Google Android
- Thread starter westmeadboy
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RobRedbeard
进士
mfcb said:
I'm a developer too, and it really matters how much pointer math he used, how much direct memory access was used, and whether the nature of the file system access provided by Silverlight would be adequate for him to implement this application. Windows Phone 7 requires development in C#, which as Mike pointed out is a managed code system. The WP7 platform is a love child of .NET and Silverlight -- two technologies that make client end database software development a joy and a breeze. However, viability for a database backbone is yet unexplored. Mike is most definitely doing this sort of exploration now.
WP7 and Iphone are totally consumer systems. They are locked down and boarded up. They offer about as much to explore and tweak as your DVD player. Android is just as consumer friendly, but offers more to the brainy crowd who want it. It "has it all" so to speak. It is also most suited for Pleco because it's the only newgen OS that allows ALL of Pleco's current WM features. Thus, it should be the successor for WM Pleco users.
As Mike mentioned there is, in theory, potential for balkanization in the Android world. However, I think this is true for any device ecosystem and no truer anywhere than the PC. I understand the nature of Mike's argument though, but it may just mean limiting support to core devices if necessary, not poo pooing the whole platform. Still, if carriers damage the compatibility of Android apps they are undermining the value of their devices. Right now marketing strategies across the board are touting apps as a measure of a device's strength.
I believe longevity should be a bigger concern. Even if we move to x86 processors in 2 years, people aren't going to run straight Linux on their phones. Android's processor agnostic approach means it will be among the first OS available on x86 mobile devices. Mike suggested that it might end up merely an interface option but I don't think so. Primarily because it has created apps of a quality far beyond most K and Gnome apps. There's also a size/weight rubicon for mobile devices that's keeping their screens at around 4" and Android works SO well in that space. With immense system power, tons of apps, and endless extensibility, Android could be poised to supplant desktop OS's even should x86 get mobile power efficiency friendly.
With regard to WP7, it's a complete gamble whether or not WP7 will even get off the ground let alone develop any applications or user base. As it is 0% compatible with the Windows Mobile platform I believe it should be viewed as the introduction of a new platform, not as a successor to Windows Mobile. Right now the question for WP7 isn't longevity, it's viability. An Android version could be written and finished in the time it will take to see if WP7 gains widespread adoption.
I think Android's framework of applications providing services to each other creates the platform most suited for Pleco. I read the newspaper online (All of Tianjin's newspapers are fully available in text online) using my WM phone and when I need to, I use Pleco instant access to look-up words, or send sections to Pleco Reader. This seems to be better supported in Android than even Windows Mobile 6.x! As a central design feature we can expect future extension to this ability not repeal of it. WP7 has removed a great deal of Windows Mobile's ability to do things like this.
WP7 will also ship without key features like the ability to highlight text and act upon it. Don't expect that feature soon either -- as Microsoft has opted for a completely different approach. They plan to automatically identify useful information on apps and pages and make applications able to service that. This is great for e-mail addresses and phone numbers, but what about selected Chinese text. Are they going to recognize every instance of Chinese text and send it all to Pleco? Even if at some point they do implement standard highlighting, and applications can plug into it, this is an unknown potential event.
mfcb said:
Haha, I forgot about this, and I actually own and use an HTC Shift! I guess I stopped thinking of it as a potential Pleco device when I found out that there was no way for the WM side of it to access its SD card. Oh well, you make a great point.
Mike, please consider getting a "light" yet offline based version of Pleco at least out for us to start beta testing.
Thanks,
Rob
mikelove said:Interesting - any particular reason you didn't pick an iPhone instead? (obviously not a keyboard issue) And I assume you're not somebody who'd ever buy an iPod Touch and carry around two devices? Trying to understand the market here.
Chinese-Forums users are significantly nerdier than typical Chinese learners, I think, so I'm not confident the data from a poll there would be more accurate (= not stacked with votes from Android fans who have absolutely no interest in Pleco but just promote Android everywhere they go) than from one on our website, though I suppose having it somewhere not hosted by Pleco would demonstrate that I wasn't tampering with the results...
I have been a windows mobile PDA's user for several years (iPAQ, Kaiser, Blackstone). These machines fulfilled my needs very well on a daily basis and also while I was abroad on business trips. Needless to say that every new machine meant a significant step about possibilities offered. For the records I'd like you to know that I have also been a PC and Apple Mac user.
When the iPhone was launched I immediately felt attracted by its powerful and fast interface. But, as often happens with the products launched by Apple, it lacked of some specs already present in the wm machines. So it was a nice toy to show off in front of some friends but not the machine I needed. After different versions of the iPhone been launched it always keeps behind the concurrence when talking about total specs. Something similar happens now with the iPad when talking about a device to read books. I prefer my Sony eReader with its e-ink which is way better for my eyes.
Regarding the Android machine I like very much the huge potential it has to offer (frequent updates, increasing users community, the people I know using it has more interests and curiosity on apps than those I also know using the iPhone. i.e. between my colleagues at the Chinese language course all of us use PDAs. The share is: 6 x Android, 2 x WM6, 1 x Blackberry. Needless to say that we all would love seeing Pleco ported to our Android devices.
RobRedbeard
进士
mikelove said:That is a concern with the poll, yes. But other metrics aren't necessarily much better; we get a lot more email from BlackBerry users than Android ones, for example, but most of the emails from the former are of the "does Pleco work on BlackBerry" type, while most of the Android ones are of the "are you planning to develop a version for Android" type, so it may be that Android users are more likely to visit our website, find this thread, and have their question very thoroughly (albeit indecisively) answered here without having to write in at all
...
