Modern WM Pleco screenshots and why it's still the best

[RobRedbeard]

Here are some screen shots of Pleco at work on a Windows Mobile device. These are pixel-for-pixel screen shots. Maybe someday the iPhone will get a nice high-res screen (like the iPad and Touch HD). (Fingers crossed). For now, WM is the king for professionalism and beauty.

Pleco PinYin input (A4 keyboard is an easy addon.



Having a stylus means inputing handwriting doesn't block the view of definitions and word matches.



Full screen handwriting works too.

 

[RobRedbeard]

I love the context menus (this is the WM 6.5 default menu, I've removed all the OEM enhancements).



The compounds screen is worth the whole price of the product. Especially the lower half.



Instant Access is great -- but needs to be implemented in context menus for text, since most OEM's replace the notification behavior of the task bar up top. I'll post about that separately.



Cheers on making a great application. Maybe I should just stockpile extra WM devices

Rob

 

[numble]

 

[RobRedbeard]

One more just to provide an English definition screen shot for Instant Access.



Mike - I encourage you to use these screen shots in anyway you can to market or demonstrate Pleco 2.

Rob

 

[RobRedbeard]

Numble -- you're awesome!
Yeah, IPAD is great! And actually has a screen like the Touch HD -- except it's not a pocket device. Still, really great!

Just go ahead and show me a Pleco iPad screenshot of it helping you read an emergency advisory SMS.

Rob

 

[numble]

Here you go:

And another browser image:

It's great that you only need to purchase one license to run on multiple iPhone OS devices.

 

[RobRedbeard]

Uh, how did you get an SMS onto an iPad? Does the 3G version do SMS and not phone calls?

Remember, my point overall is that the WM version uses screen space on SMALL devices so much more efficiently.

Of course, with an iPad that's different, but then we're comparing with Google/Kingsoft Ciba.

iPhone vs Touch HD are similar sized/function devices -- in that class of devices -- the iPhone has one really cool feature right now -- the web browser. When I was using the iPhone version I thought it was really slick, but there was a lot of sliding left and right on the screen, where with my WM version it was all there.

 

[numble]

SMSs can't be sent and received on iPad via jailbreak (released yesterday--but you can also get Google Voice SMS, [and maybe Skype SMS?] without jailbreak), but the browser and reader functions are exactly the same from iPad to iPhone. I'm just sending iPad screens since I have Photobucket installed on my iPad. I can send you the same screens on an iPhone some other day.

 

[character]

Remember, my point overall is that the WM version uses screen space on SMALL devices so much more efficiently.

Can you post a video on YouTube or the like of you using Pleco with the pad of your finger instead of a stylus? I've heard recommendations that for touch input icons should be 44x44 pixels in size. A stylus can probably select things 5x5 pixels in size or smaller.

 

[mfcb]

44x44 pixels
do you know totalcommander ? the icons in the upper right corner (for "/" root directory and ".." for 1 directory up) are terribly small (had a hard time to avoid the "f" word). but somehow on the Touch Pro i manage to press these buttons with more than 90% accuracy, with finger, not stylus. i did not manage that with my Del axim 50v, that had the same VGA resolution, but a much bigger screen. sometimes it looks like the device knows, what i want to do... :lol:

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for posting these - I still enjoy our WM software too, and certainly the higher-res screen (supposedly coming to iPhone this summer) and stylus input (not really available on any current-generation modern smartphone OS, sadly) make some lovely things possible. I really wish Microsoft had been less aggressive in replacing it in WP7 - just because everybody else has moved away from stylus input it doesn't necessarily mean that they have to. The bones of Pleco for WM may live on even after WM devices are no longer available in a Pleco desktop version, though...

mfcb - there may be some clever coding involved in that; just because a button appears to be tiny doesn't mean that its tappable area is, Apple does all sorts of crazy stuff with taps behind the scenes (dynamically adjusts the tappable area of keyboard keys based on the most probable next letter, e.g.).