iPod Touch / iPhone

Well there's at least an outside chance Apple's Tuesday press conference could announce some big change in iPhone OS 3.0 (like, say, a Documents folder which let you easily copy files to / from your iPhone via your desktop, which would have a colossal impact on our development time for the flashcard system at least), so you never know how our schedule might change. But yes, hopefully not too much longer now.
 
iPhone 3.0 to have "in-app purchases"

Good news it appears for you and Pleco Mike!

3.0 plans to allow for Subscriptions, additional levels, or new content to be bought within the app. Of course, Apple will still be grabbing their 30% I'm guessing, but still, there's room for some optimism.
 
Yeah, we were actually just starting work on our own system for that, so this is nice since we can now drop that and get the software out faster - my tentative thinking is that we might require OS 3.0 and take the extra time we were planning to spend on our subscription / add-on purchase system to get flashcards ready in the initial release instead.
 
Also pleased about the 1000 new APIs, there were a couple of things we were doing with undocumented APIs in our development builds that we were going to have to come up with elaborate alternatives for - big development time gains all-around from this.
 
Of course the downside is that this probably makes license transfers impossible, so that's something we'll have to deal with - they're probably going to be completely unwilling to let us sell add-ons outside of iTunes now that it's possible to sell them inside of iTunes.
 
Might be able to sort-of work around that, though - say by making the software available at a massive discount for exactly one hour on a particular day and disclosing the hour / day only to people who'd already bought Pleco.
 
(gee, this is getting kind of Twitter-ish)

Wouldn't even have to be a hour, actually, we could narrow it down more and do it for, say, 5 minutes, with paid Palm / WM users able to sign up for a SMS notification or something like that when it was ready. Though that would be contingent on iTunes letting us change prices that quickly, rather than having to wait a few hours for a "database update" or somesuch.
 
After finally getting a look at the SDK, without divulging any NDA'ed stuff, I'm not getting the sense that they'd necessarily be against the idea of our offering free downloads of previously-purchased modules - it seems like this might be something a lot of applications end up having to do. So we'll have to see how that turns out as far as distributing Pleco is concerned.
 
Hey Mike,

I have been following your posts with interest, as I imagine many other's are also doing :)

Maybe it's not the route you would like to take since the restrictions on redistributing software/updates have been updated/relaxed with OS 3.0 and the new SDK, and maybe it is a little too technical for some of your users, however, have you looked at the way WeDict Pro offers to download dict files directly to the iPhone to update its dicts? They download without a problem. Additionally, WeDict Pro has a built in FTP which is quite nice. I just uploaded about 600 MB of dictionary files to my iPhone using the FTP in conjunction with Filezilla downloaded to my PC. It was a painless process and occured without a single event.

I am sad to see that some of the features I was most hoping for in OS 3.0 won't be available on my 2G iPhone. What gives? It appears that the hardware should be entirely capable of MMS and A2DP. Is this a ploy by Apple to get people to upgrade to the more secure (read: more locked down) iPhone 3G and to make additional profit at the same time? Yeah, I am aware of yellowsn0w, I have re-jailbroken and re-unlocked my iPhone with every new firmware update that has come out for carrier choice as well as feature enhancements.

Oh, I am glad to see that you might be leaning back towards including flashcards in the inital release. This is a biggie for me since I already own the WM version of Pleco, with everything you have offered installed, and therefore do not necessarily "need" the iPhone version but instead would prefer it for convenience, such as for yanking it out of my pocket to study a few cards while eating my lunch or during a lull moment at work, etc....

Cheers!

Darrol
 
When I read about the new iPhone OS, my first thought was that this will be great for Pleco! What would be really nice is if the in-application store offered some kind of discount code feature, then you could use that for users who are upgrading. Really looking forward to having Pleco on my iPhone....
 
hairyleprechaun - I've seen how WeDict works, yeah - we'd like to do something similar though a bit more streamlined, it's just a question of what we'll be able to get away with approval-wise.