You've made excellent points all around Mike, as always. It's doubling down to service many of your current users. So charge a fee. Most Android users around me were WM users before. Our WM devices aren't going to function forever, we need an upgrade path.
Android may very well allow you to compile your engine from your C/C++ code. The NDK allows this. http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/in ... l#overview
This could significantly reduce the work you have to do, possibly limiting a lot of Java work to just interface and system interaction.
By indentured servitude I wasn't just talking about complex features, I was mostly talking about pretty ordinary stuff:
I HATE iTune, I HATE Quicktime, and I don't want to jailbreak a phone but I also don't want to have a phone that is tied to a carrier (remember, I'm in China, where that isn't normal).
I want to buy my music from any source I want, and sync it with whatever media player I want.
What do I want? A dictionary on Android that can lookup Chinese words on webpages, text messages, and e-mails using an offline database and store them in a list.
To me, that's Pleco lite. Do you want us to start coding the interface code for you? What do we need to do to make this happen now?
User count around me:
3x WM (all plan to go to Android) 4x Android 1x iPhone touch.
The iPhone touch guy is only carrying it with him for pleco right now. All lament annoyance at carrying multiple devices.
Rob
Most of the expats (I'm talking about 40 people) around me at work in China are low tech users. Many study Chinese seriously but they aren't tech or gadget fiends and they don't care about specs between WM, iPhone and other smartphone devices. Work gives them Blackberries. They don't know what Android is. They can afford iPhones and what they like that it is easy to use. They usually buy grey market iPhones or just pick one up in Hong Kong. iPhone 12> BB 8 > Rest aren't smartphones. No one uses WM or Android apart from local Chinese.
You can buy music from almost any source for your iPhone. The majority of my music on my iPhone comes from Amazon's digital music store and Google China's music site. The iTunes store doesn't even sell DRM music anymore. I don't know what you're going on about Quicktime--nowadays that's just the video player used to play videos on the iPhone, and sometimes embedded video or audio (mostly open formats) on Safari. Jailbreaking is practically a one button push these days, with a simple reversion. I used my iPhone with China Mobile while in China, NOT China Unicom. Yes, you need to sync with iTunes, but that should not be a dealbreaker.RobRedbeard said:
How do you know this? It's been roughly 2 years since an iPhone version was announced, and it's still not done, it's still rough around the edges compared to most polished iPhone apps.
westmeadboy
榜眼
Basically says that developers that care about making money will concentrate on iPhone more and Android less, and Android will continue to get sub-par apps. And that the alternative is not to focus on iPhone + Android + WP7 + Blackberry + Symbian + WebOS, but instead to create web-only apps. Interesting arguments for Pleco to consider moving forward.westmeadboy said:
RobRedbeard
进士
Very interesting - our pattern here is opposite. In our expat group I'm the only techie and I'm nearly the only one not using Android. None of the Chinese staff has Android - they are all Windows Mobile.Azabu said:
We all have the disposable income to buy iphones, but seeing how our phones cost more than iphone I don't see the importance of that.
I wonder if age is a factor. We are all 25-35.
The biggest point I want to make is that of so many platforms Android is the only one that will certainly stick around longer than it takes to get pleco running.
Rob
character - still waiting for Google to decide to send me a free device; wouldn't singlehandedly convince me to do an Android version, but since my Android experience to date all involves simulators and devices borrowed from other people (more than enough time to get a sense of how it works / establish that I like it less than iPhone, but not quite the same as carrying one around every day as my regular phone) it certainly might help
RobRedbeard - I think you might be confusing comments about desktop Windows with comments about Windows Phone 7; we have no intention of holding up anything to wait for WP7, it has a lot to prove both on the sales and technical sides of things. The APIs aren't looking particularly promising for offline data storage, particularly since Microsoft is likely to cripple it with one of their bloated memory-hogging mobile SQL implementations instead of using nice efficient public-domain SQLite like everybody else does.
A desktop Windows version of Pleco would be done in native code, and would indeed be very little work to get ported from Windows Mobile; they use basically the same APIs and the same UI controls, which is a bad thing for WM (since it made everything feel creaky once the rest of the market moved from similarly desktop-esque Palm to mobile-optimized iPhone style UIs) but a very good thing for WM-to-desktop-Windows porting. The only reason the desktop version isn't an obvious slam-dunk is that the work involved to get it running well - adding things like an integrated web browser, flashcard synchronization, support for more document formats, a UI that takes full advantage of all of that lovely screen space - would be very time-consuming. But a quick-and-dirty, here's-our-WM-software-recompiled-to-run-on-your-desktop port would be very easy indeed, and really the only reason we haven't already done one already is that we'd like to be a bit more confident we're going to develop it further first; with the one-device-at-a-time restriction, we'd rather not have a bunch of people buying fresh copies of Pleco to run on their desktops and getting ticked off at us when we decide to leave it as-is and not keep improving it.
On the Instant Access front, I'm feeling better and better about the embedded web browser "Live Mode" feature in our iPhone software for that - it was kind of a stretch performance-wise with original / 3G iPhones, but it works beautifully on the 3GS and iPad, and provides a level of integration that even Instant Access can't match; tap on a character to look it up right on the page instead of having to tediously highlight it (which will never be as easy on Android or iPhone as on resistive-screen WM devices) and invoke a command to launch Pleco to look it up. Plus, there's a whole lot of other stuff we can do with it as it continues to develop - tone-coloring, for example, or highlighting words on the page based on what flashcard categories they're in. So I don't view the lack of Instant Access support on iPhone as being that big a deal, and I don't really view support for it as a compelling argument for an Android version (though we'd almost certainly take advantage of it if we did develop for Android).
