Request for Official iPhone Statement on Homepage

[ryan erwin]

Michael-

I'm a big fan of Pleco and Wenlin. For better or worse, my iPhone has basically replaced my Black Berry (email) and my Treo (sms+pleco) these days, but I really miss having a great dictionary in my pocket. Especially the Chinese <-> Chinese dictionary. I saw your statement in response to the "iphone + plecodict + japanese = true" and you're comments obviously show you've put a ton of good thinking into your strategy.

I'm not sure if you've got a way to track how many of your users have fallen into the same boat as me, that is, people who were Treo users that migrated to the iPhone, but if Treo and iPhone sales are any indicator, this could be a big part of your market.

I realize the Pleco 2.0 stuff has been in the works for a long time now, and there are obviously a lot of great features in there. I'm personally really excited to get my hands on it, especially if I can run it on my iPhone. If that means I've got to purchase styletap too, as long as it runs smooth I can accept that for a short time.

On a side note, while you are thinking about development complexity, I'm curious what % of users find the handwriting recognition feature critical... I realize that it's technically very challenging, but for me it's definitely something I can live without. On the off chance there's a character that I don't recognize, there's a 99% chance somebody within 1m does recognize it...

I don't mean to rant here, but I suppose some of my nervousness and frustration are showing through here.
- As a customer of yours, I'm saddened that the 2.0 development schedule has slipped so much
- I'm also disappointed that there's no note on the homepage about the current iPhone strategy
(I'm still not totally sure whether or not you're going to make pleco support the iphone....)
- I find the Pleco.com website to be dated and the forums not terribly active

Bottom line, like many here I really want to see Pleco succeed and grow. Don't follow Palm down that dark road...

Please set a firm launch date for the 2.0 product and post it on pleco.com. Post a date that you will not miss again.
Please make a statement about iPhone support - if Styletap will be the solution, say so. If it's the bridge, say so. If you're working on the iPhone version, please make a clear statement about it.

Nobody wants to read tea leaves. Give it to us straight. We love Pleco. That's why we're here.

Best-

-Ryan Erwin
www.ryanerwin.com
Shanghai, PRC

 

[mikelove]

We're definitely supporting the iPhone, in a real and non-StyleTap-dependent way, but the reason there's no statement on it is that we have nothing specific to say - the necessary licenses are in place so that I can say definitely that we can and will support it, but we still have no idea about the pricing / upgrade policy (waiting for clarification from Apple on a few issues with that), about whether or not it'll be possible to add on / modify the dictionary bundle, or about the release date, so about all we'd be able to put on an iPhone policy page is "we're working on an iPhone version." And posting that on the website in a more prominent way is just going to generate a lot more e-mails asking for answers to those questions, along with causing people to delay their purchases just as all of the talk of 2.0 has done.

The forums are as active as they've ever been, it's tough to get a large community going on such a specific subject - I consider it a huge success that I'm responsible for less than 1/3 of the posts on here. They provide answers to a lot of questions people might have / might not feel like writing us an e-mail about, and give us a lot of wonderful customer feedback too, so they're all we really need them to be. The rest of the website's dated because we didn't see any point in updating it until 2.0 is ready, but that should of course be remedied soon.

There won't be any more specific release dates because we're close enough now that one showstopper bug could be enough to measurably alter things. I could post some ridiculous overestimate like 1/1/09, but that would just needlessly depress people. I see no problems in getting it out for back-to-school, but giving a specific date might cause some people (naively, perhaps, given our history) to plan on having it / not having it for the start of term, so we're better off not pretending we know things we don't actually know. There likely won't ever be a release date announced for the iPhone version, I kind of like the idea of it dropping out of the sky one day when people have no idea that it's even close - when you're shipping software on CD you can't really pull that off, you go Golden Master and then there's a clear period of a month or so between that and when the CDs are actually in stores, but with an online product you can be dark one day and go live the next.

