Pleco for Android 3.2.7 Beta 1

[mikelove]

Hoping to only do one beta for this update, but enough has changed that we thought we needed the one at least.

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-150123.apk

List of changes:

• 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.

 

[Yiliya]

Thanks for the update, Mike! I see you even included the hex code support for colors.

There are some problems with the material color themes though.

1) On Kitkat (4.4.4). Selecting Material Orange results in these two (1 2) UI bugs. Other colors are fine.

2) On Lollipop (5.0.2). The above bugs don't appear, however the status bar colors are much darker than they need to be, see the material design guidelines: "The status bar should be the darker 700 tint of your primary color." So let's take your Material Orange theme again, the primary color is 500#FF9800, so the status bar color should be 700#F57C00, however your theme uses 900#E65100, the darkest color in the palette, making the contrast jarring.

 

[alex_hk90]

Thanks Mike. Looks to be quite a substantial update.

 

[Yiliya]

One more annoyance with the theme engine. The highlight color in the word list is too light to contrast with white.

 

[Taichi]

Nice update!
"sort order of categories in Organize Cards" shows transparent dialog on xperia z3 compact

 

[mikelove]

@Yiliya - thanks!

On the status bars, you're quite right - they got notched up to 900 when we were experimenting with darker toolbars (the original plan had been to use darker versions of yellow/orange/etc rather than adding separate black icons, but the results were poor) and we forgot to bring them back down to 700 afterwards.

Re your other comment, we mostly use A100 for list selections but it seems like at least with some colors we'll need something darker.

@alex_hk90 - you're welcome!

@Taichi - argh, that's a nasty one - thanks.

 

[Taichi]

Not sure if this is a new bug, but monitor clipboard occasionally shows a previously searched
term and new one at the same time. Also sometimes shows blank results.

 

[HW60]

There seems to be a problem importing flashcards into a user dictionary. Pleco stops after 10 to 20 records and sends a report (at least 3 times). There is no problem with 3.2.6 importing the same flashcards.

 

[mikelove]

@Taichi - so it appends the new term to the end of the old one? Interesting.

Blank results suggest that the result count in the list is getting out-of-sync with the actual results data - very odd, actually, there's a lot of code in there to make it really hard for them to get out-of-sync. We'll investigate, thanks.

@HW60 - good catch, thanks! Fixed for next release. (in the meantime if you don't want to revert to 3.2.6 you can work around the problem by filling in the simplified along with the traditional field in your imports - just duplicate the text there, once the cards are imported you can use a batch command to remove that unneeded simplified data)

 

[Taichi]

I first copied "袖珍" and got 13 results (lets say a_0~a_12).
then I copied "內指向" which should've returned 3 results (lets say b_0~b_2)
the attached screenshot seemingly shows a_0, b_1, b_2, a_3 to a_12 as blank text.

so it looks as if either the previous results didn't get erased, or the clipboard update triggered the two searches ("袖珍" and "內指向") which resulted in a race condition. (or maybe the previous search results are cached ones?)
I've seen the case where my updated clipboard text filled in the search box, but the results are "Browsed Entries", "History", "Search Tips", "Instruction manual" which is also very odd.

 

[mikelove]

Has to be happening at the UI layer rather than the engine layer - results lists are immutable and there can only be one active one at a time, so it's not really possible that the results from the two searches could have been dumped into the same list. So it must be that 內指向 caused an update which made all the cells from the second one onwards refresh their contents but did not update the first cell or the number of results.

 

[HW60]

@HW60 - good catch, thanks! Fixed for next release. (in the meantime if you don't want to revert to 3.2.6 you can work around the problem by...

Thanks, I still have 3.2.6 on my phone, and moving flashcards and user dictionary between devices is not too complicated.

 

[Taichi]

I see. I'll see if there's any easy way to reproduce it.

 

[HW60]

Looking at my settings I found out, that for Cards Learned the score had changed to ">=0" instead of ">=1000" before (I do not remember that I changed it).
With this setting, the number of Cards Learned is smaller than the number of Total Cards. It seems that the difference comes from the cards never reviewed, though these have a score of 100 in Statistics.

 

[mikelove]

Yes, we don't bother checking to see if a card that's never been reviewed is 'learned.'