2.2.11 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
You know what to do. Full list of changes is here - the two main new features were both timing-sensitive, Retina iPad support because Apple sold 3 million of them last weekend and support for launching from other apps for the sake of integration with a particular eagerly-anticipated Chinese app made by a company we're friendly with. But some other nice little improvements like PLC (finally!) getting a decent amount of whitespace in entries and audio files (finally!) getting louder and a bit less buggy. And fixes for a number of annoying bugs including the dreaded "repeat incorrect" corruption one.
 

rcloud

举人
Mike,

I am having some trouble with URL launching from other apps. If pleco isn't already open it works perfectly, Pleco opens to the definition of the character with a return button. However, if I use it again without force closing Pleco first, it opens to the HWR screen without a return button.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
rcloud said:
I am having some trouble with URL launching from other apps. If pleco isn't already open it works perfectly, Pleco opens to the definition of the character with a return button. However, if I use it again without force closing Pleco first, it opens to the HWR screen without a return button.

That's odd - have you configured Pleco to open up its input bar on startup? Or made any other changes to startup behavior?
 

rcloud

举人
Ahh, I forgot I did have it configured to open the input and insert the pastebar. I was using it as a workaround for URL launching coupled with Activator.

Thanks for the help, it is working perfectly now!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
rcloud said:
Ahh, I forgot I did have it configured to open the input and insert the pastebar. I was using it as a workaround for URL launching coupled with Activator.

Good to know, though in theory it should be skipping those things when it's launched via a URL.
 

dcarpent

榜眼
Can you explain the reference to "a particular eagerly-anticipated Chinese app made by a company we're friendly with"? Or is this a humorous reference to 2.3?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
dcarpent said:
Can you explain the reference to "a particular eagerly-anticipated Chinese app made by a company we're friendly with"? Or is this a humorous reference to 2.3?

Nope, it's the new Skritter app. In theory I suppose they're a sort of a competitor on the flashcard side, but aside from the fact that they both test you on Chinese our flashcard systems are about as different as they could possibly be, so I'd rather view their app as complementary to our own. Particularly if they put a nice friendly "look up in Pleco" button in it :)

(which is not to say that we aren't going to introduce some sort of drawing- instead of tapping-based stroke order test of our own at some point - we've had a couple of requests for that, and it's a concept that both predates and is used widely outside of Skritter - but even if we added one of those our system would still have far more in common with, say, Anki than with theirs)
 
The handwriting option seems to be missing when I run Pleco on my new Ipad 3.
If I buy the full screen handwriting module will it work. It is important for me to be able to define characters I can't yet read.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
tesnusxenos said:
The handwriting option seems to be missing when I run Pleco on my new Ipad 3.
If I buy the full screen handwriting module will it work. It is important for me to be able to define characters I can't yet read.

Try going into the Pleco "Add-ons" tab and tapping "Restore iTunes Purchases" - that should bring it back.
 

yong_li

Member
mikelove said:
Nope, it's the new Skritter app. ... so I'd rather view their app as complementary to our own. Particularly if they put a nice friendly "look up in Pleco" button in it :)

Hi Mike, glad to here this. I'm really loving beta testing the new Skritter app. I hink you're perfectly right, it's a kind of simbiosis:) I'm looking up words or expressions directly from the Skritter app and I would love to have a "send to Skritter" button as well! Any chance you would also integrate such a button? would be a dream come true...
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
yong_li said:
Hi Mike, glad to here this. I'm really loving beta testing the new Skritter app. I hink you're perfectly right, it's a kind of simbiosis:) I'm looking up words or expressions directly from the Skritter app and I would love to have a "send to Skritter" button as well! Any chance you would also integrate such a button? would be a dream come true...

We've talked to them about it, but I get the impression that right now they're just trying to get the darn thing finished and that adding yet another new feature is the last thing on their minds. ("send to Skritter" would require considerably more coding on their end than ours)

Maybe in a few releases, though.
 

radioman

状元
In doing some testing with Pleco and Skritter, I see that in night mode, the "Return to Skritter" button is Big and White. I know that there is intention to be obvious for the users to find their way back quickly. However, I think that would still be successfully accomplished by having the button as white text on a black background. In this way, its in sync with the night theme.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
radioman said:
In doing some testing with Pleco and Skritter, I see that in night mode, the "Return to Skritter" button is Big and White. I know that there is intention to be obvious for the users to find their way back quickly. However, I think that would still be successfully accomplished by having the button as white text on a black background. In this way, its in sync with the night theme.

I think we should probably just invert it like we do the toolbars, actually, or add it to our list of color configuration options.

