stroke order font: Windows Mobile and iPhone, different

[hleperlier]

:?: :?: (Hi Mike,)

I used to have a Palm (was a beta tester) and had to switch to Windows Mobile. You might remember my suggestions for a nicer font for traditional font strokes order. Having suggested to my students so many times to by Pleco, they finally did; I was happily surprised that 1. the stroke order was "fixed," or made consistent, with for characters such as 國 (it was different from 或 for the last two strokes). 2. the font was nice.
Talking to my students, I was telling them that I did not know why the stroke order was not what I thought it was on my WM while I was touting Pleco; until one student with Pleco on her iPhone showed it to me. I was happily surprised: corrected stroke order and a nicer font.

I tried to look in the forums but could not find whether installing beta 2.08 would fix this on my WM or should I wait until I get an iPhone.

I've been busy at work and stopped looking at the Pleco forums for a while.

Thank you for clearing this up

 

[mikelove]

It's not available in 2.0.8; if we introduce it on WM at all it'll probably be part of a bigger update like 2.1. It's a little iffy because we licensed the data from a different provider and hence have to charge for it / pay royalties again; we're not sure whether charging for an *upgrade* to a feature / add-on would go against our officially-stated policy of not charging for upgrades within the current major version number (2.x in this case).

 

[mfcb]

hmmm, i would say, forget the "officially-stated policy"... some of the WM users will switch to iPhone anyway, they wont buy it even if its a 3.0 version for WM, and the rest of us WM users, that dont want to switch to iPhone might buy any enhancement thats released, 2.x or not...
i remember, that another (future) feature also depends on these new stroke order data, right? so, the people that dont buy the new stroke order wont have the new feature...

 

[mikelove]

That other feature - component search - is still up in the air on WM; it'll take a lot of work to get one particular aspect of it implemented (rendering rare characters / components that aren't part of our font files), and we'd like to make sure WM sales aren't going to completely collapse in the wake of the iPhone flashcard release (thus far it's been more of a slow deflation) before we do it.

I guess as long as we keep fully supporting the old database too we can offer the new one as something no different from a new dictionary, a "new feature" rather than an "upgrade" - even for that I'd at least wait for a modestly larger-sounding update like 2.1, though.