How about this:

A

Anonymous

Guest
why not extend pleco dict to become a chinese input system for all aplications ala penpower? entering and displaying chinese characters would make sense for people learning chinese (a.k.a. pleco dict customers). ever wanted to input the names of some chinese friends into your palm address book or just use chinese in the datebook? see? think about it.

thanks,


jotheman
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We've considered this, but I'm afraid it presents a legal problem at the moment - we licensed the handwriting recognition system we use from another company, and they had a PenPower-like program based on it that we're not really supposed to be competing with.

The new handwriting recognizer we're working on for PlecoDict version 2.0 probably won't suffer from such legal restrictions, but even then I'm still not sure if this would be a good idea. The Palm OS especially in its newer versions is a very difficult system to "hack", so creating a Chinese display/input system that functions outside of our software would take a lot of work - it would also require a great deal of effort to maintain, since we'd have to massively overhaul our software every time Palm came out with a new OS release. (we'd almost be writing three different programs from scratch for Palm OS 4/5/6) Within PlecoDict we have something of a "controlled environment" and it's not all that complicated to enable Chinese display and input, but outside of PlecoDict it's a lot harder. And I'm not sure if the investment would pay off - I don't see what our product could offer that CJKOS/ChOS/PenPower/et al don't, aside from a slightly more learner-friendly interface.

Now if our new handwriting recognizer turns out to be a great success and people start telling us they like it much better than anything else out there, we might consider putting together a standalone character input package at that point, but it would probably be like PenPower in that it wouldn't include its own Chinese display system but rather would piggyback on another one like CJKOS'.

Thanks for your feedback,

Michael Love
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
thanks

this comes a bit late, but i really apreciate your very good customer service.

keep it up!


jo
 
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