I've addressed the NDK before - development with Java Native Interface is really not practical in a case like ours, it requires a ton of setup code and is damn near impossible to debug, and would leave us with something extremely creaky / awkward.
The "Pleco Lite" you describe sounds like something anybody could develop in a few weeks with CC-CEDICT and a rudimentary knowledge of SQL - something completely replaceable, in other words, and honestly not worth our time since it wouldn't be offering much of anything people would be willing to pay more than a few dollars for. (and that only until somebody else started offering the same thing for free) You could develop that app yourself in less time than it'll take to convince me to do an Android version
numble - exactly, we've been working on iPhone for a long time and it's still not really "done," won't even be done after we release the flashcard version. Not actually 2 years - put in about a week's worth of proof-of-concept work in mid-2008 but didn't really start working on it full-time until well into 2009 - but a long time, and Android would take even longer owing to all the extra code we'd need to rewrite.
westmeadboy - have to disagree with part of that post. People have been putting way too much stock in cross-development with this whole Flash kerfuffle; the only good iPhone apps that have ever been developed that way are games, and even those often need to be extensively redesigned to work well with a button-less user interface.
There's a basic fact which a couple of posts here have hinted at that I think we need to explore in more detail, which is this: there is a very big difference between "apps" and "applications." "Apps" are the modern style of mobile software introduced by iPhone and now eagerly mimicked by every other mobile platform: very simple, spartan user interfaces, as few configuration options / extra screens as possible, with extremely short development cycles of just a few weeks or months and prices generally in the $10-and-under range. "Applications" are everything else, desktop software like Office / Quicken and the old-school Palm/WM apps that routinely went for $40 or $50. They have far more configuration options, in fact their quality is often defined by those options; most people don't use 90% of the features in MS Office, and DateBk6 was perhaps the quintessential Palm organizer app but had an array of options / interfaces that an iPhone or Android user would consider borderline obscene. (the instruction manual is 131 pages long!)
With "applications," there's a lot to be said for cross-development - you've got a ton of existing code / features that you don't want to rewrite, and managing a development project that big requires that you abstract yourself from the OS a good bit anyway; you're already using something on top of the built-in UI framework to manage all of that business and it might as well be something that also lets you cover a couple of other platforms. With "apps," however, there's so little code, and so much of an emphasis placed on having a clean UI that's easy to learn and highly consistent with everything else on the platform, that you're really shooting yourself in the foot with cross-development; you don't gain nearly enough from code reuse to justify what you give up in polish and usability.
Separate from the cross-development aspect of this (since that's clearly not a possibility now anyway) is the fact that Pleco in its current form is an "application" with a capital A - the number of options and the size of the instruction manual do in fact look completely ridiculous by iPhone or Android standards.
The continued viability of that model is a big concern, and the reason why even doubling-down on our current product with Android isn't necessarily all that "safe" - by the time we had an Android version ready, there could very easily be "good enough" free or low-cost Chinese dictionary / Chinese document reader "apps" for Android that integrate beautifully with Anki for flashcards and give you most of Pleco's basic functionality without paying a dime - wouldn't have anywhere near as many features, but an awful lot of users don't seem to mind giving up features any more if they can get a simpler UI and save some money in exchange. Even commercial-quality dictionaries might be available in these apps if one of them integrates StarDict - they might be illegally-pirated commercial-quality dictionaries you'd have to find / download / install yourself, but they'd be commercial-quality all the same. And the very same tech-savvy users who seem to be favoring Android the most are also the ones best-equipped to go out and find / install that alternative software, and the least concerned about getting everything in one simple, well-supported package.
The closed-ness of iPhone and the fact that it doesn't allow for easy exchanges of data between apps is probably the only reason why this situation doesn't already exist on there; the fact that iPhone offers "as much to explore and tweak as your DVD player" isn't entirely a bad thing for our purposes.
So the question, then, is whether in the face of ever-growing competition from free and low-cost "apps," we should really still be putting all of our energies into continuing to make mobile "applications," which is what an Android port (at least in the way most of the people here seem to be envisioning it) would essentially be. A desktop "application" is a different story: the desire for extra features / functionality remains strong there, as does the willingness to pay triple-digit prices for software, and the likelihood of new competitors emerging is almost nonexistent, so while the "application" model may not even survive on desktops forever - between Office Online and Mint a lot of consumers may soon be able to get by without buying any third-party software for their PCs at all - it's likely to survive longer than it does on mobiles at least.
If we start transitioning out of the mobile "application" business, though, the question arises of where we go from there - what else can Pleco do for you? What other valuable product or service can we provide that takes advantage of our Chinese dictionary expertise / brand / license portfolio? Do we start simply churning out "apps," do we continue developing "applications" but on desktops, do we develop a web-based product (I continue to be impressed by the success of Skritter in that regard - if people are willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for access to a high-quality web-based character flashcard system, they might also be willing to do so for a high-quality web-based dictionary, in spite of the availability of ad-supported free alternatives to both), do we focus on corporate / educational institutional / government buyers who want to get everything well-integrated from a single vendor and don't mind paying a premium for that? Where do we go from here, in other words, if we don't just keep doing the same thing on different mobile platforms? (I suppose that's the larger question about this entire thread - consolidation of old territories versus conquest of new ones)
RobRedbeard - I think you might be confusing comments about desktop Windows with comments about Windows Phone 7; we have no intention of holding up anything to wait for WP7, it has a lot to prove both on the sales and technical sides of things. The APIs aren't looking particularly promising for offline data storage, particularly since Microsoft is likely to cripple it with one of their bloated memory-hogging mobile SQL implementations instead of using nice efficient public-domain SQLite like everybody else does.
