Project Catalyst

vinteuil

Member
Very exciting news viz. "Project Marzipan" (now Catalyst) today from Apple! Has iOS Catalina been made available to the developers of Pleco?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yes, but we haven’t had a chance to test it yet as we’re busy with bug fixes on iOS and an urgently needed 64-bit update on Android. Hopefully we’ll have some idea of how we’ll support it in a few weeks.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It fails totally with our old app, but seems to work OK with 4.0; however, HWR/OCR/TTS are currently only barely working (very iffy) and we haven't yet decided whether to try to ship with those or to simply leave them out and consider adding them later if there's sufficient demand.

For HWR, our time would probably be better spent on allowing you to use a mobile device with a touchscreen as your input method, for OCR, since this would only be still OCR we don't necessarily need something as performant as our current system - and Apple are working on a built-in system OCR engine anyway, it just doesn't support Chinese yet - and for TTS, people can probably make do with the built-in macOS ones.

Also, a lot of our custom UI looks really, really bad on Mac, so we're tentatively planning to chuck that both on iOS and on macOS in 4.0. This will probably upset a few people if we take it to its extreme - for example, I'd really like to get rid of our built-in color picker, because iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 have a lovely new system color theme system where you can pick 'red' and then it will automatically adjust the shade of red based on day/night mode, accessibility settings, etc - but since we're planning to offer a "Pleco Legacy" app anyway, people for whom custom colors are more important than new features can simply keep using that one.
 

JD

状元
Also, a lot of our custom UI looks really, really bad on Mac, so we're tentatively planning to chuck that both on iOS and on macOS in 4.0. This will probably upset a few people if we take it to its extreme....

Does the addition of iPadOS 13 have any developmental impact? My personal use case almost never touches iPhone Pleco (unless I can’t get to my iPad) but I use it on my iPad all the time. The current iOS Pleco look fantastic (and completely different) on iPad devices vs. the tiny screen on iPhone devices.

But I’m curious to know what/if the formal division of iOS 13 from iPadOS 13 impacts Pleco development?
 
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