Proving that we're still not completely focused on iPhone development, the first test release for Pleco 2.0.2 is available here:
http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd202b1.zip
Not quite as many improvements as 2.0.1, but some nice and oft-requested little tweaks at least, and fixes for a couple of longstanding issues.
Please back up your flashcards and user dictionaries before trying out this beta - it seems pretty stable but we don't want anyone losing their data. See backup instructions here for Windows Mobile or here for Palm OS.
To update on Palm, just install the updated application file to your handheld and it'll replace the regular 2.0.1 one. On Windows Mobile, exit Pleco completely with the Quit command in the Dict menu, then connect your handheld to your desktop, go into its memory through My Computer and copy the updated Pleco application file into your \\Program Files\Pleco folder (My Computer, Mobile Device, My Windows Mobile-Based Device, Program Files, Pleco on XP, or on Vista, My Computer, (your handheld's name), /, Program Files, Pleco), replacing the version that's already there. Copy the file from the "wm2003" folder if your handheld is running Windows Mobile 2003, or the "wm5" folder if your handheld is running Windows Mobile 5 or 6.
We're mostly done adding new features for 2.0.2, but we're certainly still hoping to fix a few more bugs, and we've probably also introduced a couple of new ones with all of the new features in this release.
FEATURES ADDED
-- made a tiny tweak to the font rendering code on Palm OS which had a MASSIVE impact on performance - it's literally an order of magnitude faster for long entries, 21st Century entries that used to take 10 or 20 seconds to load can now load in under 2.
-- enabled control resizing in the Input dialog on Windows Mobile, so the controls in there will now expand to fill the available space on portrait / landscape displays (as they already do on Palm)
-- also in the Windows Mobile input dialog, the "left-handed" setting now applies to the placement of the clear / backspace buttons next to the input field, so now those will appear on the left side in left-handed mode (making them easier to hit with a stylus)
-- on Windows Mobile, upgraded the handwriting "auto-enter" option to highlight the character it's just automatically entered, which means that the handwriting "instant" and auto-enter options can now be combined, allowing you to have the recognizer's best guess about a character appear in the Input Field after each stroke as you draw it. This only works in the Input dialog, however, not yet on the main screen.
-- added an optimization for single-character lookups in the document reader which uses the Unihan database (if installed) to choose the entry with the most common Pinyin if more than one entry is found (so no more 'd's for 'de', etc)
-- changed the default directory search paths on Palm to replace "/Program Files/Pleco" with just "/Pleco", to fit better with the directory layout for most Windows Mobile installations
-- made the definition scroll up / down button assignments in flashcards part of the default preferences set, both on Palm and WM
-- renamed the "Fwd/Return" button option in flashcard button actions to "Next/Return" - it actually already would advance you to the next card after answering the current one, but we hadn't labeled it to indicate that
-- added an experimental (let us know if it works / causes problems / puts your system in an infinite loop / etc) fix for the problem of fullscreen mode being disabled when turning a Windows Mobile PDA off and then on again with Pleco running in the foreground
-- relabeled "prompt for answer quality" as "show score buttons" in the scoring panel of flashcard advanced settings, and added a popup list to let you choose the button order - the former "show all" option has now been replaced by three new choices on that list (123456, 654321, and "alternating" for the 2.0.1 behavior of showing 654321 on correct answers and 123456 on incorrect ones)
-- added a "require filled" option to free-answer tests (Tests panel of advanced settings) (also applies in tone practice tests) - with this option enabled, free-answer tests will refuse to score your answer until all of the blanks on the current card are filled in, helpful if you find yourself accidentally tapping the answer button before you're done
-- added a new "head / pron from dictionary" checkbox to the Tests panel of advanced settings; this will cause self-scored (and review-only) cards to pull their headwords / pronunciations from the dictionary entry they link to, preserving (r)s and other bits which get stripped out when they're turned into flashscards
-- added a new "match search length" setting to the Results panel of Preferences - this lets you customize whether Pleco will prioritize search results which exactly match the length of the search query over longer results, e.g. with "进阶" matching a 4-character entry in ABC et al but a 2-character entry in CEDICT / HanDeDict. With this set to "Always", Pleco will always search all dictionaries for an exact length match before accepting a longer one; with "Never," it'll always accept a match in the current dictionary even if it's the longer than the search query; and with "Non-user only," it'll try to find an exact-length match in fixed / non-editable dictionaries, but will accept a longer match in user-created dictionaries (useful because user dictionaries often don't contain single-character entries for the first characters of multi-character words)
-- combined the "Always search in order" and "Search only in current dictionary" options into a single "Search Dictionaries" option - "From Current" is the default behavior, "From First" is equivalent to the old search-in-order and "Current Only" is the equivalent to search-only-in-current dictionary. The two options could never actually be combined (enabling always search in order would disable search only in current) so this just makes that clearer.