A desktop Windows version of Pleco would be done in native code, and would indeed be very little work to get ported from Windows Mobile; they use basically the same APIs and the same UI controls, which is a bad thing for WM (since it made everything feel creaky once the rest of the market moved from similarly desktop-esque Palm to mobile-optimized iPhone style UIs) but a very good thing for WM-to-desktop-Windows porting. The only reason the desktop version isn't an obvious slam-dunk is that the work involved to get it running well - adding things like an integrated web browser, flashcard synchronization, support for more document formats, a UI that takes full advantage of all of that lovely screen space - would be very time-consuming. But a quick-and-dirty, here's-our-WM-software-recompiled-to-run-on-your-desktop port would be very easy indeed, and really the only reason we haven't already done one already is that we'd like to be a bit more confident we're going to develop it further first; with the one-device-at-a-time restriction, we'd rather not have a bunch of people buying fresh copies of Pleco to run on their desktops and getting ticked off at us when we decide to leave it as-is and not keep improving it.
On the Instant Access front, I'm feeling better and better about the embedded web browser "Live Mode" feature in our iPhone software for that - it was kind of a stretch performance-wise with original / 3G iPhones, but it works beautifully on the 3GS and iPad, and provides a level of integration that even Instant Access can't match; tap on a character to look it up right on the page instead of having to tediously highlight it (which will never be as easy on Android or iPhone as on resistive-screen WM devices) and invoke a command to launch Pleco to look it up. Plus, there's a whole lot of other stuff we can do with it as it continues to develop - tone-coloring, for example, or highlighting words on the page based on what flashcard categories they're in. So I don't view the lack of Instant Access support on iPhone as being that big a deal, and I don't really view support for it as a compelling argument for an Android version (though we'd almost certainly take advantage of it if we did develop for Android).
I've addressed the NDK before - development with Java Native Interface is really not practical in a case like ours, it requires a ton of setup code and is damn near impossible to debug, and would leave us with something extremely creaky / awkward.
The "Pleco Lite" you describe sounds like something anybody could develop in a few weeks with CC-CEDICT and a rudimentary knowledge of SQL - something completely replaceable, in other words, and honestly not worth our time since it wouldn't be offering much of anything people would be willing to pay more than a few dollars for. (and that only until somebody else started offering the same thing for free) You could develop that app yourself in less time than it'll take to convince me to do an Android version
numble - exactly, we've been working on iPhone for a long time and it's still not really "done," won't even be done after we release the flashcard version. Not actually 2 years - put in about a week's worth of proof-of-concept work in mid-2008 but didn't really start working on it full-time until well into 2009 - but a long time, and Android would take even longer owing to all the extra code we'd need to rewrite.
westmeadboy - have to disagree with part of that post. People have been putting way too much stock in cross-development with this whole Flash kerfuffle; the only good iPhone apps that have ever been developed that way are games, and even those often need to be extensively redesigned to work well with a button-less user interface.
There's a basic fact which a couple of posts here have hinted at that I think we need to explore in more detail, which is this: there is a very big difference between "apps" and "applications." "Apps" are the modern style of mobile software introduced by iPhone and now eagerly mimicked by every other mobile platform: very simple, spartan user interfaces, as few configuration options / extra screens as possible, with extremely short development cycles of just a few weeks or months and prices generally in the $10-and-under range. "Applications" are everything else, desktop software like Office / Quicken and the old-school Palm/WM apps that routinely went for $40 or $50. They have far more configuration options, in fact their quality is often defined by those options; most people don't use 90% of the features in MS Office, and DateBk6 was perhaps the quintessential Palm organizer app but had an array of options / interfaces that an iPhone or Android user would consider borderline obscene. (the instruction manual is 131 pages long!)
With "applications," there's a lot to be said for cross-development - you've got a ton of existing code / features that you don't want to rewrite, and managing a development project that big requires that you abstract yourself from the OS a good bit anyway; you're already using something on top of the built-in UI framework to manage all of that business and it might as well be something that also lets you cover a couple of other platforms. With "apps," however, there's so little code, and so much of an emphasis placed on having a clean UI that's easy to learn and highly consistent with everything else on the platform, that you're really shooting yourself in the foot with cross-development; you don't gain nearly enough from code reuse to justify what you give up in polish and usability.
Separate from the cross-development aspect of this (since that's clearly not a possibility now anyway) is the fact that Pleco in its current form is an "application" with a capital A - the number of options and the size of the instruction manual do in fact look completely ridiculous by iPhone or Android standards.
The continued viability of that model is a big concern, and the reason why even doubling-down on our current product with Android isn't necessarily all that "safe" - by the time we had an Android version ready, there could very easily be "good enough" free or low-cost Chinese dictionary / Chinese document reader "apps" for Android that integrate beautifully with Anki for flashcards and give you most of Pleco's basic functionality without paying a dime - wouldn't have anywhere near as many features, but an awful lot of users don't seem to mind giving up features any more if they can get a simpler UI and save some money in exchange. Even commercial-quality dictionaries might be available in these apps if one of them integrates StarDict - they might be illegally-pirated commercial-quality dictionaries you'd have to find / download / install yourself, but they'd be commercial-quality all the same. And the very same tech-savvy users who seem to be favoring Android the most are also the ones best-equipped to go out and find / install that alternative software, and the least concerned about getting everything in one simple, well-supported package.
The closed-ness of iPhone and the fact that it doesn't allow for easy exchanges of data between apps is probably the only reason why this situation doesn't already exist on there; the fact that iPhone offers "as much to explore and tweak as your DVD player" isn't entirely a bad thing for our purposes.
