Once again extending past a single beta, but a couple more cool features were now ready to include so I think it's probably worth it.
If you previously signed up for beta testing through Google Play, this new beta should show up as an update within a few hours. Otherwise, you can get it:
a) Through Google Play. Sign up for our Android Beta Testing group at:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pleco-android-beta-testing
And then sign up for beta versions of Pleco at:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.pleco.chinesesystem
after which you should be able to get it right from them. (this isn't up yet but should be in a few hours)
b) Directly from our website; APK at:
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-150131.apk
Changes
Beta 2:
Beta 1:
If you previously signed up for beta testing through Google Play, this new beta should show up as an update within a few hours. Otherwise, you can get it:
a) Through Google Play. Sign up for our Android Beta Testing group at:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pleco-android-beta-testing
And then sign up for beta versions of Pleco at:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.pleco.chinesesystem
after which you should be able to get it right from them. (this isn't up yet but should be in a few hours)
b) Directly from our website; APK at:
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-150131.apk
Changes
Beta 2:
- Added a brand new backup / restore mechanism for settings and history; it's listed at the bottom of Settings. This exports data in relatively clean XML, so it's hackable, and one type of hack that might be particularly useful would be to export just your color settings, remove any that are not tone colors, and distribute that file as a sort of "tone color profile" which others can use. (we'll be doing a whole lot more with this in future releases) The format is fully cross-platform, so as of our next iOS update it should also be possible to migrate your settings and history from one platform to the other.
- Added a 'show in dictionary' icon to the top of the flashcard test screen - tap on this button to instantly bring up a dictionary definition screen for the current card. A cool extra feature of this is that it'll also let you rapidly flick through your history of recently reviewed cards in this test by scrolling down with the list scrolling buttons.
- Increased the maximum length of searches in history and the maximum number of saved entries in history.
- Updated our 'show in dictionary' icon (used to bring up a fullscreen dictionary entry from popup reader / OCR / etc, and now also flashcards) to a different design that we hope will be a bit more clear.
- Made spaces at the end of Chinese character searches prevent longer matches (as they already do with English/Pinyin searches).
- Tweaked several of our theme colors for better adherence to Material Design + better readability.
- Made our system for detecting whether or not a copy of Pleco was downloaded from an app store (and should therefore not be updated separately from our website) a bit more aggressive, and added a flag to the version we're uploading to GPlay to totally disable app updates so that any Chinese app stores that both a) rip our app from GPlay without permission and b) don't correctly set the installerPackageName flag on Android will still get the correct no-updates behavior.
- Made the Organize Cards sort option (but not the search option) available in the free version of our flashcard system.
- Fixed a bug that could cause intermittently garbled handwriting input display on some Android 5 devices.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent the handwriting box from retaining its contents on a screen rotate.
- Fixed a few buggy graphics on XXXHDPI devices.
- Fixed a bug that could cause OCR history changes to get out of sync between the history screen and the OCR screen.
- Fixed a bug that caused transparent backgrounds in some dialogs on Android 4.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the currently highlighted section in the sidebar to not match your actual current section.
- Fixed incorrect tint / background colors in the flashcard dictionary switch toolbar.
- Fixed a bug that caused the flashcard + button in the popup reader to fail to update correctly when expanding the selection so that it no longer was a valid word.
- Fixed a crash when importing user dictionary entries with no simplified character field.
- Fixed a bug that could cause garbled text in the headers of some dictionary entries (and possibly even an occasional crash).
- Fixed a few other crashing bugs.
Beta 1:
- Added a new "Day Mode Color Theme" option in Settings / Colors, allowing you to return to something much like our pre-Material-Design theme (light gray toolbars with dark gray icons) or to pick any of the Material Design colors as the basis for Pleco's app theme. Unlike our earlier toolbar color change support, this is a comprehensive reskin - changes colors of buttons, labels, example sentences / links in dictionary entries, it even changes the color of the toolbar in the Lollipop task switcher.
- In service of the above, we've completely overhauled the way our app handles color themeing; lots of things that used to rely on fixed, tint-colored images are now generated dynamically, and down the line we should be able to make our Android app almost as customizable as our iOS app is now. We've also finally added custom tint colors to alerts and dialogs (which were missing them before).
- Added (at long last!) the ability to customize the sort order of categories in Organize Cards. Tap on the sort button next to the magnifying glass button at the top of Organize to enable this. You can sort by anything that you can sort by in Search Cards, can apply a change to a individual category or to a category and all of its children, and can convert a fixed sort order to a custom one if you want to for example sort all of your cards by Pinyin but then adjust that order a bit.
- Added a brand new search filtering feature for Chinese searches (characters + pronunciation included); to use it, just put a # followed by an English word (or phrase) after the Chinese portion of your search. This will filter the results to only include entries in which that English word / phrase appears. For example, "gao#tall" will return only characters pronounced "gao" with "tall" in their definitions. Prefix searches are supported - "ji#chicken" will match not only "ji" but also "jia," "jian," etc - so if you want to limit it to just the exact search term you entered, put a space before the #.
