Windows 8
- Thread starter thph2006
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cjbarth said:
Honestly, that's never been a problem for us - usually on any given new OS there'll be half a dozen major limitations / bugs that the manufacturer can't help with which either require an elaborate workaround or just flat-out dropping the feature in question, but for anything fixable we can get all we need from StackOverflow.
Raesu said:
Well there's a personal issue here too - Pleco is doing plenty well on two platforms, adding a third means more work for me (even if somebody else is doing the bulk of the programming I'm still the architect / designer / Guy Who Has To Explain What This 5 Year Old Function Does), and as the father of a 7-week-old daughter I really really don't want to add yet another thing to take me away from her right now.
I'm very much hoping that the big iOS update will be out by the time she starts to do more than just loll around staring at things, because after that update things should be relatively calm for the next year or two - not that there won't be updates, there'll be lots of updates, but they should be smaller / more frequent and hence less stressful and easier to manage.
But basically, unless Windows Phone gets to a point market-share-wise where not supporting it is going to jeopardize my ability to take care of my daughter, it's going to be very difficult to persuade me to take it on.
gabor said:
Sorry, just to double-check (from your post history): your main bug complaint involved the keyboard being blank, correct? That one had to wait for a big update (since fixing it involves breaking compatibility with a lot of old devices) but it should definitely be fixed in 2.3.
Its not that, I bought your product mostly for editing my own dictionaries. I opened a new thread called "Some ideas..." Almost a year ago, where I introduced both bugs (one example: mistakenly clicking on Switch Language loses several minutes of work editing a new entry) and ideas concerning user dictionary editing (which I won't mention one by one now). To most of those ideas and bugreports you then answered, that the whole thing (user dict editing) is going to be redone in the next big update. I basically stopped working on my dictionaries then, because it was really cumbersome and not at all what I expected. I still use Pleco for reading, but in order to use Pleco as my main tool for translating, I really need the user dict feature to be reliable and usable. I think I am by far not the only user looking forward that. Pleco is a great piece of software, and that feature currently is just not good enough. I already have over 10.000 entries, but I plan to edit many thousands more, once this feature works somewhat better. I am quite patient though, so no hurry, this is just a reminder, so it does not get completely forgotten.mikelove said:
Killroy123
Member
Wanted to put forth a second on a Windows 8 port or Windows generally. I know feasibility is the main issue here; you want to reserve time for your family. However, I think the potential to reap a large market is huge even if the focus isn't strictly on portability. With respect to desktops, there is no Chinese dictionary program with any semblance of dominance. The only currently is Wenlin and needs a serious updating. The lack of the features in comparison to Pleco makes it a no contest as to what one would choose. The thought of a Surface Pro with Pleco makes my mouth water and would make all of the heavy translation work I have to do so much easier.
Never did I think I'd be hoping for the best for Microsoft. I hope soon in the future you will change your mind.
Never did I think I'd be hoping for the best for Microsoft. I hope soon in the future you will change your mind.
Its not that, I bought your product mostly for editing my own dictionaries. I opened a new thread called "Some ideas..." Almost a year ago, where I introduced both bugs (one example: mistakenly clicking on Switch Language loses several minutes of work editing a new entry) and ideas concerning user dictionary editing (which I won't mention one by one now). To most of those ideas and bugreports you then answered, that the whole thing (user dict editing) is going to be redone in the next big update. I basically stopped working on my dictionaries then, because it was really cumbersome and not at all what I expected. I still use Pleco for reading, but in order to use Pleco as my main tool for translating, I really need the user dict feature to be reliable and usable. I think I am by far not the only user looking forward that. Pleco is a great piece of software, and that feature currently is just not good enough. I already have over 10.000 entries, but I plan to edit many thousands more, once this feature works somewhat better. I am quite patient though, so no hurry, this is just a reminder, so it does not get completely forgotten.
(sorry I didn't see this one sooner)
Yes, those are definitely going to get improved - now that we've got our handwriting input system working as a more official system keyboard we can dispense with the separate editing screen and let you edit everything about an entry on one page, which should streamline the process considerably.
What would a Surface Pro with Pleco do that an iPad won't, aside from support a mouse?
To be honest, I don't view "desktops" as having much of a future outside of specialized, performance-intensive work like graphical design / app development / scientific modeling / etc - the vast majority of users are very close to being able to replace their primary computer with an iPad. And for Pleco specifically I'm having a hard time seeing what we could offer on a desktop that we can't also offer on an iPad - there's certainly no feature in Wenlin that wouldn't work equally well on a tablet if they ever decided to make a tablet version.