So the question, then, is whether in the face of ever-growing competition from free and low-cost "apps," we should really still be putting all of our energies into continuing to make mobile "applications," which is what an Android port (at least in the way most of the people here seem to be envisioning it) would essentially be. A desktop "application" is a different story: the desire for extra features / functionality remains strong there, as does the willingness to pay triple-digit prices for software, and the likelihood of new competitors emerging is almost nonexistent, so while the "application" model may not even survive on desktops forever - between Office Online and Mint a lot of consumers may soon be able to get by without buying any third-party software for their PCs at all - it's likely to survive longer than it does on mobiles at least.
If we start transitioning out of the mobile "application" business, though, the question arises of where we go from there - what else can Pleco do for you? What other valuable product or service can we provide that takes advantage of our Chinese dictionary expertise / brand / license portfolio? Do we start simply churning out "apps," do we continue developing "applications" but on desktops, do we develop a web-based product (I continue to be impressed by the success of Skritter in that regard - if people are willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for access to a high-quality web-based character flashcard system, they might also be willing to do so for a high-quality web-based dictionary, in spite of the availability of ad-supported free alternatives to both), do we focus on corporate / educational institutional / government buyers who want to get everything well-integrated from a single vendor and don't mind paying a premium for that? Where do we go from here, in other words, if we don't just keep doing the same thing on different mobile platforms? (I suppose that's the larger question about this entire thread - consolidation of old territories versus conquest of new ones)
What are your thoughts on Chinesepod's mobile apps? I haven't taken too much of a look at it since I don't subscribe anymore. It seems something like that provides a constant revenue stream/customers.
My personal preference is to see Pleco Software improve upon existing products and expand into other product categories instead of spending years porting onto the next platform. I think the "app" model can make a lot of money for developers (but would that translate to Chinese learners?), and your comment about the Bible earlier was interesting--I can see a lot of dualscreen books (Chinese|English) possibly selling, even ones that are public domain, as long as it wasn't a machine-translated gobbledygook but are better translations that are also tightly linked to the source language. Or something like DeDoMusic that provides translation of lyrics with streaming music. Children's books for kids to learn Chinese. An app to provide pictures and a description of what exactly 地三鲜, etc. is, so that people stop ordering only kung pao chicken because they don't know what all these foods on the menu are.
Personally, I am most interested in the dictionary application (and its improvements) since I'm at a pretty high language level already--so I'm just speculating on what would be interesting, and what language learners might shell out $1-$5 on.
And if things are a success, maybe it'd be easier to port the main application and all these other apps to different platforms. As it stands, it feels like the past 2 years (even if it was actually 1 or 1.5) was just spent on porting, and the potential of that happening over and over again just feels like a lack of progress.
My personal preference is to see Pleco Software improve upon existing products and expand into other product categories instead of spending years porting onto the next platform. I think the "app" model can make a lot of money for developers (but would that translate to Chinese learners?), and your comment about the Bible earlier was interesting--I can see a lot of dualscreen books (Chinese|English) possibly selling, even ones that are public domain, as long as it wasn't a machine-translated gobbledygook but are better translations that are also tightly linked to the source language. Or something like DeDoMusic that provides translation of lyrics with streaming music. Children's books for kids to learn Chinese. An app to provide pictures and a description of what exactly 地三鲜, etc. is, so that people stop ordering only kung pao chicken because they don't know what all these foods on the menu are.
Personally, I am most interested in the dictionary application (and its improvements) since I'm at a pretty high language level already--so I'm just speculating on what would be interesting, and what language learners might shell out $1-$5 on.
And if things are a success, maybe it'd be easier to port the main application and all these other apps to different platforms. As it stands, it feels like the past 2 years (even if it was actually 1 or 1.5) was just spent on porting, and the potential of that happening over and over again just feels like a lack of progress.
Well, it is very normal that users owing machines of other platforms (i.e. iPhone) to have a feeling of threat (a silly thing) when they perceive that a new standard may delay the launch of new versions or add ons for their machines. So they allways keep an eye on forums that do not directly apply to their machines.
I really think this is just an 'offer/demand' issue. Sometimes when one neglects a platform is just leaving an empty space for the concurrence to grow stronger and start creating a name with products that at the beginning were not real contenders for the big names (ie. Oxford Dictionaries).
I really think this is just an 'offer/demand' issue. Sometimes when one neglects a platform is just leaving an empty space for the concurrence to grow stronger and start creating a name with products that at the beginning were not real contenders for the big names (ie. Oxford Dictionaries).
sui.generis
探花
As promised in another thread, I've gone ahead and purchased more content even though I had planned to try and wean myself off Pleco in preparation for the coming Android-less future. I did so in hopes the purchase would operate as a small tip towards your considering Android in the future, and realize I'm happy to spend dough on Pleco. It took me a long time to scrape together the money for my original Oxford purchase, and this purchase wasn't easy to manage either. Once I'm out of school and have real money to work with, the money will flow even easier. I'll happily pay for the Android software and there are future dictionary purchases in my future. Other Pleco products will instantly get my attention, and I tell people about this software all the time.
Maybe this tact isn't as effective as not buying more content until an Android version was agreed to, but I'm not much of a hostage taker, and Pleco has been good to me so any persuasion I attempt will be positive towards Pleco. Anyway, all the coin I have to spare is in the tip jar, so take it in consideration that nerdy users like myself (who like particular niche features/functionality/freedom in Android) are also more likely to drop a benjamin on quality software than the mass market is.
