3.2.0 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

As a temporary workaround I'd suggest that you delete / disable as many user dictionaries as you can stand to - that should hopefully get startup to be fast enough that this won't be a problem.
Just to wrap it up so that no-one else wastes as much time as I did trying to work around this problem:

Whether on iOS or Android, even on a fresh install with default settings and no flashcards, adding just a single, small user dictionary, such as Radicals-120605.pqb (212 KiB, approx. 300 entries) and making it active in a custom group will not persist through a restart: the dictionary will inevitably become inactive. If a group had only user dictionaries active, it will be completely gone with no trace it ever existed.

In other words, even one (1) user dictionary is one too many. I don't think this problem can be worked around at all from the user side. Hopefully it's resolved in the next update.

As for me, the solution doesn't really need to involve custom groups at all. The only thing that would be really nice to have as far as I'm concerned is a basic switch between mono- and bilingual dictionaries somewhere on the toolbar, so that I can view the search results separately (C-C/C-E instead of C). I think this is a very practical solution for people with lots of dictionaries and it could even be built-in but since it's not, this is all I ever needed the custom groups for.
 
Sorry it's me again... really a small thing this time.

In a flashcard test asking for pronunciation, if after answering I open the sketchbox and then advance to the next question forgetting to close it first, it then cannot be closed anymore while the keyboard is open, and also the question cannot be answered because the tone marks are covered by the sketchbox, so instead of choosing the tones, I'm writing on them (and even if I switch to the numerical keyboard and input 1-5, the cursor will not advance to the next field, and I cannot click on the input fields either as they're also covered by the sketchbox). A screenshot is attached.

There is a workaround: (i) fold the keyboard down, (ii) press the [字] button - the sketchbox will now go away, (iii) tap the input field to bring the keyboard back. It'd be great though if advancing to the next question closed the sketchbox automatically and/or if the sketchbox could be toggled on/off even with the on-screen keyboard showing.

Thanks for bearing with me.
 

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Shun

状元
Hi Mike, a minor UI glitch:

During a Flashcards test, there are two ways to change the dictionary for a flashcard; one either taps the dictionary abbreviation at the lower right until the desired dictionary appears, then one taps the floppy disk button to reassign that dictionary to the flashcard. I prefer the other way: I tap the right arrow at the lower left to see all dictionary entries at once, then tap the small [+] button at the upper right of the desired dictionary entry to update the flashcard. (Of course, this works only if the default flashcards category is the same as the category currently being tested.) If I do that and go back to the flashcard, the flashcards screen still shows the old dictionary entry. It would be nice to see it updated right away to reflect the change. Thanks!
 
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[...] adding just a single, small user dictionary [...] and making it active in a custom group will not persist through a restart: the dictionary will inevitably become inactive. If a group had only user dictionaries active, it will be completely gone with no trace it ever existed.
Seems resolved on iOS in 3.2.6. Thank you!
 
