This year on Mac OS!!! Please... pretty please?
Pleco for Mac Update?
- Thread starter silversaturn
- Start date
Not to play the blame game, but we had been planning to release a Mac beta with our big UI simplification revamp and ended up nixing that plan over stupid Liquid Glass.
In general my thinking now is trending back towards “release a meh Mac version and charge for it and make it good if people pay for it” because Apple UI design is such a train wreck that I’m really reluctant to put in the effort to make anything new and polished on their platforms right now.
In general my thinking now is trending back towards “release a meh Mac version and charge for it and make it good if people pay for it” because Apple UI design is such a train wreck that I’m really reluctant to put in the effort to make anything new and polished on their platforms right now.
Lovely news! Just basic dictionary lookup on a 'click a character (or two...)' would be wonderful for me to have on my laptop. As for Liquid Glass - a review tried to explain it as "Liquid Glass is essentially a new design concept that's built on the idea of layering software elements that look like actual glass, making for a design that looks more natural, rather than completely digital.". Lord knows what that is about. Anyway, I have managed to avoid noticing its presence overmuch.
Fernando
榜眼
And as Apple drops the ball over and over again we get closer and closer to Pleco as a GTK app.
I mean honestly even though I don't care for it, if most people loved it then I would cheerfully redesign Pleco around it; the problem is that they released a design that way too many people hate and that is likely not long for this world, and it would be a terrible shame to waste a lot of time optimizing around that.
TenThousandThings
Member
For me, it would be wonderful if a macOS desktop edition could surface by the time macOS 28 arrives. macOS 27 will reportedly be a sort of "housekeeping" release, since Intel support ends with macOS 26 (Tahoe). One thing that will be removed in macOS 28 is full Rosetta 2 support [see here], which means Wenlin is going to stop working for me around January 2028 (when I update to MacOS 28) -- unless Tom Bishop or someone else can be persuaded to update the app, which was last updated in 2016.
Currently I connect my iPad to my Mac and just use Universal Clipboard to directly copy-paste long, complex citations from Hanyu Da Cidian into Wenlin on my desktop, where I can trace them and parse them more easily. I haven't felt a strong need for you to use Catalyst to port the iOS/iPadOS version to macOS or even to have a desktop version, but if Wenlin goes away then a desktop version of Pleco could be useful.
I think I must have posted here in the past, but I've had to re-register today. I've had Pleco since 2011, but I'm not sure I've ever expressed just how useful Pleco has been, due to the quality of the dictionaries you've provided. I lugged the original print edition of Hanyu Da Cidian back with me on a plane in the 1990s, and I had the CD version, but the 12 volumes (and the CD) did not go up into the attic until Pleco got it. Thank you.
As I'm sure you know, there is a revised and expanded 2024 edition, available here -- it would be nice to have offline access to the 2024 edition, but I don't know if that's possible.