Maybe this tact isn't as effective as not buying more content until an Android version was agreed to, but I'm not much of a hostage taker, and Pleco has been good to me so any persuasion I attempt will be positive towards Pleco. Anyway, all the coin I have to spare is in the tip jar, so take it in consideration that nerdy users like myself (who like particular niche features/functionality/freedom in Android) are also more likely to drop a benjamin on quality software than the mass market is.
numble - ChinesePod is more in the content development business than the software business, but the apps seem like pretty well-executed takes on the standard iPhone-interface-for-a-paid-content-service idea. (which could end up as a backdoor way onto Android if we do do a web-based version of Pleco - I know a lot of the posters here aren't wild about the idea, but better that than nothing)
There's a ton of potential for us in add-on reader content; heck, we've already got the DRM system in place, we could easily license a couple of dozen good Chinese readers / eBooks at a variety of levels (maybe even just support ePub), license or develop audio versions of them, etc - creating an ongoing stream of original content like ChinesePod might be a stretch, but building up and continuing to expand a good corpus of licensed stuff to read / listen to is very doable indeed. Menu readers are already a widely-developed category of "app" and probably one that's best left to other developers, but there are certainly other "app" possibilities that might work if we end up going that route.
I agree completely about the lack of progress; living with weak points / bad design decisions / roughly-implemented bits from 2 years ago and even porting them to iPhone for lack of sufficient time to redesign them has been very frustrating, and I'm really looking forward to finally getting some of those things fixed in the coming months.
Huguete - I think numble is actually responding to my comment about other things we might do instead of an Android version, but iPhone users would be correct to feel threatened by an Android version - we continue to operate with rather limited resources, so unless someone drives up to Pleco World Headquarters with a dump truck full of cash and an elite team of crack Java programmers, time spent on Android basically equals time not being spent on iPhone.
And honestly at the moment I'm feeling more threatened by competing apps on iPhone (such as they are) than on Android - the nightmare scenario for me is that we finally do put out an Android version but see our iPhone sales dwindle in the process because some other developer has been improving their much cheaper Chinese dictionary in the meantime while we've been ignoring ours to concentrate on Android. If someone comes along and develops an outstanding Chinese dictionary for a platform Pleco's not even choosing to support, I wish them all the best - we've managed to keep up a friendly relationship with Wenlin for the better part of a decade in spite of the fact that we routinely get emails from people trying to decide which of our two products to buy. It's not like Android is going to disappear if don't end up developing a product for it; some of our customers are going to decide they're more enthusiastic about Android than they are about Pleco, and they deserve to have their Chinese dictionary needs met by someone if not by us.
But Apple has tens of billions of dollars in cash on hand and a market cap rivaling Wal-Mart, and they now get the majority of their revenue from iPhone OS devices - iPhone isn't going away anytime soon, and scary stories of AppStore rejections notwithstanding, Pleco should continue to be a viable and successful business for many years to come even if we never do a native version for another mobile platform after iPhone. (at least until everybody switches to web-based mobile apps, at which point we'll hopefully be there to greet them in that brave new world)
sui.generis - thanks again for that. You do make a good point about nerdy users paying more for quality software, I'm just not sure if there are enough of you guys out there, at least enough of the paying-for-quality-software as opposed to the installing-a-bunch-of-pirated-StarDict-dictionaries type. However, with the "apps" market being increasingly crowded / saturated there's certainly the potential for customers to start going the other way again, paying more for extra features since the $5 apps are all so similar. And as someone (numble again?) alluded to, trying to expand the market for our software on iPhone - pushing into schools and other institutional buyers - might ultimately get us to that flush-with-cash stage where we could then support other platforms more easily; that stage is going to be a lot harder to reach if we ignore iPhone for 2 years while concentrating on Android.
There's a ton of potential for us in add-on reader content; heck, we've already got the DRM system in place, we could easily license a couple of dozen good Chinese readers / eBooks at a variety of levels (maybe even just support ePub), license or develop audio versions of them, etc - creating an ongoing stream of original content like ChinesePod might be a stretch, but building up and continuing to expand a good corpus of licensed stuff to read / listen to is very doable indeed. Menu readers are already a widely-developed category of "app" and probably one that's best left to other developers, but there are certainly other "app" possibilities that might work if we end up going that route.
I agree completely about the lack of progress; living with weak points / bad design decisions / roughly-implemented bits from 2 years ago and even porting them to iPhone for lack of sufficient time to redesign them has been very frustrating, and I'm really looking forward to finally getting some of those things fixed in the coming months.
Huguete - I think numble is actually responding to my comment about other things we might do instead of an Android version, but iPhone users would be correct to feel threatened by an Android version - we continue to operate with rather limited resources, so unless someone drives up to Pleco World Headquarters with a dump truck full of cash and an elite team of crack Java programmers, time spent on Android basically equals time not being spent on iPhone.
And honestly at the moment I'm feeling more threatened by competing apps on iPhone (such as they are) than on Android - the nightmare scenario for me is that we finally do put out an Android version but see our iPhone sales dwindle in the process because some other developer has been improving their much cheaper Chinese dictionary in the meantime while we've been ignoring ours to concentrate on Android. If someone comes along and develops an outstanding Chinese dictionary for a platform Pleco's not even choosing to support, I wish them all the best - we've managed to keep up a friendly relationship with Wenlin for the better part of a decade in spite of the fact that we routinely get emails from people trying to decide which of our two products to buy. It's not like Android is going to disappear if don't end up developing a product for it; some of our customers are going to decide they're more enthusiastic about Android than they are about Pleco, and they deserve to have their Chinese dictionary needs met by someone if not by us.