So if we view tablets (or something tablet-like) as the future then the question simply becomes whether or not to buy into Microsoft's ecosystem, and I'm skeptical of its prospects at the moment. Linux was never really a practical desktop OS for end users, but Android is - tablets not made by Apple have had their prices cut so aggressively that there's not really any way for Microsoft to compete if they still want to make some money off of software licensing (and it seems rather essential to their business model that they do).
Killroy123
Member
From my standpoint, Pleco is the first success at providing an all around solution for Chinese language learning for non-Chinese students on any computer. Other related programs pale in comparison to the functionality, design, and ability of Pleco hands down. For example, I need to use Wenlin and ZDT at the same time to provide an even remotely close solution that Pleco can offer. Even then, its cumbersome and limiting in many ways. That being said, my situation prevents me from adopting Pleco because my research field does not use iOS or Android at all. Nearly all of my work requires software not ported over to the iOS environment and so I have no reason to migrate completely. I simply cannot justify adopting a 400+ GBP piece of hardware just so I have access to A program. Even if we were discussing an Android tablet, there is still the problem of using it to assist work on a different computer.
My main reason for putting my 2 cents as to a Windows port is because of your competitive advantage. Pleco in its current form beats all by a country mile. There is a huge well of opportunity for a desktop solution because of this; researchers and others chained to a windows desktop. I understand your general skepticism at Windows mobile prospects given the last few years of Apple successes and Windows mis-steps. If you see Pleco as a mobile only solution, then I would agree that a port doesn't make economic sense at this time. However, I'm not as sold on your arguments regarding the future of desktops. While mobile computing is the fastest growing portion of the market, it really is a distinct portion of the market. Desktops have a place in computing just not on the level of prominence it did have. Even if that is reduced to 30% of the market...its still 30% of the market that lacks any real competition for Chinese language programs. Overall, I think most businesses would agree that mobile computing is not a justifiable desktop replacement. This is expressed quite clearly with the criticisms leveled at the Surface Pro as its "not a tablet, not a laptop, not a desktop"; the industry sees each area as completely different. I think that having Pleco cover all bases would be a great way to balance out any risk regarding the future of various setups.
Perhaps a solution would be to create....a Windows 7 port? No idea if that would be an option but if it made things simpler to convert I'd happily plunk down cash to help since I'm not changing to Windows 8 anytime soon.
Anyways, really keep up the great work. I'm always jealous when I see my classmates get to whip out Pleco during class to quickly categorize a Chinese word. I just need something like Pleco on my desktop so I could speed my research work that way...
It has to be a long-term thing for it to make sense for us - bringing Pleco to a new platform takes at least a year (and really 2 before we're happy with it) and involves spending a whole bunch of up-front money on licenses. And my feeling is that over the next few years, tablets and desktops are going to start to converge and an awful lot of "desktop" apps will be nothing but modified / ported tablet apps - already happening on Mac, a tremendous portion of the new Mac software coming out now is software ported over from iOS. So a desktop platform without a successful tablet platform to go along with it is going to find itself with a severely limited software catalog.
If Apple announces that they're merging iOS and Mac OS together at this summer's WWDC, we'll almost certainly develop a Mac desktop version of Pleco based on that; even without it, we might even do one anyway if they bring a few more iOS APIs to Mac OS and it becomes a little easier to support both. And if Google continues adding desktop-y APIs to Android and we start seeing Android-based PCs show up (for $100 less than whatever the Windows equivalent is) we might consider supporting those too. But both of those would be far, far easier for us to support than Windows, and frankly at the moment I'd say they both have better long-term sales prospects too.
So my issue is more with Windows than with desktops. I can see some value in a desktop version of Pleco, but not enough value to justify supporting an OS without a strong mobile presence; to really make business sense, a desktop version of Pleco would have to share most of its code with a mobile version of Pleco.
I think whether or not a desktop edition makes sense probably depends a lot on individual users' use cases. A lot of the people who post here seem to make a lot of use of Pleco for language learning and review -- flashcards and the like -- for which I don't know how much of a benefit a desktop version would provide.