Flashcards have gained some importance since there are actually a decent number of iPhone Chinese dictionaries out there now with databases other than CEDICT (found one today claiming they're about to release a version with the ABC dictionary) - simply having top-of-the-line dictionaries isn't really going to get us that far anymore, so we need to differentiate Pleco from everybody else's products with features instead of just content. But if all we had was a stack of licenses and a simple dictionary wrapper we wouldn't be much of a company anyway.

Luhmann - that's a good idea, though since OS 3.0 is under NDA I can't say anything about whether or not it would actually be possible to have a discount code with Store Kit. (I can say the system is called called Store Kit since that's on a public Apple site)
 
Sharing user data, like flashcards etc...

There is a possibilty sharing files with your iphone using usb (no jailbreak necessary). The app is called diskaid ( http://www.digidna.net/diskaid/ ). Runs on win and mac. Have been using this for some months now. Works perfectly.

Cheers

Nick
 
Mike-

I think that you are right about long term iPhone development requiring Flash Cards, but with all of the licensing already settled you are way in advance of Murage who's pro version will be licensing the ABC Chinese-English dictionary.

If Pleco were my company, I would take the Release Early / Release Often strategy. Get your core dictionary product to market as quickly as possible and follow up with the release of the Flash Card interface - potentially as a free upgrade. What is the downside?

Whether we like it or not, the App Store and iPhone is a game changer. I don't love the iPhone, but this is starting to look like Windows in 1990...

-Ryan
 
nico176 - thanks, but I'm not sure if this would be practical in our case since it seems more suited towards standard file formats - I'm not sure if it would work with something proprietary like Pleco flashcards.

ryan erwin - the core dictionary functionality was basically working weeks ago, so if those guys really get their product out quickly and it looks like it's starting to severely impact our sales (which seems doubtful, since we're not even on iPhone yet, and I imagine they'll set their price low enough to not make people feel too committed if they later decided to buy Pleco) we could always rush out something - I'm quite confident we could blow them out of the water on both price and features. But I'd rather get as much functionality as possible into our very first release, and given all of the wonderful new things appearing with iPhone OS 3.0 it would be lovely to launch on that if possible.
 
The announcement of in-app-commerce could/should makes things a bit easier for you guys I guess.

Even though I'd like to have it now now now (if you know what I mean), you should take your time.
Make this app perfect, so you will be invited by Apple to attend the Dev-Con and present Pleco during the keynote.
This'll make you filthy rich ;)

*ok, ok I'll shut up and go back to my corner*
 
Oh, I've already got the TV ad written in my head - highlights the built-in document reader, first they show some other eBook app like "Classics" and talk about how you can read books on your iPhone, then they bring up Pleco with, say, 红楼梦 and talk about how you can read books on your iPhone in Chinese.
 
Will the new iPleco (I made that up) have the potential to run on an iPod Touch? Although that's the thread title, I only see "iPhone" mentioned. I've already found sites that show you step by step how to convert an iPod Touch into a full IP phone, for example. But, honestly, I don't want a phone, I want a dictionary with the largest screen possible :)
 
Mike,

Regarding pricing and allowing current Pleco users to upgrade to an iphone version for free - i thought you might like to look into www.olivetree.com. They had a similar situation to you guys with a whole lot of people who were already invested in their software when they finally made a version for iPhone. They were able to work something out with apple so that current users could download all of their previously purchased books for free to their iPhone. New users and new purchases obviously cost money, but when a user logged into their account on the iPhone software there was an option to download all previously purchased books to the device for free. Pretty sweet system and made all of us olivetree users quite satisfied.

hope this works out for us faithful Pleco investors as well,

I appreciate your work,

Chris
 
We're hopeful that we'll be allowed to do the same thing, but I'm sure you understand why we can't commit to anything until the software is approved by Apple - you never know what might be OK with one reviewer but not another.
 
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