Pleco equivalent for desktop PC

[mikelove]

2 hours ago, NinKenDo said:

There was also just a lot of hype train around that time about how desktop PCs were dead, laptop PCs are dead, blah blah blah. Not to sound negative but you drank hard on the cool-aid, and that's all it ever was.

Sorry, to be clear, I didn’t think the form factor was going to die, just the OSes. I thought Apple would do in 2011 what they finally started to do in 2020 - add desktop-specific UI affordances to iOS so that eventually you’d simply be writing iOS code to run on Macs as well as on iPhones/iPads (they had just done an impressive job with that sort of work for the iPhone to iPad transition in iOS 3.2) - and I thought Google would do the same thing with Android and, by giving it away for free + leveraging their large and growing mobile app catalog, eventually replace Windows.

 

Mobile and desktop development have never been that different - Windows Mobile apps could be ported to desktop Windows with little more than a recompile in some cases. (I did this successfully with our Windows Mobile app at one point) So I didn’t understand and still don’t entirely understand why the market didn’t coalesce around just 2 form-factor-spanning OSes.

 

The 8yo reference wasn’t about the 8yo herself but rather the fact that anything resembling 20% time went away after she was born - much harder to take on experimental potentially-money-losing side projects like a prototype for a Windows port now.

[NinKenDo]

Thanks, that distinction makes me understand the decision making better.

 

I'm guessing the Windows Mobile version is no longer database compatible and therefore couldn't be the basis of a port?

[mikelove]

6 hours ago, NinKenDo said:

I'm guessing the Windows Mobile version is no longer database compatible and therefore couldn't be the basis of a port?

No, any hope of that vanished after we launched 3.0 - it'd be much faster / easier to do a new port now.