Let the rejoicing commence - had a flash of insight last night that had eluded me for months, and after about 3 hours of furious coding today there is now a fully functional Instant Access system on Palm again. Even has audio - it's identical to the popup interface in the regular dictionary. And unlike in the old version it uses our own code for rendering text, so there's full bold character / Pinyin tone mark / simultaneous simplified/traditional support. The only restriction is that it doesn't load the flashcard or user dictionary databases, mostly for performance reasons (they're responsible for about 2/3 of the current startup time) but also because they use up enough memory to do serious damage to stability; however, it will be easy to add a bit of code that stores the IDs of entries you want to add to flashcards in a little file somewhere and then adds them to the flashcards the next time you start up the software in full mode.
So barring catastrophe, the next beta of 2.0 will have full Instant Access both on Palm and on Windows Mobile - the WM version may still be a little quirky in terms of which applications it can get text from (hopefully SMS will work at least), but will have an actual popup window (same popup interface again) and should be invokable both from a taskbar icon and from an assigned button.
So barring catastrophe, the next beta of 2.0 will have full Instant Access both on Palm and on Windows Mobile - the WM version may still be a little quirky in terms of which applications it can get text from (hopefully SMS will work at least), but will have an actual popup window (same popup interface again) and should be invokable both from a taskbar icon and from an assigned button.