On development complexity, handwriting actually has almost nothing to do with that since we license it from Hanwang - costs us some money but not much time, even including the system to capture / smooth strokes it's really on a few hundred lines of code (or about the size of one configuration screen in flashcards, which are the real development-time boondoggle - absent them 2.0 would have been out in mid-to-late '07).

On Pleco's health in general, it hasn't been a great summer for us due to the Olympics limiting visas / study-abroad trips, but we're doing fine, have no reason to think we'll be doing any less fine a year or two from now, and have some exciting stuff in the works even aside from 2.0 and the iPhone/desktop versions. The slow / oft-missed release dates may make it seem like we're having problems, but actually the very things that cause us to miss release dates, namely the tiny staff and the lack of a fancy organization-inducing office or a board of directors pressuring us to ship whatever we've got, also make it less of a problem when we do since our overhead is so small - we're debt-free and outside-investor-free and it's a lovely way to run a business.

 

[ryan erwin]

Mike-

Fair enough. I sincerely appreciate the time for a thoughtful response and respect you line of reasoning. I don't think it would be intellectually fair to say that any point that you've raised isn't reasonable. Entrepreneurial folks like ourselves have our own strong values, our own strategies, our own reasons. Often, that's why we're entrepreneurs. For me to say more would just be 纸上谈兵 ;-)

As for operating a small private company, free of debit, I agree with you 100%. If me getting Pleco shipped on X date means a net loss in quality of life, then it's just not worth it. We only get one shot at this.

What you're doing with Pleco is great. I'm anxious for it on my iPhone. The sooner the better.

Again, thanks for your thoughtful response and if you do decide to do a small beta ahead of the iPhone release, please do consider including me.

Best wishes-

-Ryan Erwin
ryan@red.com
Shanghai, PRC

 

[mikelove]

No problem! If we do do an iPhone beta we'll probably have some kind of lottery - might as well use up all of our 100 available Ad-Hoc distribution slots. Though with such a narrow range of devices to test on the case for a public beta is somewhat thinner than on Palm/WM...

 

[gato]

(or about the size of one configuration screen in flashcards, which are the real development-time boondoggle - absent them 2.0 would have been out in mid-to-late '07).

In hindsight, maybe it would have been better to leave PlecoDict 1.0 flashcard design alone for 2.0 (just add the hooks needed for SQLite). I don't want to sound too critical, but perhaps the 2.0 flashcard design was too focused on features (programmer designing for programmers) rather than the user experience, leading to at least a first impression of greater complexity even when compared to the already quite complex 1.0 flashcard system.

 

[mikelove]

In hindsight maybe so, but this certainly isn't a case of programmers-designing-for-programmers - most of the most labor-intensive features in the new system, multiple-choice tests, hierarchical categories, more intelligent repetition spacing, etc were added in response to repeated requests from users. 2.0 should have been broken up into two or three releases, that way we could have gotten the new content to everyone sooner while taking our time on the really tricky stuff, but what's done is done and at least we're almost finished now.

 

[gato]

this certainly isn't a case of programmers-designing-for-programmers - most of the most labor-intensive features in the new system, multiple-choice tests, hierarchical categories, more intelligent repetition spacing, etc were added in response to repeated requests from users. 2.0 should have been broken up into two or three releases,that way we could have gotten the new content to everyone sooner while taking our time on the really tricky stuff, but what's done is done and at least we're almost finished now.

Thanks for all the hard work. Hope it's all taken in the spirit of constructive feedback here. I would hate to see good features go to waste because of too high of a learning curve. As a former programmer who now works among mostly non-techies, I'm often surprised how difficult non-techies may find things that appear second nature to myself. Just wanted to remind you about that.

 

[mikelove]

Oh certainly, but people are spending enough time in the flashcard system that it's the sort of thing that they're willing to take a little time to learn, particularly if we do a better job with providing teaching materials (more in-depth tutorial in the manual, videos, etc). If you want a really easy-to-learn flashcard system, you're probably not using flashcards in 1.0 either, since even they are a lot more complicated than most of the alternatives.