To be honest, we added that feature in 2.2.11 in a very quick-and-dirty way so that just in case Skritter launches their finished app before we launch 2.3, there'll be some sort of minimal "look up in Pleco" functionality working when they do. But in general, given the changes to our app launching and dictionary UI code that we've already made (and are continuing to make) for 2.3, any upgrades we make to the Skritter integration functionality in 2.2.x would have to be pretty much rewritten from scratch for that larger update, so we'd really rather not spend any more effort on the 2.2.x version of Skritter integration unless we absolutely have to.
 

radioman

状元
mikelove said:
I think we should probably just invert it like we do the toolbars, actually, or add it to our list of color configuration options.

Makes sense, as well about 2.2.x developments.

Oh, and with regard to Pleco and writing, a while back I commented that using a pen to delete characters when writing was inconvenient as you needed to use two fingers to clear the screen. I was thinking a single tap would be good (and still do). However, Skritter uses a slide up motion to clear the screen. I did not think I would like it but in fact do. It leaves you with your pen toward the top of the writing area and ready to go.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
radioman said:
Oh, and with regard to Pleco and writing, a while back I commented that using a pen to delete characters when writing was inconvenient as you needed to use two fingers to clear the screen. I was thinking a single tap would be good (and still do). However, Skritter uses a slide up motion to clear the screen. I did not think I would like it but in fact do. It leaves you with your pen toward the top of the writing area and ready to go.

Could be worth a try, though in general it seems like very few people use a stylus in Pleco - most of the UI works better with buttons, and the mode-switch to and from a pen is enough of a hassle that people usually don't want to do it too frequently while using an app.
 
I just updated today and I noticed that in the PLC dictionary only, all entries have a ton more white space in them now, like there's a line of white space between every definition and example sentence within an entry. Is this intentional? I don't really care either way, just looks a bit odd since I'm used to the old look.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Unfadeable said:
I just updated today and I noticed that in the PLC dictionary only, all entries have a ton more white space in them now, like there's a line of white space between every definition and example sentence within an entry. Is this intentional? I don't really care either way, just looks a bit odd since I'm used to the old look.

That was by design (we wanted to see how people felt about more whitespace in general) - see this topic for a more detailed discussion.
 

Eddy

举人
Hi, I thought I'd share an observation about remapping flashcards to a dictionary.

About every other day when I finish learning a batch of new characters I upload updated flashcard categories and also an updated custom dictionary. The updated dictionary I remap to the updated flashcard categories via: Flashcards / Organize Cards, Select a category, eg "HSK Vocab Studied So Far" in my case, then Edit / All / Batch, remap to my custom HSK Dictionary. So far so good.

It gets a bit tricky when also working with a second custom dictionary, in my case a Radicals Dictionary. This dictionary I map onto a "Radicals Studied So Far" category. Some of the characters in the Radicals category are standalone characters that overlap with the HSK card categories.

I was expecting that when I remap my Radicals category cards to the custom Radicals Dictionary that only the cards in that category would be remapped. However, what I am finding is that when remapping to a custom dictionary *all* the cards in the selected category are remapped to that dictionary regardless of what category they belong to. For example, when I just remapped the updated Radicals cards to the updated Radicals Dictionary and afterwards review cards in an HSK category I will see the Radicals definition iso the HSK definition for cards that overlap.

Not a big problem but I guess it is something to be aware of when using multiple custom dictionaries. Perhaps worth noting in the user manual (I could not find a mention of it)?

Hope this helps,
cheers

PS - on an entirely different note, you have my vote for introducing a Pleco iOS drawing- instead of tapping-based stroke order testing module (similar to skritter's about to be launched app)!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Eddy said:
I was expecting that when I remap my Radicals category cards to the custom Radicals Dictionary that only the cards in that category would be remapped. However, what I am finding is that when remapping to a custom dictionary *all* the cards in the selected category are remapped to that dictionary regardless of what category they belong to. For example, when I just remapped the updated Radicals cards to the updated Radicals Dictionary and afterwards review cards in an HSK category I will see the Radicals definition iso the HSK definition for cards that overlap.

Not a big problem but I guess it is something to be aware of when using multiple custom dictionaries. Perhaps worth noting in the user manual (I could not find a mention of it)?

Pretty rare use case, but yes, it's probably worth mentioning. In general this is a situation where I'd suggest creating duplicate cards, since it's unlikely we'd ever allow a single card to support multiple definitions depending on which category you load it from (lots of problems with that idea).

Eddy said:
PS - on an entirely different note, you have my vote for introducing a Pleco iOs drawing- instead of tapping-based stroke order testing module (similar to skritter's about to be launched app)!

It's certainly doable - with some minor modifications our existing handwriting module could be made to work quite well for that - but for the moment it seems easier to just work with Skritter; we're already talking about ways we might allow you to sync / share your Pleco flashcard list with their system. We've got so many other projects that we can't possibly cover everything, and ultimately I think we can both do better as collaborators than competitors.
 
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