Some minor bugs I've spotted using Pleco intensively over the past two weeks: as none of them are really serious, I didn't want to make a separate post for each of them so I waited until they accumulate. Listed in the order of decreasing annoyance:
  1. Fill-in-the-blanks pinyin test: proceeding to next question with sketchbox open makes it impossible to close until on-screen keyboard is hidden (already reported this one before, mentioning it again just for completeness)
  2. Fill-in-the-blanks pinyin test: cannot backspace to previous syllable
  3. Fill-in-the-blanks character test: if there is just one stroke written for the second character, pressing "Undo" clears the previous character as well; should just remove that stroke instead (otherwise it's no different from the Backspace button)
  4. Flashcard test: when proceeding to the next question, audio playback is interrupted if it is composed of multiple syllables recorded separately; should just finish playing regardless of the user switching to the next screen;
  5. Reader with an HTML file: position is lost on orientation switch between portrait and landscape
  6. Pop-up dictionary: the "Back" button does not support fallback font, so less common characters are shown as question marks (screenshot attached, the word "Back" is replaced with the entry it points back to):
    Back as Question Mark.png
  7. Fill-in-the-blanks character test: occasionally (rarely) the background will disappear in the character writing area (two screenshots):
    Background Gone 1.png Background Gone 2.png
  8. Fill-in-the-blanks character test: occasionally (very rarely) strokes stop appearing on screen at all
  9. Flashcard test: with the sketchbox on, occasionally the lines drawn will start appearing some 3 cm below where the screen was touched (that's on a 9.7", 1024x768 screen); there is only vertical and no horizontal (left/right) shift relative to the finger position
    (Any of the above three issues can be resolved by closing the Pleco activity and relaunching Pleco but just switching to the springboard and back to Pleco is not enough.)
  10. Fill-in-the-blanks pinyin test: correct answer can sometimes be marked wrong, which probably happens if the previous syllable was not legal pinyin and thus got split into multiple syllables when analyzing the answer (screenshot):
    Correct Syllable Marked as Incorrect.png
  11. Fonts: it appears trigrams cannot be rendered at all (screenshot):
    Trigrams.png
Somewhere between a bug and a feature request:
  1. The character component database could be better. The problem is twofold: (1) the most straightforward immediate component is often not listed but analyzed too far skipping the intermediate steps. Example: [U+21A04, stripped by forum software] is not shown as a component for either 寒 or 塞; and (2) often the information seems to based on vaguely similar appearances but is actually incorrect. Example: in 齋 it's 小 and not 示 that is listed as a component. There are many situations like this, which somewhat limits the usefulness of this whole feature; if you could make Hanwang or whomever you license the component database from to up their game a little it'd be a wonderful as it's a great way to review characters and reinforce their memorization.
  2. The flashcard test screen is somewhat ugly (even more striking as other than that anywhere else within Pleco the design is very pleasant). This part actually used to look better on Windows Mobile. It doesn't matter that much at the end of the day and I very well understand you'd rather do something else with the constrained resources but if you could just get rid of all the fancy backgrounds, beveled buttons and boxes and reuse the customizable color scheme from the dictionary and/or reader with minimal additions. No need to add anything new, just remove all the distracting visual cruft.
  3. The lady's (Mandarin) pronunciation is frequently off with regard to the initial consonant (I'm not talking /v/ vs. /w/, which I know is a regional difference). Not really much of a problem, makes the test more challenging, but I think at least the hissing sound from the background could be removed with some automated processing.
  4. Would be great to improve startup time. The culprit are the PQB files, without them it all happens in the blink of an eye but even with just an empty flashcard database and no user dictionaries it's already 2-3 seconds at least (also on Android).
Feature suggestions, sorted from the least cumbersome to implement:
  1. Organizing flashcards: allow truly alphabetical sort order (or did you just implement it in 3.2.6?)
  2. Dictionary slider: briefly show full name of the selected dictionary in the center of the screen when sliding between dictionaries
  3. Organizing flashcards: show large first letter in the center of the list when scrolling through alphabetically sorted flashcards using the scroll bar
  4. Flashcard test: re-evaluate the filter on each iteration so that an "Endless" test can eventually end when all the flashcards reach a certain score (posted before, repeating just for completeness)
  5. Flashcard test: allow test type to vary based on score
  6. Flashcard details: list and allow easy access to related flashcards, where "related" is defined as either sharing any character with the current card or having the same pronunciation, regardless of any tonal differences
  7. Chinese language version for the interface. Even better, have multiple versions such as: Simplified-China (网络,在线), Traditional-Taiwan (網路,線上), Classical, perhaps Cantonese. I know it's a great load of work but it could all be crowdsourced, and then just add a menu option to switch the languages.
  8. Dictionary: visual browser showing the relationships between dictionary entries as a graph, based on: (a) shared characters, (b) shared pronunciation, (c) synonym/antonym database (could look more or less like the screenshot):
    Visual Dictionary.png
I really don't need a detailed answer (or any, in fact), just hope you can read it and give it some consideration. Pleco is already a great product but everything can be improved and the above is my take on what could be done.

On an organizational note, it would also be a good idea to have an issue tracker for bugs and feature requests, and perhaps allow users to vote on and/or sponsor some features.

Thanks for all the hard work so far!
 
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mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks for all of these.

Bugs: should mostly be pretty easy to fix but a few are due to iOS system limitations we can't do much about (there isn't currently a way to install fallback fonts in a system-supplied button, e.g.)

Bug/Feature: component database does need work, yes. (it's actually ours but cobbled together from open source data and not super tidy) Flashcard screen we punted on redesigning for iOS 7 because we were way behind schedule but then never found our way back to - should hopefully be redone soon, though we may keep a little bit of translucency and just make the background customizable (so it can be something less busy).

Features: we do have alphabetical sort order now, tap on the arrow icon at the top of Organize. "Related" I'm a little unsure about since we need a definition of 'related' that satisfies everyone.

Issue tracker: to be honest I don't think this is a good way to capture what users really want; we'd inevitably end up with only a small subset of users on this, and probably not a good representation of our user base as a whole. We already see some tension from that even just in the informal way we do feedback on the forums now - features that many people here consider high priority take a long time to implement because there's little interest in them among the rest of our customers. So if it took us 2 years to add whatever the most upvoted thing on this tracker was, we'd be furthering the (not inaccurate, but perhaps exaggerated) impression that we take forever to do things even if we were actually working briskly on a lot of other projects that people using this issue tracker system didn't happen to care about.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Also, regarding startup times: on iOS pretty much everything to do with PQB files happens in a background thread, and checking the current version in the system profiler I'm not seeing any signs that they slow down startup; also, our app creates a flashcard database as soon as it starts up, so even if you've just deleted it you'd still be opening an empty flashcard database. So if you're seeing slower iOS startups because of PQB files I'm inclined to think something else might be going on here - are your flashcards on iOS synced on iCloud? Even there they're loaded on a background thread, but iOS might be doing something related to making them available that ties up the main thread.