I tend to use Pleco more as a dictionary to support my day job (translation), and since I do that almost exclusively at a computer, it'd be very handy to be able to Alt+Tab into Pleco for quick lookups. I generally use a combination of Wenlin and the built-in OS X Dictionary.app (with custom dictionaries like 汉语大词典 and 康熙字典 to make it suitable for use by grown-ups) for this at the moment. Having a desktop version of Pleco that could talk to web browsers, sync custom dictionary entries, etc. would make life a lot easier as well, but even a straight-up dictionary app would be really nice.
I tend to use Pleco more as a dictionary to support my day job (translation), and since I do that almost exclusively at a computer, it'd be very handy to be able to Alt+Tab into Pleco for quick lookups. I generally use a combination of Wenlin and the built-in OS X Dictionary.app (with custom dictionaries like 汉语大词典 and 康熙字典 to make it suitable for use by grown-ups) for this at the moment. Having a desktop version of Pleco that could talk to web browsers, sync custom dictionary entries, etc. would make life a lot easier as well, but even a straight-up dictionary app would be really nice.
Well that's certainly an argument for it, but it seems like it might be less work to simply come up with a "translator mode" in our iPad app; give you a split-screen with your Chinese document on the left (now that we're supporting just about every file format you can think of, along with a much more robust version of web page "live mode") and an editing screen on the right. We've had a few requests for this anyway and it seems like it would really add a lot of value to the document reader module.
Tablets are not going to replace laptops for one extremely important reason: I/O (input/output). The input is one of the biggest problems for a tablet. Just try typing 40 words per minute on a touch-screen. Most tablet input is slow hunt-n-peck. Screen size is also another factor. I use a 17" monitor, and when at home, I have a second monitor connected up that is a vertical-24" monitor. Tablets won't have that ability for a while, especially if they want to retain the ability for long-time portability without recharges.
Laptops also have something else that Pleco and Wenlin need to keep their eyes on: Touchscreens are increasingly showing up on them. Because of this fact, it will not be uncommon to see most laptops above $500 in the near future with touchscreens; large touchscreen prices are dropping and dropping fast. Those softwares that can take advantage of touchscreen capabilities and keyboard/mouse/touch-pad capabilities will be the future winners.
I don't know what kind of profits Pleco is getting, but it may be worthwhile to get a Windows/Linux programmer on board. The future is only minutes away...
In other words, my biggest argument for a laptop port is because of hardware changes, not OS changes. And in my case, most of the times I have recommended operating systems was because of the applications that work best for the user's needs, not loyalty to Linux, OS-X, Solaris, or Microsoft.
Pleco has become my most used tool on the tablet, by far. Wenlin on the laptop, for many of the same reasons. I now rarely use my laptop without my tablet, because of the other features unique to Pleco. To me, the OS is secondary to the most important app I use. What would be the advantage of a laptop version of Pleco? It is because of the dictionary capabilities, that would make reading website and e-reader books so much easier!
Laptops also have something else that Pleco and Wenlin need to keep their eyes on: Touchscreens are increasingly showing up on them. Because of this fact, it will not be uncommon to see most laptops above $500 in the near future with touchscreens; large touchscreen prices are dropping and dropping fast. Those softwares that can take advantage of touchscreen capabilities and keyboard/mouse/touch-pad capabilities will be the future winners.
I don't know what kind of profits Pleco is getting, but it may be worthwhile to get a Windows/Linux programmer on board. The future is only minutes away...
In other words, my biggest argument for a laptop port is because of hardware changes, not OS changes. And in my case, most of the times I have recommended operating systems was because of the applications that work best for the user's needs, not loyalty to Linux, OS-X, Solaris, or Microsoft.
Pleco has become my most used tool on the tablet, by far. Wenlin on the laptop, for many of the same reasons. I now rarely use my laptop without my tablet, because of the other features unique to Pleco. To me, the OS is secondary to the most important app I use. What would be the advantage of a laptop version of Pleco? It is because of the dictionary capabilities, that would make reading website and e-reader books so much easier!
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There is little difference between a laptop and a desktop these days, unless somebody is into extremely-high level graphics work or gaming. (Screen size is the main difference. I also like the Microsoft natural-keyboard, which unfortunately I had to forsake when I went to a laptop.) Basic business needs require very little of the CPU now in todays' hardware. People who would use Pleco are more into the low-CPU demand usages of computer software. Word processing, perhaps the most common use of a computer, requires less than 10% of the normal CPU for even the lowest level computers on the market today. Most Pleco users would be doing their work in conjunction with word processing.
What I'm getting at, is that every laptop computer out there is mobile computing. (My gosh, I got my Osborne II in 1979 because it was mobile computing!)