Palm webOS and Pleco

[Dr.Grace]

Pinch-zoom does work in a pinch (sorry) but it's inconvenient to use often. I keep the window sizes fixed and now use the alternate key controls to move up and down in the lists, rather than trying to scroll.

[mikelove]

If you were to pick, say, 3 parts of the Pleco interface you'd most like tweaked to work better on the Pre, what would they be?

[Dr.Grace]

You mean within Classic, or as a potential native app? For the PalmOS app within Classic, the most annoying thing is that it's hard to tap on very small characters, e.g. in the definition window for the English-Chinese dictionaries, and even harder to select a group of two characters so they can be moved to the query line. Scrolling is the next most annoying thing, and of course resizing the definition window, as Benzhen noted. Character input is not the best, but it's been usable. I guess, from what you've written, that the drawing response can't be improved much within Classic. Of course, Classic itself is a bit of a problem because it's fairly slow to load, unstable and something of a resource hog. However, I imagine that Classic will be improved in time. As of WebOS 1.3.1 it's been better behaved for me (although many other people report that it's been very unstable, but those problems should be sorted out with the 1.3.5 WebOS update.) Obviously a native app would be much better. Also, I would love to be able to search for characters that use various parts, as you've implemented on the iPhone app.

[Dr.Grace]

OK, Mike, now that Palm has announced the Plugin development kit (PDK), to be released in March, that will allow C/C++ code, is there any chance for a native Pleco version for the Pre?

http://developer.palm.com/index.php?Itemid=20&id=1850&option=com_content&view=article

[mikelove]

Maybe, we'd have to see that development kit. Though webOS' sales and market share numbers are kind of discouraging at the moment, to be honest.

[FengLeien]

really? i had the impression the Pre was doing well, its all over tv adds and stuff..

i just checked out the Pre from a friend of mine and i really like it! It would be really nice, if there were a native Pre Pleco! im really thinking about getting one and pleco is the major point of argument for me. it was the reason i got a touch-phone (winmo) in the first place and it still remains almost the only reason not to change back to a normal cellphone, as i have to admit that i dont like very much how windows mobile complicates easy processes. Pre on the other hand makes things so much easier than on any other (except maybe iphone) device..

as for the handwriting problems on PRE.. i just saw the iphone demo, were fingerwriting seems to work just like a charme! why does it not for pre, as the touchscreen is also very good (compared to, say, the Samsung Omnia WinMo, which is what im having at the moment and it drives me nuts!!!).
so is this big difference due to the fact, that the pleco version running on pre is the normal palm version which was designed for stylus intead of finger? for example, on the Omnia i can hardly do anything without the stylus, it likes to ignore my finger..

[Dr.Grace]

Maybe, we'd have to see that development kit. Though webOS' sales and market share numbers are kind of discouraging at the moment, to be honest.

Right now that's true. But app sales will improve, now that Verizon and ATT have announced that they'll carry the Pre, and eventually paid apps will be distributed in other countries. Also, the market for the Pre should improve as more developers release apps, which in turn will encourage more app development.

Also, maybe after the PDK is released you'll find that it's not TOO difficult to port the app over to the Pre, since you have the foundation established on the iPhone.

[mikelove]

FengLelen - I like the Pre too, it's just still too early to tell whether it'll survive / mature enough to be worth developing for. Palm is advertising it plenty, but as far as market share or "mindshare" it's still pretty tiny compared to iPhone.

At the moment, stroke capture actually seems to be iffy relative to other capacitive-touchscreen devices like iPhone, so at least until they get that working more smoothly it'd be tough to offer a decent handwriting recognizer in a webOS version of Pleco; it's theoretically possible to do handwriting well on those screens, as our iPhone software demonstrates, but in practice there's still a lot of variation between how smoothly individual devices / platforms interpret finger movements. (see the widely-discussed study of this at http://labs.moto.com/diy-touchscreen-analysis/)

Dr.Grace - sure, sales will improve and it's certainly possible the Pre will reach a point both sales- and maturity-wise where it'd make sense to put Pleco on it, we just aren't sure enough of that yet. It may end up presenting the same sorts of problems for porting that Android does, even with the PDK.

[ipsi]

Looks like the PDK (Plugin Development Kit) for doing C/C++ development is now available: http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2000&Itemid=333. Looks like it will be about as easy to develop a GUI application for WebOS PDK as it would for Android (maybe a little easier).

[mikelove]

That's promising, but Palm has to show they have a lot more staying power before we develop anything specifically for webOS. If, however, this and the Android NDK start to overlap to the point that we could essentially develop a single app that targets both, that would certainly improve the Pleco prospects on both platforms.

[radioman]

Just saw this....


StyleTap Platform for iPhone Now Available
Posted: 22 Mar 2010 09:30 PM PDT

StyleTap Platform for iPhone® is now available for download and purchase at the StyleTap website!
StyleTap Platform for iPhone Now Available

Posted: 22 Mar 2010 09:30 PM PDT
StyleTap Platform for iPhone® is now available for download and purchase at the StyleTap website!

We are very happy to finally announce the immediate availability of a full implementation of StyleTap Platform that runs on Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices.

StyleTap Platform for iPhone supports standard features that include TCP/IP networking, audio recording and playback, the ability to use the multi-gigabyte storage as a virtual memory card, and cut/copy/paste of text between native and Palm OS applications. It also provides innovative capabilities such as giving Palm OS applications access to the iPhone GPS by providing location information in standard GPS NMEA format.

With this release, StyleTap-compatible applications can now run on all Palm OS devices, all Windows Mobile devices, all Symbian smartphones, and now on Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices – more than any other type of mobile applications.

See the news release for the full details.

[mikelove]

Not too relevant for our purposes since we already have iPhone software (would have been better if they'd developed StyleTap for Android ), but I guess if you really really want the not-available-in-our-iPhone-software Oxford Concise dictionary this would be a way to get that.

[Dr.Grace]

For anyone using Pleco within Classic, I'd just like to mention that there's a new patch available in Preware that reduces the "drag radius" from 25 to 10 pixels. This greatly improves the responsiveness of the character handwriting screen in Pleco, as well as improving other kinds of controls on the Pre. With this patch installed, the characters I draw in Pleco actually look like Chinese characters, rather than strange scribbles.

[mikelove]

Interesting - it'd nice if Palm would add this as an option officially, or at least if the makers of Classic would enable it in-app.

[Dr.Grace]

I don't know how likely they are to do that. They have probably tried to optimize this parameter for tapping on icons, links etc. The reduced radius makes this a little more demanding (I often have to tap on an icon or menu item twice) . It's a trade-off. But I think it would be great to be able to set this value via a webOS preference.