-- gave the language auto-detection setting its own menu, adding a new "Hanzi Only" option which automatically switches languages when you enter a search query with Chinese characters but doesn't do so otherwise.
-- shifted the underline on large Palm OS high-resolution fonts up by 1 pixel, to make it easier to see the bottoms of underlined letters
-- split some of the "Display" preferences panel settings into a separate "Fonts" panel on Windows Mobile,
-- added a new option in that "Fonts" panel to not magnify headwords that are greater than a certain length
-- added a new option in the display panel to add a newline between the headword / pronunciation / definition sections of each entry
-- added a check to strip tab characters from flashcard / user dictionary text definition exports
-- added an extra "reset statistics" item to the flashcard session score-change button popup menu; this not only clears a card's statistics, it also removes it from the pool of cards to study if you're using the new limit-unlearned feature, so it's a convenient way to skip cards in that
-- added support for creating bookmarks in clipboard / Send to Reader reader documents, though they won't be saved on exit
-- moved the "store imported defns" option in the Import screen to the "Dict Order" screen, and added a brand new "Definition Source" option - this lets you prioritize whether you want the importer to draw definitions from the file (File Only), dictionaries (Dicts Only), or both (Prefer File to use file definitions when both are available, Prefer Dicts to use dict ones)
-- added a check to strip newlines out of text in XML imports (they screw up the database in all sorts of ways and until we work around that we're removing them)
-- added a check to prevent <scoreinfo> records in imports from importing if their score was blank / set to 0
-- added an error message to the Char Info screen when the Unihan database isn't installed
-- added two new options to the audio file set option in the Misc panel of Preferences, "alt (m 1st)" and "alt (f 1st)" - with one of these options selected, the audio will *start* on the selected gender (male or female) for each new vocabulary word or flaschard, but will then flip to the other gender if you play audio again on the same card / vocabulary word
-- added internal support for allowing users to toggle whether they want headwords in example sentences to be preserved or replaced by ~s, though since we haven't coded up our database files for this yet we won't be adding a preferences setting for it until we do
BUGS FIXED
-- fixed a bug that could cause the syllable 'nv' (with an umlaut) to be interpreted incorrectly if placed after another syllable that ended with a vowel but could end with an n (de/den, ma/man, etc)
-- fixed a bug that could cause pinyin where one syllable ended with 'n' and the next syllable began with 'g' to be converted incorrectly in copy-to-input and when importing from tone-marked (instead of numbered) pinyin text
-- fixed a bug that caused a crash on palm when attempting to open the reader with no document selected (or a blank list of documents)
-- fixed a bug that caused newly-imported cards to have their scores lowered when answered correctly with "scale first increase" selected in the scoring panel of advanced flashcard settings
-- fixed a bug which caused the statistics screen to double-count cards which appeared in multiple subcategories of given category when retrieving statistics for that category
-- fixed a bug with the highlight-calculating algorithm for full-text English searches which would sometimes cause it to highlight the start of another word beginning with the search term rather than highlighting the exact search term
-- fixed a bug that could cause "copy to input" to sometimes fail to look up an entry if that was the last entry you were viewing before backtracking to a previous entry
-- fixed a bug that made the popup definition screen on Palm always use a small font even when the main definition was set to display with a larger font - now both display with the same size, as on Windows Mobile
-- fixed a bug that on Palm that could cause text in edit fields to be duplicated after entering the Input screen with some characters already highlighted
-- fixed a small crashing bug when creating a custom flashcard with a traditional headword and no simplified one
-- fixed editing cards during sessions so that the cards' definitions will now be updated as soon as you return from the Edit Card screen (rather than waiting until the card is loading again)
http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd202b1.zip
Not quite as many improvements as 2.0.1, but some nice and oft-requested little tweaks at least, and fixes for a couple of longstanding issues.