But Apple has tens of billions of dollars in cash on hand and a market cap rivaling Wal-Mart, and they now get the majority of their revenue from iPhone OS devices - iPhone isn't going away anytime soon, and scary stories of AppStore rejections notwithstanding, Pleco should continue to be a viable and successful business for many years to come even if we never do a native version for another mobile platform after iPhone. (at least until everybody switches to web-based mobile apps, at which point we'll hopefully be there to greet them in that brave new world)
sui.generis - thanks again for that. You do make a good point about nerdy users paying more for quality software, I'm just not sure if there are enough of you guys out there, at least enough of the paying-for-quality-software as opposed to the installing-a-bunch-of-pirated-StarDict-dictionaries type. However, with the "apps" market being increasingly crowded / saturated there's certainly the potential for customers to start going the other way again, paying more for extra features since the $5 apps are all so similar. And as someone (numble again?) alluded to, trying to expand the market for our software on iPhone - pushing into schools and other institutional buyers - might ultimately get us to that flush-with-cash stage where we could then support other platforms more easily; that stage is going to be a lot harder to reach if we ignore iPhone for 2 years while concentrating on Android.
RobRedbeard
进士
mikelove said:
First, interesting vocab submission. We should consider your fork for the words "apps" and "applications."
But I think we might be better off to use the original word for that purpose, applets.Before these mobile apps existed, there were already other lower cost alternatives to Pleco. The majority of students did and probably still just buy Chinese dictionaries meant for Chinese students studying English. A few of these work pretty well for reverse use. In addition, PowerWord has been out there in force even since before Google threw their coin into it. Since about 2006-2007 there has been tremendous growth in the number of students studying Chinese in America. The question is how to best capture that market.
My feeling is that you need a marketing program that works with faculty at universities to help introduce and push the software. It really DOES significantly add to students' abilities to study Chinese effectively. What I've noticed is that most Chinese studying students that I talk to haven't yet heard of Pleco and I'm usually the first to show it to them. Afterward, many buy it. Honestly, Pleco should have been available at my university bookstore years ago. It's not significantly different that when your calc professor requires you to go out and get a graphing calculator. Pleco is to Chinese what the graphing calculator is to math.
Two aspects of Pleco are attractive:
1 - the dictionaries. CEdict isn't nearly up to the task, and it's not at all an easy task to find decent commercial quality dictionaries online.
2 - the features.
I think it would be a mistake to move away from your current business, at least it would be a huge loss for us, the users. But it's easy to see a guy make 100K selling a bear can applet on iPhone and feel discouraged that making something of actual use and sophistication gives so much less reward. However, even just last night, I was at a birthday party and a couple guys were showing off their Pleco to another guy who hadn't seen it before, and they so excited about the usefulness of its features. Most people find it to be that tool they've always been looking for, but just find it slowly.
Rob
westmeadboy
榜眼
This post is pretty old (and so some of the comments about the current state of the Android Market are no longer relevant) but is a good read relevant to this discussion:
http://www.plothatching.com/2010/01/21/ ... ese-review
http://www.plothatching.com/2010/01/21/ ... ese-review
RobRedbeard - marketing is key, certainly, but along with marketing there's also some important work that needs to be done on the product side of things to reach out to a larger audience; both in design / programming (ease of use!) and licensing (more beginner-oriented dictionaries, scholarly dictionaries, etc). And for institutional use we really need to work on creating a larger Pleco "ecosystem" - more types of content, textbooks, audio lessons, integration with more online services (Skritter and ChinesePod are both working on APIs), some sort of online sync / backup system of our own, teacher management tools, desktop version, the list goes on and on.
Pleco in its current form is useful for a lot of different groups, but really optimized around one fairly specific one, namely, intermediate-to-advanced Chinese learners who are reasonably computer-savvy, committed enough to take the time to learn all their way around of our various options / features, and demanding enough to pay for those features. That seems to describe most PlecoForums users and most of the people in this thread, and a lot of those qualities also seem likely to correlate strongly with a preference for Android in general. So I don't doubt that a port of our current product to Android would be a hit with Android users, but I don't know that it would really let us reach out to large untapped groups of new customers like those other improvements might - we'd just be getting more of the same users we've got now.
And my fear is that that won't be enough to grow or even maintain our current sales - the pricing situation has gotten a little bit better on iPad but it's still pretty bleak. How many of the people you show Pleco to love it when they see it but balk at the price? Anecdotes from other customers suggest that's a very common thing - offering a fairly full-featured free app on iPhone is a partial solution at least, hopefully getting them hooked with one or two cheap add-ons and later persuading them to buy the whole thing, but there's still tremendous pressure to keep things as cheap as possible. So you might think that in theory we could double our number of customers with an Android version, but after two years of improvements to CC-CEDICT / built-in OS features / etc, by the time we released an Android version we might only be making half as much money off of each of those customers.
All of which continues to suggest that the best strategy with Android may be to wait a while - concentrate on expanding into new areas rather than doubling down on our current product, and hopefully make enough money doing that (heck, we won't really even know how successful iPhone is until we see how the flashcard version sells) to more easily underwrite an Android version; generate growth in other areas and create more value (in the form of additional licenses, web-based features, etc) that doesn't have to be painstakingly rewritten in Java to increase the usefulness of that prospective Android version.
