PlecoDict for Pocket PC by September 1st

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
See the main page announcement; setting a firm deadline for the beta version on Palm has proven to be an excellent motivator, so we're doing the same thing for our Pocket PC port. Also worth noting is that we've now extended our license with Oxford to cover Pocket PC; this means that all of our current dictionaries will be making the trip to Pocket PC. (and future ones as well, since we're no longer considering Palm-only licenses)

Coincidentally, it's been almost exactly 3 years since the first e-mail came in asking for a Pocket PC version... sorry it's taken us so long to get our act together on this :D
 

Smoodo

举人
Priorities and resources.

It's great to have such nice software like PlecoDict. I look forward to seeing the finshed version for Palm and see what other exciting developments might occur.

Great job Mike.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I'm sorry, I'm afraid you misunderstood my meaning; I've now taken the posting down from the main page since I realize other people (who don't read the forums) might have a similar reaction.

The Pocket PC work has not done anything at all to slow down the finished Palm OS version; my reference to "preliminary work" simply meant that we were laying some of the licensing-related groundwork for the Pocket PC version now while we continued working on the Palm OS version. Licensing / contracting deals can take a while to negotiate, so it's often a good idea to get started on that aspect of a product before the first line of code is written.

But as yet, we haven't written that first line of code, nor do we plan to until the finished, bug-free version is available for Palm OS. Honestly, I was just trying to provide a little bit of reassurance to the (literally) hundreds of people who've written me asking for a Pocket PC version that we are still moving forward on that project; I never intended to suggest that there was any sort of a realignment of priorities going on.

It was a difficult decision to go ahead with releasing PlecoDict in a "preview version" at all. We've never had a very good history of predicting release dates, but a number of people wrote me saying that regardless of what condition it was in they would much rather pay now for an unfinished version than wait for a finished one. Still, we never would have put out a preview version in September if we thought we were still going to be working on this in March. If we ever do another preview version of a product, we'll be certain to more explicitly state that we make no promises at all with regard to release dates, and that if you don't find the product a worthwhile purchase in its current condition you should wait to purchase it until the finished version is ready.

So in summary, as I've said before in numerous e-mails, I'm sorry it's taking this long, but we really are doing everything we can.
 

Rustic

秀才
If I were you Mike, I would definitely divert some of your resources/time towards the pocket pc project given Palm's exit from the China market and its declining market share of the PDA market. It would be a priority in fact. And this is coming from an existing Palm/Oxford C-E user waiting to convert to Plecodict.

I don't think Mike is "dipping fingers in other pots of potential" so much as preparing for what could become a major business issue in the futute. None of us would like to see this Company go down after all the excellent work they've put in.
 

Smoodo

举人
Long live Pleco!

I absolutely agree with your point! Long live Pleco! I see it as a real possibility that PlecoDict 2, might be a pipedream for PalmOS and be realized on the PocketPC, or who knows maybe Symbion OS with all the covergence of Cell Phones and PDAs. Mike clarified that PlecoDict will have flashcards and such in very soon and that's pretty much completion.

All in all, the software is great and it is a miracle to have the ABC dict on Palm.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well certainly a lot of the features we're looking at for 2.0 are going to make it on Palm - for various licensing reasons, our new handwriting reognizer has to be brought over to Palm by the end of the summer, and for everything else, once the basic software has been brought over to Pocket PC it should be pretty easy for us to port new features between the two platforms.

Really, we barely use the Palm OS in PlecoDict anyway - virtually everything on the screen is drawn by our own code, interface elements like the entry list and text fields are all ours, our font system is totally independent of Palm's (including our very own custom-developed blitter), we even have our own database system (we use Palm's as a wrapper but can easily switch to using Microsoft's), so if it weren't for the fact that our current handwriting recognizer is a licensed Palm-OS-only library we'd have had a Pocket PC version out months ago.

If I'd known last spring that PlecoDict development was going to take this long, we probably would have mapped out an entirely different development plan: an upgrade on Palm that would have ended up looking pretty much like the Preview Release feature-wise (but less buggy and much more polished), then a Pocket PC version, and only after both of those were out would we have started in on the extra features like flashcards and on-device custom dictionary editing and so on. But we're finally getting close to the finish line on PlecoDict for Palm, and I'm confident that once we start in on Pocket PC development we'll be able to get it released long before the decline of Palm OS starts to noticeably impact our business. (it certainly hasn't yet; this is far and away the best February we've ever had sales-wise)
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Rustic said:
I would definitely divert some of your resources/time towards the pocket pc project given Palm's exit from the China market

Actually, Palm signed a licensing agreement with Acer Computers, a subsidiary of the Taiwanese company Benq. It's not very likely Palm, or any computer company for that matter, will be giving up the biggest emerging market in the world anytime soon. Please correct me if I've missed any recent developments.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
All this PPC talk is overrated in my opnion, at least when it comes to the Pleco dictionary.

If Pleco really wants to dig into a new market segment I would say go for korean and japanese students. There seems to be at least as many people if not more studying chinese in korea and japan as in the rest of the world put together. (I might be completely wrong on that, i just judge from student population here in Beijing)

Another thing is, I think that most Pleco users bought their handheld to use the dictionary and didn't buy a handheld and went "hey maybe there's a chinese dictionary for this thing".

This is just speculations of course 8)
 
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Anonymous

Guest
... I forgot the biggest market of them all of course: Chinese studying english.