Please back up your flashcards and user dictionaries before trying out this beta - it seems pretty stable but we don't want anyone losing their data. See backup instructions here for Windows Mobile or here for Palm OS.
To update on Palm, just install the updated application file to your handheld and it'll replace the regular 2.0.1 one. On Windows Mobile, exit Pleco completely with the Quit command in the Dict menu, then connect your handheld to your desktop, go into its memory through My Computer and copy the updated Pleco application file into your \\Program Files\Pleco folder (My Computer, Mobile Device, My Windows Mobile-Based Device, Program Files, Pleco on XP, or on Vista, My Computer, (your handheld's name), /, Program Files, Pleco), replacing the version that's already there. Copy the file from the "wm2003" folder if your handheld is running Windows Mobile 2003, or the "wm5" folder if your handheld is running Windows Mobile 5 or 6.
We're mostly done adding new features for 2.0.2, but we're certainly still hoping to fix a few more bugs, and we've probably also introduced a couple of new ones with all of the new features in this release.
FEATURES ADDED
-- made a tiny tweak to the font rendering code on Palm OS which had a MASSIVE impact on performance - it's literally an order of magnitude faster for long entries, 21st Century entries that used to take 10 or 20 seconds to load can now load in under 2.
-- enabled control resizing in the Input dialog on Windows Mobile, so the controls in there will now expand to fill the available space on portrait / landscape displays (as they already do on Palm)
-- also in the Windows Mobile input dialog, the "left-handed" setting now applies to the placement of the clear / backspace buttons next to the input field, so now those will appear on the left side in left-handed mode (making them easier to hit with a stylus)
-- on Windows Mobile, upgraded the handwriting "auto-enter" option to highlight the character it's just automatically entered, which means that the handwriting "instant" and auto-enter options can now be combined, allowing you to have the recognizer's best guess about a character appear in the Input Field after each stroke as you draw it. This only works in the Input dialog, however, not yet on the main screen.
-- added an optimization for single-character lookups in the document reader which uses the Unihan database (if installed) to choose the entry with the most common Pinyin if more than one entry is found (so no more 'd's for 'de', etc)
-- changed the default directory search paths on Palm to replace "/Program Files/Pleco" with just "/Pleco", to fit better with the directory layout for most Windows Mobile installations
-- made the definition scroll up / down button assignments in flashcards part of the default preferences set, both on Palm and WM
-- renamed the "Fwd/Return" button option in flashcard button actions to "Next/Return" - it actually already would advance you to the next card after answering the current one, but we hadn't labeled it to indicate that
-- added an experimental (let us know if it works / causes problems / puts your system in an infinite loop / etc) fix for the problem of fullscreen mode being disabled when turning a Windows Mobile PDA off and then on again with Pleco running in the foreground
-- relabeled "prompt for answer quality" as "show score buttons" in the scoring panel of flashcard advanced settings, and added a popup list to let you choose the button order - the former "show all" option has now been replaced by three new choices on that list (123456, 654321, and "alternating" for the 2.0.1 behavior of showing 654321 on correct answers and 123456 on incorrect ones)
-- added a "require filled" option to free-answer tests (Tests panel of advanced settings) (also applies in tone practice tests) - with this option enabled, free-answer tests will refuse to score your answer until all of the blanks on the current card are filled in, helpful if you find yourself accidentally tapping the answer button before you're done
-- added a new "head / pron from dictionary" checkbox to the Tests panel of advanced settings; this will cause self-scored (and review-only) cards to pull their headwords / pronunciations from the dictionary entry they link to, preserving (r)s and other bits which get stripped out when they're turned into flashscards
-- added a new "match search length" setting to the Results panel of Preferences - this lets you customize whether Pleco will prioritize search results which exactly match the length of the search query over longer results, e.g. with "进阶" matching a 4-character entry in ABC et al but a 2-character entry in CEDICT / HanDeDict. With this set to "Always", Pleco will always search all dictionaries for an exact length match before accepting a longer one; with "Never," it'll always accept a match in the current dictionary even if it's the longer than the search query; and with "Non-user only," it'll try to find an exact-length match in fixed / non-editable dictionaries, but will accept a longer match in user-created dictionaries (useful because user dictionaries often don't contain single-character entries for the first characters of multi-character words)
-- combined the "Always search in order" and "Search only in current dictionary" options into a single "Search Dictionaries" option - "From Current" is the default behavior, "From First" is equivalent to the old search-in-order and "Current Only" is the equivalent to search-only-in-current dictionary. The two options could never actually be combined (enabling always search in order would disable search only in current) so this just makes that clearer.
