Advice on updating for a wary updater

[Paul Duke]

Longtime Pleco user here -- back to the Palm Pilot days. Want to ask advice about updating to version 3.

I am a wary updater (in general -- not specifically related to Pleco) these days. I find often I update something and things have changed/regressed in a way that makes me wish I hadn't updated. iTunes 10/11 being a good example, Skype for Mac another, and on and on.

I know Pleco is great software and a great company but I actually use version 2 everyday in my work on my iPad reading Chinese documents for people who don't know any Chinese. In other words, I'm translating for people and Pleco is my most important tool.

So if the new tool has problems it could set me back several days.

Can I get some general advice from people? Is the new version running smoothly? Will it take me long to learn? The single function I use the most is the reader. I load documents (usually via email/then cut and paste, to preserve some of the formatting) and then read. Can the reader now read RTF docs, Word docs, PDFs? That would save me some time, but is not essential.

One thing I am slightly worried about is that we are still at 3.0.0 from what I can tell. I was planning to wait until at least the first update to deal with the more obvious/troublesome bugs.

I read through several pages of the bug report thread. My impression is the update is going over very well. I am interested to give it a try, but would love to hear a specific response or two based on my situation.

I have an old iPhone I'm not using right now. Thinking of updating on that one as a test. But I assume if I sync that phone with iTunes after updating, then it will update the app in iTunes and then the next time I sync my iPad it will be copied over. So I'm even a little hesitant about that. But I guess I'll update to 3.0 the old iPhone via wifi. Then be careful about syncing to iTunes until I really know I'm ready for this.

I know I sound slightly nuts, but in some jobs I truly use Pleco all day long, and one of those jobs starts in two days, so I really can't have this go wrong on me. I'll stay with the tried and true until I know I can learn the new one in less than an hour and it won't crash.

Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

I'm obviously not the person to comment on subjective issues, but to cover a few objective points:

Yes, the reader now supports RTF, Word, and PDF. In general that area of Pleco has been relatively complaint-free - the most significant bugs I can think of in the reader are that Dropbox support is a little wonky (not a regression since we didn't support Dropbox at all in 2.0) and the + button for flashcards is hard to hit, and it doesn't seem like either of those would be likely to affect your translation workflow much.

3.0.1 has taken longer than expected both because of the sheer number of minor bugs and the fact that the biggest sources of complaints tended not to be bugs at all but rather design changes people didn't like. (we've had to totally rewrite the Edit Entry screen now, for example) There wasn't really anything we could fix in a few days that was serious enough to justify fixing in its own update. We expect to have it finished any day now, but thanks to the glut of new apps people are submitting to take advantage of the Christmas rush (never a factor for us - our Christmas bump happens a few weeks later when people go back to school with their new iDevices in tow) and the fact that App Review goes on vacation from the 21st to 27th, we're not optimistic that it will actually be out until the week after Christmas.

As for backups, if you sync your iOS device with the current version with iTunes on your computer, you can go into your iTunes Library / Mobile Applications and back up the Pleco IPA file (Pleco Chinese Dictionary 2.2.14.ipa or something like that) to another safe location and that will give you a backup copy that you can put back even if you end up with a newer copy after you update on your test device.

 

[Paul Duke]

Hi Mike,

Thanks much for your comprehensive reply.

I played with it a little on my old iPhone 4 and it looks good. One reason I was wary about updating, to be honest, was that I've been getting emails describing this update for at least a couple of years -- I'm not complaining; my point is that I was under the impression this would be a hugely radical change in the program. A quick look at it on my old iPhone tells me I think I could basically figure this out in a few minutes. Another reason I was wary is that when you get into the settings, Pleco is just about the most complicated/user-customizable program program that I use with any regularity, so I thought there was potential for having to spend a day or two figuring out settings.

The only quick comment I would make from what I can see is: I add my voice to the chorus (I hope it's a chorus; I saw one or two comments) asking for the simplified/traditional character toggle back on the main dictionary screen. Not only is it incredibly useful as there is more and more business and interaction between Taiwan and Hong Kong and the mainland, but it's also very convenient for those of us who mostly learned one system and slowly transition to another. Going back and forth and testing myself on my knowledge of both is one of the things I do when stuck on the subway or something like it. ;-)

At the very least, it would be really nice to have the option to put it there. It's pretty troublesome to drill through so many menus to switch.

Thanks again for the note and congrats on the update. Your company, your software and yourself are always a class act, in my experience.

PD

 

[mikelove]

Great! (and you're very welcome)

To be honest, you can only get so radical with a Chinese dictionary app - we may push the envelope a little farther with skinning once we drop support for iOS 6 (perhaps around the same time that the first iOS 8 beta shows up), but for a search-driven app like ours, about the only alternative UI layout that's at all popular is to have the search results display in a popover above the definition instead of pushing the definition on a separate screen, and I tend to think that only makes sense when it's acting as more of an auto-suggest (e.g. in an English dictionary where you type in a word and really only want a definition for that word, rather than a Chinese dictionary where you type in a bit of Pinyin and could have dozens or even hundreds of results to sift through).

We also do need to be a little cautious about very radical changes because it didn't make sense for us to launch this as a separate app as some developers making major updates do nowadays - too much traffic / search ranking / etc value associated with our old app ID to try to replace it with a new one. (even if we let people transfer their purchases over for free, as we certainly would have, there'd still be a lot of links and such pointing to the old app) So we had to go into this with goal of making (nearly) all of our old users view this as an improvement, as opposed to making a totally fresh start and letting people who prefer the old app continue on their merry way with it.

Simplified/traditional is indeed a chorus - biggest of all of those bugs-that-are-actually-design-changes, in fact.

 

[denmitch]

As a user, I have found the Reader in Pleco so much better that I have stopped all the copy/paste projects I used to do and am loading files (both ePub and PDF) directing from Pleco and saved in Pleco. I have not used another reader app in over a month. Hope it works just as well for you.

 

[Paul Duke]

By the way, the reason I asked what formats are supported in the Reader is that this is the current text on that issue on the pleco.com homepage: "Look up words in a document simply by tapping on them; currently supports text files and web pages, EPUB / PDF / DOC support coming soon on iOS."

So I assumed there was no PDF and Word support yet.

You shouldn't be bashful about advertising your new features. ;-)

 

[mikelove]

Not about bashfulness but rather about being too busy to update out still-rather-lightly-trafficked website