iPhone version: questions/problems

hannes

Member
Hi Mike,

Let me start off with saying that I am another huge fan of the new pleco app for iphone. I have been waiting for its release at least since the beginning of 2009 and must say that it has been worth it.

Still exploring all the functions I tried to follow the description of the document reader manual to bring up small texts and stories through the built in web browser. It says in the manual:

but for now you can just stay on the Pleco home page that comes up. Tap on the "Document Files" link, then on "Essentials," then tap on an interesting-looking title from that list. (we recommend "The True Story of Ah Q" by Lu Xun

Unfortunately after following the 'document files' link there are only two options 'uploads' (0 files in there) and 'upload new files'. There is no 'essentials' link as you suggested in the manual. Perhaps I am in the wrong menue but when I follow the web browser the home page does not offer any links either. Except some pleco text and a google search field. I purchased the complete bundle running on a 3GS.

Thanks for putting me on the right track. I am leaving China for a short Christmas vacation and would like to keep up with reading some Chinese during that time. The option above seems to be perfect for this.

Thanks in advance for your, as usual, excellent support and happy holidays of course!

Stephan
 

sburkle

Member
Unable to install purchased bundle

Just tonight I pulled the trigger on the basic bundle. Unfortunately it got off to a bad start. I managed to fix it myself, but if someone else comes across this issue, hopefully this post will be helpful.

My problem was that the HWR and DocReader hadn't been downloaded. I tried the "appstore method" of click on buy now again, to try to redownload them, but I just received a purchase error message. The other portions of my bundle were listed under demo instead of purchased.

Fortunately, I had read this post earlier: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2105

I took ozajicek's advice and deleted all the demos from the "installed" section of add-ons.

Then I went to Settings>Registered to [YOUR NAME}>Check for new purchases

Then I received a notification that my add-ons were purchased but not downloaded, and would I like to download them. Of course I would. After changing my downloads to the HK mirror, everything zipped right along.
 

cjgait

举人
Enjoying the new version very much. A very elegant implementation.

A couple of things that I think would enhance things:

Making the undo stroke by stroke button in HWR visible by default. I had to do a bit of digging to find it in the menus.

Making the lock orientation persistent (I have to got into settings to lock each session).

Great job!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
hannes - we're still working on putting that page together (that's what the manual's referencing) - goal is to have it up before Christmas. For now, though, an excellent source for Chinese documents is Project Gutenberg - go on there and you should be able to find lots of free Chinese documents.

sburkle - sorry for all of the hassle; from our server logs it looks like your iPhone most likely tried to send the purchase transaction to our server, did so, but the response from our server didn't reach you, so then your iPhone tried the connection again and this time received a response saying the transaction was already processed. To avoid this problem in the future (seems to have only happened to you so far) we'll update that message to make it clear that you should Restore Purchases in that case - that should actually be all that's needed.

cjgait - good points; not sure about making the undo button default (confusing to have the backspace button suddenly change on people), but lock orientation is just a technical issue - we couldn't get it working reliably on startup in landscape mode so we disable it instead.
 

Eggwind

举人
When searching for Chinese text in Baidu through the web browser portal the search query gets obfuscated. Doesn't happen with Google searches. Small issue, but thought you'd like to know. The portal looks promising, and I'm eager to see what plans you have for it. If you can put more links there for mobile-formatted sites with Chinese content it could become a very practical and useful resource. News sites in particular, such as http://tw.m.yahoo.com would be of interest. It would be even more useful if we could somehow read news content without having to select and copy the text we want to read, because that gets annoying.

Actually, have you thought of organizing the portal as a community-built resource?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yeah, it looks like Baidu's expecting input in GB-2312 encoding while Google expects UTF-8. I'm not immediately sure how to fix this (is there a way to specify web page text encodings on a block by block basis?) so for now I've just taken that field out of the front page to avoid confusing people.

Community-building a portal would be interesting, particularly if we could compile a good collection of public-domain Chinese etexts with English introductions / difficulty level ratings / etc. Pretty much all of the Chinese etext repositories we've seen are extremely un-mobile-friendly since the documents are all hard wrapped (i.e., they have carriage returns at the end of each line) - this makes them very frustrating to read on mobile screens where those original lines inevitably end up as two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half lines on a mobile screen and you end up with a lot of confusing and superfluous whitespace.

You don't actually have to copy-and-paste if you enable Live Mode (see the manual) - it's a little buggy / experimental but with cleanly-formatted mobile sites at least it generally seems to work pretty well.
 

cjgait

举人
good points; not sure about making the undo button default (confusing to have the backspace button suddenly change on people), but lock orientation is just a technical issue - we couldn't get it working reliably on startup in landscape mode so we disable it instead.

Actually I have both the backspace and back one stroke button enabled, that's what I mean, having both available by default in HWR mode. Maybe it's just a matter of labeling, though the two concepts are close enough that they are hard to distinguish in the limited space of an icon.

On the orientation, why not use the system a lot of iPod apps use and offer a popup lock button when orientation changes? That way you can immediately lock it if you want but it doesn't interfere with anything or require a lot of menu steps. Or was that what you tried to get and it didn't work?