-- gave the language auto-detection setting its own menu, adding a new "Hanzi Only" option which automatically switches languages when you enter a search query with Chinese characters but doesn't do so otherwise.
-- shifted the underline on large Palm OS high-resolution fonts up by 1 pixel, to make it easier to see the bottoms of underlined letters
-- split some of the "Display" preferences panel settings into a separate "Fonts" panel on Windows Mobile,
-- added a new option in that "Fonts" panel to not magnify headwords that are greater than a certain length
-- added a new option in the display panel to add a newline between the headword / pronunciation / definition sections of each entry
-- added a check to strip tab characters from flashcard / user dictionary text definition exports
-- added an extra "reset statistics" item to the flashcard session score-change button popup menu; this not only clears a card's statistics, it also removes it from the pool of cards to study if you're using the new limit-unlearned feature, so it's a convenient way to skip cards in that
-- added support for creating bookmarks in clipboard / Send to Reader reader documents, though they won't be saved on exit
-- moved the "store imported defns" option in the Import screen to the "Dict Order" screen, and added a brand new "Definition Source" option - this lets you prioritize whether you want the importer to draw definitions from the file (File Only), dictionaries (Dicts Only), or both (Prefer File to use file definitions when both are available, Prefer Dicts to use dict ones)
-- added a check to strip newlines out of text in XML imports (they screw up the database in all sorts of ways and until we work around that we're removing them)
-- added a check to prevent <scoreinfo> records in imports from importing if their score was blank / set to 0
-- added an error message to the Char Info screen when the Unihan database isn't installed
-- added two new options to the audio file set option in the Misc panel of Preferences, "alt (m 1st)" and "alt (f 1st)" - with one of these options selected, the audio will *start* on the selected gender (male or female) for each new vocabulary word or flaschard, but will then flip to the other gender if you play audio again on the same card / vocabulary word
-- added internal support for allowing users to toggle whether they want headwords in example sentences to be preserved or replaced by ~s, though since we haven't coded up our database files for this yet we won't be adding a preferences setting for it until we do
BUGS FIXED
-- fixed a bug that could cause the syllable 'nv' (with an umlaut) to be interpreted incorrectly if placed after another syllable that ended with a vowel but could end with an n (de/den, ma/man, etc)
-- fixed a bug that could cause pinyin where one syllable ended with 'n' and the next syllable began with 'g' to be converted incorrectly in copy-to-input and when importing from tone-marked (instead of numbered) pinyin text
-- fixed a bug that caused a crash on palm when attempting to open the reader with no document selected (or a blank list of documents)
-- fixed a bug that caused newly-imported cards to have their scores lowered when answered correctly with "scale first increase" selected in the scoring panel of advanced flashcard settings
-- fixed a bug which caused the statistics screen to double-count cards which appeared in multiple subcategories of given category when retrieving statistics for that category
-- fixed a bug with the highlight-calculating algorithm for full-text English searches which would sometimes cause it to highlight the start of another word beginning with the search term rather than highlighting the exact search term
-- fixed a bug that could cause "copy to input" to sometimes fail to look up an entry if that was the last entry you were viewing before backtracking to a previous entry
-- fixed a bug that made the popup definition screen on Palm always use a small font even when the main definition was set to display with a larger font - now both display with the same size, as on Windows Mobile
-- fixed a bug that on Palm that could cause text in edit fields to be duplicated after entering the Input screen with some characters already highlighted
-- fixed a small crashing bug when creating a custom flashcard with a traditional headword and no simplified one
-- fixed editing cards during sessions so that the cards' definitions will now be updated as soon as you return from the Edit Card screen (rather than waiting until the card is loading again)