ciaocibai said:
Fair enough. I can't say I've read that much on a 3.0 release of Android - although I've got a bit more reason to look into it now I guess. I'll be curious to see what the do in terms of UI, and I've even heard rumours that they are going to come out with something iTunes like to compliment it - wonder if a doubletwist acquisition might be on the horizon?
I think that would be foolish at this point - it's technically possible to do everything cloud-based nowadays, and there are tremendous philosophical and business reasons for Google to do so; the last thing they want to do is tether Android devices to desktops more when Apple's moving in precisely the opposite direction (if rumors of their offering a cloud-based iTunes are true, and honestly there's not much else that could explain that enormous new data center they're building).
sui.generis said:
Honestly I'm a little shocked. I fully anticipated you'd start dev'ing android once the NDK had everything you needed. Glad to hear SWIG came through. Now I really have to start finding a satisfactory successor to my TP2 These days even HTC is taken with 4 line keyboards. Pretty much only the Samsung Galaxy Pro comes close to my standards, and I think it's only for Sprint (not on my top 3 list).
There might be others soon - I think I've seen a few pictures of something from HTC; the main worry is that Android apps aren't really tested / optimized around square screens yet, so even if the resizable interface layout engines might theoretically accommodate them it's likely that a lot of apps won't work. And may not be updated if square-screen devices don't take off; that exact same thing happened on Windows Mobile and many apps were actually never optimized for square screens (Pleco's doing so made us something of an anomaly, in fact).
sui.generis said:
I've been a customer for so long I can't even remember when I first bought it, and pleco is hilarious about release dates. I remember the traditional small developer's overly optimistic release date scandals, the we won't do release date scandals (but then we can't resist so we redo the overly optimistic release date scandal), and the darned if you don't scandal. I mean hilarious in a good way. Your approach has always been very customer responsive, even to the detriment of your own hair growth/coloration (you have to completely bald by now, right?). That's part of the reason I'll be looking for yet more content to buy once the Android version comes out with (potentially) another generous platform transfer policy. The Classical Chinese dictionary is right up my alley.
The free platform transfers are almost a lock, we're just hedging a bit because 1) Apple could do something that makes iPhone-to-Android transfers impossible (such as, say, updating their distribution agreement to expressly forbid them), 2) Google could do something that makes them impossible (locking down more phones to be Android-Market-only with stricter rules on activation of outside purchases than apple has), or 3) a licensor could complicate transfers for their particular licensed content (as happened with Oxford on iPhone). None of those things have happened yet, and none are very likely, but we need to leave ourselves a little wiggle room just in case.
sui.generis said:
For the record, example-heavy tech and engineering lexicons or legal lexicons would grab my attention too.
Any specific recommendations on those?
sui.generis said:
I love the fact that you're selling it through your store! For those devices, including some tablets that don't qualify hardware-wise to run the market, that's great news, and I hope more developers start at least cross-selling from their own location. I want to pay my carrier a percentage on the sale for your hard work like I want a hole in my head. Kudos on attracting engadget's (moth-like) attention (span) too, I hope it translates into some serious sales.
Oh absolutely - I'd like to believe / hope that interest in Android would evaporate rapidly in the event that Google took a less permissive stance towards non-Market apps, so hopefully we can get back to the good old days of keeping the whole price (minus 3-4% or so in credit card fees) for all of our Android sales. And certainly there seem to be quite a lot of Android devices that don't support the Market too. Heck, that might even include one of ours; once our Android software is finished we plan to reach out to hardware manufacturers in China and see what it would cost to make some simple non-phone Android devices that were Pleco-branded / preloaded with a custom Pleco Android ROM; we explored that years ago on WM, but when WM started to go into its death spiral we abandoned the idea.