at the same time, PlecoDict can stay loaded in the background, reducing start-up time and making Instant Access a little more Instant.

But aside from OS-related things like that, the two platforms should be pretty much identical. When we release updates with new features, they'll probably come out on Palm OS first, simply because (for the near future at least) we'll have a lot more customers using Palms than Pocket PCs. With all the people who've run out and bought Palms specifically to run our software, it would be downright mean-spirited if we were to suddenly decide to put Palm OS on the back-burner and give Pocket PC users the first crack at the new stuff.

And while I'm not 100% sure about this yet, since we now have licenses to release all of our current dictionaries on Pocket PC as well as Palm OS, it looks like the Pocket PC version will use the same database format as the Palm OS one (the same exact .pdb files, in fact), so as far as new and updated dictionaries, the two platforms should be completely identical.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
Update

Any news on how the coding is going for the Pocket PC? And how are you enjoying your Axim x50v? Make sure to update the rom to A03.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It's proceeding pretty well, we've already got the database engine working and hence it's possible even now to enter a search query and retrieve results from the dictionary.

We're still making some decisions about the interface - the trickiest issue is what to do with the toolbar and Input Field area. The convention on Pocket PC seems to be to put toolbar buttons at the bottom of the screen (or in unoccupied space on the menu bar) - in general I think I prefer them at the top, the UI metaphor works a little better if the input is above the definition text, but this may look a little weird with the Pocket PC title bar.

So what we'll probably do is make this yet another optional setting - let users put the toolbar on the top or at the bottom of the screen, add an "Exit" button the option to show or hide the (rather space-consuming) title bar, and let the toolbar be put above or below the Input Field line. Handwriting/radical input will probably be implemented as SIP's, though we'll keep the fullscreen option available too. If people like being able to have the toolbar at the bottom of the screen it'll be trivial to add this functionality to the Palm version.
 

sfrrr

状元
I'm drooling, I'm drooling. Hurry up with this thing, will ya? (Although I gotta admit that PD on a Life Drive is a joy. Still, there's no question I'll use the PPC version as soon as it arrives.

Question: can you design it so that everything (or everything but the main program) goes onto an SD or CF card?

And, yes, I'd expect the interface to be the hardest part. But that's what you have beta testers for, right?

Sandra
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We haven't actually tried putting everything on an SD card yet, but as far as Windows CE is concerned there's no difference between internal memory and an SD card (they're just different directories on the same file system, accessed the same way) so I wouldn't think there would be any problems.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
Update

Can we get our weekly update on how the pocket pc code is coming along?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I have to do weekly updates now? Yeesh...

We're making progress on the interface, we're using the built-in HTML renderer to display dictionary entries which will make it marvelously easy for us to add things like hyperlinks and magnified headwords in a future update. And there's a "scan all directories for pdb files" function built into Pocket PC, so assuming the performance is decent we're planning to use that (with a secondary check to make sure they're PlecoDict files) instead of forcing you to set up specific directories to store files. (if it's too slow we'll just use it the first time you run the software and save out the relevant directories)

There's a bit of a question now about editable databases (flashcards and custom dictionaries) - it's not really feasible to leave them in PDB format, since the Pocket PC file system has a less-than-enlightened approach to inserting data in the middle of a file, so we're probably going to use a different format for them (most likely the built-in CE database system). Character magnification is also a little tricky - drawing the magnified characters is very easy since we have scalable fonts, but the only interface Pocket PC offers to detect when a character is tapped on is hyperlinks and we're not sure if making every single character in a definition a link would be feasible performance-wise. (especially problematic when we release a Chinese-Chinese dictionary) So we may end up implementing magnification with a toolbar button in 1.0 and then in 1.1 or 1.2 make each word (but not each character) a hyperlink to the corresponding entry and offer the option of showing every entry with a magnified headword.
 

markilou

Member
mikelove said:
Handwriting/radical input will probably be implemented as SIP's, though we'll keep the fullscreen option available too.

Gakusoft's KinHanzi http://www.gakusoft.com may be of interest to look at for this particular question if you haven't already done so. I know we are talking about VERY different applications but I think the stroke order & character recognition they have is... simple and nice. They have a 15 days trial version available.

Ah, and as many others here I'll be more than pleased to betatest even if this implies committing to buying the final product before it gets finalised. Where do we submit our contacts ? :p
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We're looking at doing something like that in PlecoDict 2.0, actually - replace the "dumb" edit box in the current flashcard system with a smarter one which matched up characters and tested you on stroke order. Long-term, if we ever develop a courseware product it would be a great thing to add to that - Chinese teachers who could previously only guess at whether or not their students were using correct stroke order could now add a dozen PDA-administered character writing questions to every test. (though I've had some teachers who were eerily good at guessing - I suppose it depends a lot on the neatness of one's handwriting)
 
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