On Android user dictionaries can sometimes load in the main thread, which is an issue that we'll be fixing shortly.
 
Bugs: should mostly be pretty easy to fix but a few are due to iOS system limitations we can't do much about (there isn't currently a way to install fallback fonts in a system-supplied button, e.g.)
You could just check if a character can be rendered before replacing the "Back" label with it or, if that sounds like an overkill (which it probably is), I think it'd be perfectly fine to keep the button labeled "Back" at all times. It'd actually work better in a way as when the label is replaced with just a single character, the area to tap on becomes very narrow and also, with the label width changing all the time (which moves the menu button as well) it makes it sort of confusing for the "muscle memory."
Features: we do have alphabetical sort order now, tap on the arrow icon at the top of Organize.
What I mean by alphabetical sort order is that for example "jùlí" (距離) should be after and not before "juānkuǎn" (捐款). There are probably some people used to the way it works now, so it could be a separate option under "Sort by."
Issue tracker: [...]
The first benefit of an issue tracker (which could be made read-only) would be that people (such as myself) would not report some "known issues" just because they missed a forum post where it was already discussed. Although you generally tend to fix everything as soon as it is reported anyway, so perhaps this isn't good enough as the sole reason to go for it. But then you could track feature requests there as well and allow people to pledge some money towards what they want to see implemented, which would be a market-based way to prioritize feature requests. Anyway, just some food for thought.
Also, regarding startup times [...] if you're seeing slower iOS startups because of PQB files I'm inclined to think something else might be going on here - are your flashcards on iOS synced on iCloud?
On Android user dictionaries can sometimes load in the main thread, which is an issue that we'll be fixing shortly.
I shouldn't have written about both Android and iOS together, as there are probably different underlying factors at play. I have a pretty much legacy iOS device (iPad2,1) and despite this Pleco is still perfectly usable even with a few large user dictionaries and a lot of flashcards. just takes a couple of seconds to start up (even before I installed all these user dictionaries and flashcards though). If performance ever becomes a problem for me the obvious solution is to upgrade the hardware first. If you can make it launch faster then by all means please do but I shouldn't really be complaining.

On the other hand, on Android (where I have filesystem access) I noticed that the startup was instantaneous when I deleted all the PQB files but even having a single, empty "Pleco Flashcards.pqb" introduced a 2-3 second wait, so it's great to hear about the optimizations you're doing.

(For the record, I don't use iCloud sync. Would love to use a "Pleco Cloud", also syncable with Android.)

Thanks again!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Ah, understood about alphabetical order - we'd probably also want to support that in search results if we supported it in flashcards.

Pledging money towards feature requests isn't really something I want to get into - we may be capitalists to some extent, but I don't want to put is in the position of doing a feature that only one or two wealthy users want at the expense of one that thousands of less wealthy users want. Avoiding duplicate bugs is a fair point, but actually I'm not sure if I'd want to replace users' judgment about whether or not something is a duplicate with our own - very often two people will seem at first glance to be reporting the same problem but actually be reporting two totally different ones.

iOS startup honestly doesn't have a lot more room for optimization at the moment - our own code's role in it (at least on the main thread) is generally down to a small fraction of a second, but we can't speed up iOS' part in it much more than we already do.
 
Very minor font issue with just one stroke in the character 覽 in the regular (not bold) XinGothic font (screenshot attached). Does not affect any compound characters such as 欖.
 

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ZKD

举人
Hi Pleco Squad,

I have a question about blank flaschards. I am a sentence-er and so I make most all of my own flashcards. When I SRS, sometimes the prompt shows up as a blank white card. When I click to reveal, everything is filled out just like normal. Weirdest is that it is not individual cards. Certain cards that were hidden, once I click through anyways despite the blank prompt, will show up like normal in a following test. So it is not the same card that is "corrupted" or anything. It rotates. Any clues here?

You guys rule.

Zak
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks!

No idea about this one - would you mind emailing me a backup of your flashcard database? (and also letting me know what model of iPhone + version of iOS you're using) Thanks.
 
I love the lyrics reader!

It occurred to me though that it might be a handy feature to have the audio track going back a few seconds instead after a pause (while opening up a popup translation for instance).
Could be by default x second or a setting the user can change...

Hope I'm not the only one who would like to have this: )
Thanks a lot: )
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry, not quite sure if I understand this - so it would go back a few seconds but then continue playing? Or would it replay the last few seconds and then stop until you exit the popup?
 
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