One other thing I've noticed is that when you move back in a phrase to delete/backfill words then switch from HWR to KEY the cursor goes to the end of the line. Minor, but annoying.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Having separate HWR / Undo buttons seems like it would crowd out the character choices, though - it's really not a good idea to have two rows of buttons on top of each other on iPhone (we've tried it - definitely a bad time - barely even passable the way we do do it in the search / input bar).

A popup lock button would certainly be doable, but it doesn't fix the more fundamental issue of getting the last screen orientation to restore on startup - it's easy when you're always starting up in a certain orientation as in a game, but it's tougher to do smoothly when it's based on a preferences setting without using an undocumented API.

The cursor-jumping issue is a known bug, but also one that's impossible to fix without an undocumented API, sadly, at least not until we add our own custom keyboard.
 

thomashb

秀才
Hi Mike,

first: great first release for the iPhone. Thank you all at Pleco for the possibility to transfer a formerly purchased license! I just had to buy the Stroke Order add-on to have everything I need. I think this is more than fair.

But I have one problem: I do not get any information on the "Details" page. The app just shows the sign I have looked up on top of the page and the headings (like Mandarin, Definition,...). But there is no text below any of the headings. Any idea what I might try to show the information?

Thomas
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We've had a few reports of this but still haven't managed to reproduce it - did you install DeHanDict by any chance? Does it help if you delete that? Also, does this happen everywhere in Pleco or only when accessing Char Info from the document reader?
 

thomashb

秀才
did you install DeHanDict by any chance?

Yes, indeed. I just tried and uninstalled DeHanDict and HanDeDict and the info showed correctly. I then re-installed those two and the info still showed. But after stopping and restarting the app the info is gone again.

Also, does this happen everywhere in Pleco or only when accessing Char Info from the document reader?

I did not use the document reader by now. It happens starting with a normal dictionary lookup, selecting an entry, tapping the sign and pressing 字.

BTW: it does not matter from which dictionary (HDD or PLC) I look up something, just installing DeHanDict seams to be the problem.
BTW2: I just installed the 2.0.5 release, same behaviour there.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Interesting, that makes two reports of this problem now but we've still never been able to reproduce it here. If you reinstall HanDeDict but leave DeHanDict uninstalled, does the problem still come back or does that make it go away?
 

cjgait

举人
mikelove said:
Having separate HWR / Undo buttons seems like it would crowd out the character choices, though - it's really not a good idea to have two rows of buttons on top of each other on iPhone (we've tried it - definitely a bad time - barely even passable the way we do do it in the search / input bar).

A popup lock button would certainly be doable, but it doesn't fix the more fundamental issue of getting the last screen orientation to restore on startup - it's easy when you're always starting up in a certain orientation as in a game, but it's tougher to do smoothly when it's based on a preferences setting without using an undocumented API.

The cursor-jumping issue is a known bug, but also one that's impossible to fix without an undocumented API, sadly, at least not until we add our own custom keyboard.

Thanks for your answers.

I could certainly live with having a pop-up orientation lock that isn't' persistent (there are some that are persistent, Amazon's Kindle app, for instance, but I have no idea on how it is programmed). But hitting a lock when flipping the iPod on startup is definitely much better than the current six finger pokes to get it locked.

On the undo stroke button, I think we may be talking past each other a bit. I'm not talking about adding anything new, just enabling something by default that now is put in place by deep-diving the options. You do lose one character display slot, but backing out strokes is a very good feature, and I don't think most users will find it in the menu system right now. I only knew about it from using it on the PDA version.

On the bug, well, it's a bug. That's life.

Oh, and I'll echo my old refrain: Sure would be nice to have four-corner lookup. Though if the truth be told, with the quality of the HWR on iPhone I use my paper dictionaries with 4-corner very rarely, mainly for rare characters found only in the Kangxi. I just have this inner computer geek who constantly finds it disturbing that Chinese reference books don't use four-corner, relying instead on number of strokes, radicals, and other quaint and painful indexing methods. It reminds me of my personal filing method, really (everything is filed under 'F' for 'filed'. Within that it is arranged alphabetically by height). Not efficient, I'm afraid :wink:
 

cjgait

举人
One other thing I notice is that the ACE dictionary didn't transfer over from PDA, and I don't remember seeing any notes on why. I probably didn't look around enough.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yes, few minor differences but it's based on ACE. (licensing just happens to be different on different platforms)
 

thomashb

秀才
mikelove said:
Interesting, that makes two reports of this problem now but we've still never been able to reproduce it here. If you reinstall HanDeDict but leave DeHanDict uninstalled, does the problem still come back or does that make it go away?

I just tried it: having just HanDeDict installed everything is ok. After installing DeHanDict and restarting the app the bug occurs again. See screen dump:



Maybe that is another problem, but it might be helpful: It looks like there is a bug interpreting some of the codes within HanDeDict, see "&gt" in the screen dump attached.
 

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mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The HanDeDict issue looks like a glitch in our conversion system - we'll fix this for the next database update.

As far as the fields being blank, though, an explanation for that continues to be elusive - does it make any difference if you reset all of your preferences settings to defaults? (Settings / General / Reset all settings to defaults, then immediately exit / reopen Pleco). That might let us tie this to some particular setting you've changed.
 
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