Apple Vision Pro

[psucom]

Unfortunately, Apple Vision isn’t currently listed under Pleco’s compatible device list.

It would be so nice to be able to just briefly look at a character and have its definition popup — just like the mouse hover feature in 4.0.

Any chance an Apple Vision version of 4.0 can be added to the beta testing?

 

[mikelove]

No plans for that - we've tried this and found that while it is technically possible, it's unsatisfying and eye-straining and we don't think it's worth pursuing at the moment. We're also unhappy with the current state of the visionOS SDK in general - very early and buggy and beta-ish, they need to figure out a lot of things they haven't yet on the software side, not to mention figuring out how to get the pricing down to something consumer-friendly like $999; we don't want to spend time building around something with a limited market that's going to be dramatically different in a year or two.

 

[mikelove]

I should also add: hover lookups like you describe aren’t possible; you have to click. Apple doesn’t currently allow apps to track eye movements directly; they can designate controls that will be highlighted by eye tracking, but the app doesn’t know which control is highlighted, only what’s clicked on.

Also, no camera access, so the dream of AR OCR is impossible at the moment too.

This may all be fixed by the time they launch 3.0 or 4.0, but for right now it would be an extremely limited version of Pleco for an extremely limited number of users and not really worth the time.

 

[psucom]

Thanks very much for the detailed response! Even “eye-clicking”, if not “eye-hovering”, could potentially make for a nice reader.

Apple stated over a million [native iOS] apps will accessible on Vision Pro at launch. Might Pleco be one of those? (It is clear a native visionOS Pleco app is not being pursued at the moment, but it seems that many iOS apps that don’t “opt-out” will be accessible using Vision Pro.)

 

[mikelove]

No, we have opted out, and will take whatever other technical countermeasures are necessary to prevent people from circumventing that opt-out. In retrospect I consider it a serious mistake to have offered our iPhone app on iPad for free - the impossibility of monetizing it is a big part of why our iPad app is so much less than it could be - and I don't intend to support any other new form factor that way; even a so-so free app destroys the market for a better paid one.

 

[psucom]

No, we have opted out, and will take whatever other technical countermeasures are necessary to prevent people from circumventing that opt-out.

Ouch! Rings of a much a different approach compared to earlier days of Pleco that staunchly supported purchase transfers from Palm OS to Windows Mobile, then iOS and Android. So it looks like the niche group of Pleco adventurists who are able to experiment with the Vision Pro will have to make do with alternative language learning readers like LingQ for the time being. Hopefully Pleco will at some point reconsider offering (understandably paid) access to the iOS app on Vision Pro, a seemingly win-win solution for both consumer and developer.

 

[mikelove]

I said "form factor." I'm still happy to support new smartphone platforms: if anybody ever carves out a large enough market for an iOS / Android alternative that we can justify supporting it, I expect we'll do so. It's very much in our interest to have Pleco available on multiple smartphone OSes, both to avoid relying too heavily on a single partner and to expand our addressable market. But I don't think that anybody who buys a Vision Pro will not also own an iPhone on which they can run our iOS app, so we wouldn't be expanding our addressable market at all by supporting it, nor would we be reducing our dependence on Apple - in fact we would be increasing it.

The one thing I would consider in the near term - before we actually know if visionOS is going to be a success and if "running windowed iPad productivity apps" is something people keep wanting to do after they've owned the thing for a few months - would be to offer the iPad version of Pleco on visionOS as a monthly subscription app. (with that added eye-tracking feature, but only that) I generally dislike subscriptions, but I would adopt them here in order to have the ability to wind that app down at a future date without anybody losing access to something they'd purchased. Since the addressable market is so tiny, this would probably also be fairly expensive - say US$15 or $20/month. If enough people indicate that's an amount that they'd be willing to pay in order to use Pleco on their Vision Pro, I might consider going that route, but I'm pretty firmly against the idea of offering any version of Pleco on visionOS for free.

EDIT: I should also note here that at the moment, the release version of Pleco is still our creaky old version 3 - which uses a lot of weird old custom controls and is an absolute usability disaster both on Catalyst and on visionOS - and while 4.0 beta is coming along nicely, it's not going to be finished when Vision Pro launches. So even if I were absolutely champing at the bit to launch a free version of Pleco on Vision Pro, it would not make sense to do so until 4.0 is out, and that makes it pretty much impossible for us to be part of the first wave of visionOS compatible apps.

 

[tc24]

Writing this on a Vision Pro, would love to try any version of pleco on it. My dream use case would be reading texts in the books app, taking notes on the pdf, and collecting characters/looking them up all in one workspace. Using a phone with it on is kinda miserable, (non backlight palmpilot comes through nicely though…), and just having the headset on lets me work around medical issues from working at a traditional desk.

I’m part of the 4.0 beta and would happy with some time bound release, and/or also having a 20$/month subscription to help fund development, show support, and otherwise reduce the amount of headache this must cause.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks. As I said, it's not realistic for us to do anything about this until 4.0 is finished - on all 3 platforms (iOS / Mac / Android) we've currently announced it for - both for technical reasons and because users would quite rightly criticize us for prioritizing a new platform over our much larger existing ones. But hopefully by the time those are out we'll have a better idea of how this market is evolving.