Particularly given the ongoing possibility of fragmentation - Motorola's Skyhook announcement today suggests that Android developers might soon have to juggle two different location APIs, for example. It may very well be that the "app" market can even survive that sort of fragmentation comfortably enough - there seem to be plenty of people writing Android apps now, if 1/3 of them optimize for HTC, 1/3 for Motorola and 1/3 for the vanilla Google version you'd probably still get a couple of quality apps in every major category for each sub-platform (and games easily ported to all three) - but it likely wouldn't be a very hospitable environment for Pleco.
westmeadboy - that is a good post by Mat, yes. (maybe he can comment on how the market's changed since then)
mfcb - well there are some nice benefits to having two devices - battery life, easier multitasking, looking up a word while you're talking on the phone with someone (not that that's impossible on GSM, but it's tricky and pretty much requires a headset) - but personally I think in a few months the optimal two-device combo will be an iPhone HD and an iPad, replacing the iPhone with another device if you can't stand too much Apple in your life.
Pleco in its current form is useful for a lot of different groups, but really optimized around one fairly specific one, namely, intermediate-to-advanced Chinese learners who are reasonably computer-savvy, committed enough to take the time to learn all their way around of our various options / features, and demanding enough to pay for those features. That seems to describe most PlecoForums users and most of the people in this thread, and a lot of those qualities also seem likely to correlate strongly with a preference for Android in general. So I don't doubt that a port of our current product to Android would be a hit with Android users, but I don't know that it would really let us reach out to large untapped groups of new customers like those other improvements might - we'd just be getting more of the same users we've got now.
And my fear is that that won't be enough to grow or even maintain our current sales - the pricing situation has gotten a little bit better on iPad but it's still pretty bleak. How many of the people you show Pleco to love it when they see it but balk at the price? Anecdotes from other customers suggest that's a very common thing - offering a fairly full-featured free app on iPhone is a partial solution at least, hopefully getting them hooked with one or two cheap add-ons and later persuading them to buy the whole thing, but there's still tremendous pressure to keep things as cheap as possible. So you might think that in theory we could double our number of customers with an Android version, but after two years of improvements to CC-CEDICT / built-in OS features / etc, by the time we released an Android version we might only be making half as much money off of each of those customers.
All of which continues to suggest that the best strategy with Android may be to wait a while - concentrate on expanding into new areas rather than doubling down on our current product, and hopefully make enough money doing that (heck, we won't really even know how successful iPhone is until we see how the flashcard version sells) to more easily underwrite an Android version; generate growth in other areas and create more value (in the form of additional licenses, web-based features, etc) that doesn't have to be painstakingly rewritten in Java to increase the usefulness of that prospective Android version.
Particularly given the ongoing possibility of fragmentation - Motorola's Skyhook announcement today suggests that Android developers might soon have to juggle two different location APIs, for example. It may very well be that the "app" market can even survive that sort of fragmentation comfortably enough - there seem to be plenty of people writing Android apps now, if 1/3 of them optimize for HTC, 1/3 for Motorola and 1/3 for the vanilla Google version you'd probably still get a couple of quality apps in every major category for each sub-platform (and games easily ported to all three) - but it likely wouldn't be a very hospitable environment for Pleco.
westmeadboy - that is a good post by Mat, yes. (maybe he can comment on how the market's changed since then)
mfcb - well there are some nice benefits to having two devices - battery life, easier multitasking, looking up a word while you're talking on the phone with someone (not that that's impossible on GSM, but it's tricky and pretty much requires a headset) - but personally I think in a few months the optimal two-device combo will be an iPhone HD and an iPad, replacing the iPhone with another device if you can't stand too much Apple in your life.
westmeadboy
榜眼
If you look at the Android SDK, there is nothing specific to Google Location Services. The location API provides a location and an accuracy. So, devices with Skyhook will just be giving values with slightly better accuracy. No need for devs to change anything.mikelove said:
Once again, I maintain that 99% of apps (I don't know about games, I don't play them) work just as well on HTC, Motorola, vanilla Android devices. These Android fragmentation concerns seem to come from those who are not involved with Android devices (as users or developers).
The iPhone HD should not be very useful for Pleco since all those 4.0 features, Android has had since 1.0, and its been pointed out many times in this topic that Android doesn't do anything better than the iPhone!
As an Android user who then bought an iPod Touch (to run Pleco), its an extremely frustrating experience. I honestly felt I was going back to something like Windows 3.1. Having to back out of apps is something that belongs to the 20th century. Non-customizable homescreen - just banks of icons. Very Win 3.1. I won't even mention multitasking. When I read the features coming in 4.0, I couldn't understand why existing users have been so happy without those basic features in the first place. Well, I can understand - because they don't know any better. Its just the way it is and people accept it. But as an Android user, I do know better and so have higher standards to measure my smartphone-capabilities by.
Even the argument of a slicker UI doesn't hold. Just go to the AppStore and scroll down a list of apps while images are loading. Very jerky.
/rant
EDIT: Scrolling through lists containing dynamically loaded images is smoother on my Hero than my iPod Touch.
BTW, I thought I had a 3rd gen iPod Touch. Wikipedia suggests it doesn't exist in 8GB form. But then this suggests it does (and that is the model number).
Well Pleco might well be in that 1% - we were in the 1% of iPhone apps that wouldn't work correctly on iPad even in emulation without bug fixes, and the 1% of Palm OS apps that had to be totally rewritten for Palm OS 5. And I'm not sure why App Store scrolled so slowly for you, but every time I've used an Android phone it's felt considerably laggier than its contemporary iPhone equivalent.
But the biggest difference for our purposes is that Pleco already works on iPhone and would take a very long time to rewrite for Android - Android could be made of unicorns and fairy dust and it wouldn't change that fact. Which is why the business aspects of this interest me much more than the technical ones at this point.
But the biggest difference for our purposes is that Pleco already works on iPhone and would take a very long time to rewrite for Android - Android could be made of unicorns and fairy dust and it wouldn't change that fact. Which is why the business aspects of this interest me much more than the technical ones at this point.