- Added a long-press menu option in the document reader to change the speed of TTS (long-press the megaphone icon and you'll see a selectable list of speeds).
- Added options in Settings / Search Interface to hide the flashcard + edit entry buttons that appear in the search toolbar in two-panel mode.
- Made search results from custom dictionarly groups only show definitions from dictionaries in that group in the definition screen (rather than aggregating definitions from all dictionaries).
- Made user dictionaries and flashcards correctly support digits in headwords (useful for old SMS expressions, military unit numbers, etc).
- Added a "tone skip character" - an inverted question mark ¿ - for user dictionary and flashcard headword and pinyin readings; this is basically a placeholder that eats up a syllable/character on the opposite side, so that tone colors will match up even if (say) you include the number 23 (two characters) in the headword versus the three syllables er-shi-san (you'd write it as 2¿3), or if you have a character with no reading (put a ¿ in its place in the pinyin field) or a reading with no character (put a ¿ in its place in the headword field).
- Added a "jump to appended word" option in Settings / Search Engine which will cause the search results to automatically scroll down to a newly added word if you're entering a sentence breakdown one-word-at-a-time instead of all at once.
- Added XXXHDPI icons, for the sake of people with super-high-resolution phones (currently this means the Nexus 6, LG G3 and Galaxy Note 4, but many more are coming this year).
- Added a stroke count above the radical listing in CHARS.
- Added a hex color input to the color picker screen (and gave it a title matching the preference you're updating so you know which color you're about to modify).
- Added a list of the current tag categories to the duplicate card dialog.
- Added more robust protection against corruption / file format mismatches in saved flashcard sessions, which should result in fewer crashes when updating / reinstalling Pleco with a flashcard session in progress.
- Made OCR remember + restore its last zoom setting.
- Added an option in Settings / Miscellaneous to check for app updates (if you have a version of Pleco downloaded outside of an app store).
- Made Organize Cards default to editing cards instead of categories when editing a category that contains both (matching the behavior on iOS).
- Added a "browse demo" button to demo items in the Installed tab (not just in Paid) in Add-ons.
- Excluded demo dictionaries from the Batch "Remap to dict" menu.
- Started capitalizing the first letter in the edit card / edit entry definition field.
- Added Facebook / Twitter / website / discussion forum links to our About page.
- Updated to a slightly newer version of SQLite for a few % increase in user dictionary / flashcard performance.
- Fixed a whole bunch of crashing bugs, including two nasty ones related to stroke order (one on devices with very old versions of Android, and one on devices with very little free RAM) and one nasty one relating to going back to the OCR screen from a child definition screen, and one which affected users on tablets with restricted profiles.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent user dictionaries from matching correctly against long Pinyin syllables (zhuang and chuang and shuang).
- Fixed a bug that could cause unreliable search results with intelligent segmentation and full-text Chinese searches enabled.
- Fixed a bug that could cause intelligent segmentation to fail to include multi-character results containing characters which don't have their own single-character entries.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the same dictionary group to be searched twice on a query, resulting in significant slowdowns in some cases.
- Fixed a bug that could cause occasional failures to return results from valid full-text searches.
- Fixed a bug that could cause "VARIANT OF" text to appear as part of the first definition for a word instead of above it in cases where the "variant" status applied to all of the definitions.
- Fixed a bug that kept [+] flashcard icons from appearing in some items in the CHARS tab.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the launcher icons from preserving the in-app back behavior in a few specific cases.
- Fixed a bug that could cause some launcher icons to disappear when rebooting a phone with Pleco installed on an SD card.
- Fixed an extra shadow in the dictionary browser screen.
- Fixed a bug that made the definition screen header (uselessly) tap-selectable with category tags visible.
- Fixed a bug that prevented "copy full entry" from working in the long-press menu from the last item in a search results list.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the optional dictionary slider in the dictionary screen to overlap the bottom of the last definition in a way you couldn't scroll past.
- Fixed a bug that kept the dictionary slider from reappearing after switching out of and back into the DICT tab.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the text selection bar to totally overlap the search field (making it unusable).
- Fixed a bug that could cause formatted text copied out of a dictionary entry to be pasted into the search box with its format preserved.
- Fixed a bug that could allow text to overlap the search box clear button.
- Fixed a bug that could make the context menu in Organize Cards available during editing after a move or batch operation (it should always be disabled when editing).
- Fixed a bug that made the edit controls in Organize Cards grey out after a canceled batch operation.
- Fixed a bug that caused audio to play on flashcards when returning to a test from Card Info.
- Fixed a bug that could leave tap-selection boxes visible on characters (and floating over the rest of Pleco's UI) when tapping on the same character repeatedly.
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