I don't think powerful interfaces are necessarily bad as long as they still behave in a sensible way if you don't fully understand how to use them. Just two changes in 2.0, auto-detecting English versus Chinese search queries and putting a menu button in the toolbar by default on Palm, are by themselves going to eliminate something like 1/3 of the non-installation-related e-mail we get from new users, and a few intuitive things like that in flashcards should similarly go a long way in making them accessible to non-techies.

 

[ssaito]

Hi Mike,

Part of the fun of owning Pleco software is seeing you jump over one hurdle to the next. Way to go!

Your comments on the iPhone development are very interesting. I'm curious:

Are any of the delays on pricing and upgrades you mention due to the famously all-smothering iPhone SDK NDA?
I've seen references to the Ad Hoc distribution method and the 100 limit you mention. Is that just for prototyping, to prevent gaming their rev share agreement?

Keep the commentary coming - it makes the wait a little more bearable ;-)

Steve

 

[mikelove]

The NDA isn't the problem, it's the approval process - there are a couple of areas of their distribution policies that we're a bit unclear on, so if the first version we submit gets rejected we may have to scale back on some things. The biggest problem is content licensing - pretty much all of our license agreements are one-device-per-copy, but Apple's DRM system is considerably more generous, so if we can't add our own separate selling / DRMing system on top of Apple's to enforce that one-device-at-a-time rule the only thing we could release on AppStore would be a severely limited version of Pleco with just one or two dictionaries. (the lack of instant sales reporting and the slowness of Apple's payments are also problematic for a lot of those content licenses)

Though if the AppStore version were severely limited we'd probably eventually release a more full-featured jailbreak version too - Apple doesn't seem to be retaliating against companies that offer jailbreak editions of AppStore apps, and we've got an enticing enough product that a lot of people would probably take the plunge and violate their warranties. And as long as we explicitly said jailbreaking was the user's problem and not ours, and required the Device ID from a successfully-installed Pleco-for-jailbroken-iPhones copy in order to place an order (thus weeding out the people who didn't understand / weren't comfortable with jailbreaking) it wouldn't be too big a risk on our end.

But don't buy an iPhone expecting that you'll eventually be able to run a full-featured version of Pleco on it, because you may not be - some version of Pleco is certainly coming to iPhone, but how much of the Palm/PPC/soon-to-be-desktop product's functionality will ever be available on it is very much up in the air at this point, and we won't really know about that until it's actually approved and sitting in Apple's store.

 

[ste5en]

I'm really excited about buying an iPhone. But I won't do it until I know an acceptable version of Plecodict is available for iPhone. If you could post updates on this on your Website - including the functionality - that would really be great. I would be glad to buy Plecodict again for iPhone when it's available.

 

[mikelove]

Oh we're definitely planning to put some info up on that, may not be a full development blog but there'll certainly be screenshots / videos / etc. But we won't know for certain about features until Apple's actually approved the thing, which won't happen until we've finished and submitted it.

 

[ste5en]

Just curious if you yet have any kind of a timeline or estimate about when you'll submit it and how long it might take Apple to give their response. I believe this software is in high demand.

 

[mikelove]

No idea, we haven't even started work on it yet since we have to take care of our existing customers on Palm/PPC first. (2.0's been in development since before the iPhone was even unveiled, and it's been in beta since before Apple announced that they'd be allowing third-party software development on it, so there wasn't much we could do to adjust our product plans to get an iPhone version out sooner)

 

[curwenx]

I hardly ever use the flashcard functionality, and when I do its usually just to keep word lists for later reference. I find the amount of options in the flashcard session very confusing, and it seems very plausible that this functionality takes a lot of development time to get right.

In other words, I for one would hope for a iphone version ASAP with focus on the dictionary part rather than the flashcard part. Some clarification on what you mean by "Pleco lite" would be interesting. I hope you aren't looking into crippling the dictionary content, as I'm really looking forward to finally get a good C-C dictionary in 2.0.

 

[ipsi]

Sadly, I think the dictionary content is the most likely thing to be crippled, as that requires 'addons', whereas the flashcards are part of the program, and you're not likely to want to buy more or anything. Not sure though, basically have to wait and see...