I constantly see these commercials on TV where DaShan himself is promoting an electronic dictionary thats the samne price as a PDA. I even surpised that Palm themselves are not going this way to penetrate the market here. Their product blows these small dictionaries out of the water IMO.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
You're correct that "Palm" hasn't exited the Chinese market, because there are actually two different "Palm" companies now: palmOne, which makes most of the Palm hardware, has indeed exited the Chinese market (or had, perhaps they're tentatively getting back into it now), but PalmSource, which makes the Palm operating system, has not, and is still actively pursuing new licensees in China.

I appreciate your thoughts on other markets, but actually we don't see a whole lot of potential in Korean/Japanese or Chinese students. With Japanese and Korean learners of Chinese, the market for electronic dictionaries is in fact so big that there are a lot of really high-quality products out there already; we might be a big player in the market for Chinese learning software for Westerners, but we don't have the resources to go up against the likes of Canon and Sony. Especially since most of the good Japanese-Chinese and Korean-Chinese dictionaries have likely already been tied up in exclusive licenses.

The exclusive licensing problem is even bigger in China (in fact we've already lost a great deal of money because of it, for reasons I'm not allowed to discuss), but the really big problem there is piracy: to have any chance of making money in China we'd have to go for the Kingsoft strategy of selling our software in bookstores for $3 a copy, and our margins on that would be so low that it would barely be worth the effort. On top of which, PDA's in China almost always come bundled with a Chinese dictionary and handwriting recognizer already.

Plus, making a dictionary for Chinese speakers learning English is really a very different problem than making one for English (or even Korean or Japanese) speakers learning Chinese: the focus needs to be on English words, we'd need spoken English pronunciation, a vast and Chinese-oriented English-to-Chinese dictionary and a completely different Chinese-to-English one as well (with more synonyms for each word, usage examples, etc) - it would be almost as much work as an entirely new product. It would be a fun project to work on, actually, and I'm sure we could come up with some interesting new features that the Chinese manufacturers hadn't offered yet (read-along dialogs, training for different English accents, some neat ways of remembering grammar rules, etc), but given the licensing difficulties and the poor revenue prospects I just don't think it's worth the investment.

Oh, and on your other Pocket PC comment: it's true that a large percentage of our users are buying their handhelds to use our software, but at this point palmOne isn't really producing handhelds that people want to buy anymore (at least not like they used to) - if in order to run our software a customer has to shell out $350 for an ugly-looking PDA that crashes a lot, that's going to make them significantly less likely to buy our software. Plus there are all the people at corporations that have standardized on PPC (so they won't get reimbursed if they buy a Palm), people who buy their PDA's to run our software but justify their purchase by looking at all the other software they can run on them, etcetera. I don't know if a Pocket PC version will double our sales, but it's certainly going to give them a major boost.
 

Rustic

秀才
I own a Sony CLIE palm based PDA and am one of the users who bought the pda just so I could use the Oxford C-E dict. I had tried the software out before making the investment and compared it to many products out there. It kicked all comers!

I'm a big fan of the product because its really made my learning 5 times more effective. But I also know that if I had the choice, I would prefer to use the product on a pocket pc just because of the convenience of compatibility with windows based software.

So its a no-brainer, whether or not Palm has exited the Chinese market. And believe me, I am not a fan of Microsoft - quite the opposite, in fact.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Well I guess I came off as thinking a PPC version was needless but that was not my point. What I meant is that basically Pleco is in the market of electronic dictionaries and their customers are not as much PPC users or Palm users as they are just students looking for a good tool in learning chinese.

I just didn't see a whole new market opening up by making a PPC version, but Mike says otherwise and I believe him. Either way, having the software available for as many platforms as possible is a good thing.

I still believe that this will create more new PPC users than new Pleco users :wink:

Its great that they are giving us users more choice in choosing hardware. Still, I would rather see more effort going in to making the current version better. But thats just me being content with Palm and not caring much for PPC :p

Im curious to where you see PPC having better "compatibility with windows based software" ? I didn't know there was a big difference there.

By the way, Palm is still in the chinese market, they closed down their office in Shanghai but thats about it. Palm customers here in China haven't felt at thing. It's really not that big a deal.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I certainly agree with you that we're more in the electronic dictionary market than in the PDA software market - the main difference between us and Besta et al is that we don't have to deal with the tedious business of creating and selling hardware :lol:

The Pocket PC port won't really be all that much work, though - if it wasn't taking us so long to get our act together on a new handwriting recognizer, we'd probably have released a PPC version in '04. Roughly a third of the platform-specific code in PlecoDict serves simply to get around limitations in the Palm OS (most of which don't exist on PPC), and another third concerns flashcards and custom dictionary entries (which we wouldn't even need to support in the first PPC preview releases), so aside from the handwriting recognition work there are only a couple of months worth of coding involved in getting a PPC version to market. So it's not likely to significantly distract us from adding new features, and we're hoping it'll help pay for the cost of developing those features.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, though. :D
 

Rustic

秀才
I've found it difficult sometimes to convert MS Word documents to I-Silo format for viewing/editing on my palm. Also, if I use a graphics program like PicsVille to view MS Word documents, then its incredibly slow for long documents. I have a 512 Mb memory stick on my Sony, so it should not be a memory problem.

I've seen these documents being used on Pocket PCs relatively smoothly. So I just came away with the impression that it may be more "compatible". However, I'm definitely no expert - there may well be better programs on the palm which I'm not aware of. (Picsville and I-Silo was bundled with my PDA when I bought it). Can you suggest any? :D
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Documents To Go, http://www.dataviz.com/ is a very popular choice for this. QuickWord is also quite capable, http://www.quickoffice.com/. While both of these programs do support native Word documents, in general you're much better off using their built-in file converters; converted files will load a lot faster on Palm, and they still do a very good job of syncing the changes back to your original Word file without losing formatting. (a significantly better job than Word on Pocket PC, actually)
 
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