So we're now ready to unveil the first beta of our giant new update 2.4.0. We're actually developing most of this simultaneously on iOS (and there are a few bits still to be completed on both), so if you're an iOS user envious of this feature list you can be confident that pretty much everything on it is already implemented and working equally well on iOS too (along with a number of other iOS-exclusive things), but given how much easier it is to release public betas on Android we've decided to begin this process there.
New dictionaries are not included yet, though we have updated several existing ones; those updates are incomplete in that they don't yet reflect the new type design that we're still waiting on, but they do reflect many of the other database format changes we're making like our new variant-handling system. Another big item-we're-waiting-on is text to speech; we've got all of the code for that in place - speech icons next to example sentences and everything - but there's a licensing wrinkle in that we've just found a new TTS library we can use that's enough of an improvement over the old one that we think we might like to switch to it. It's a hassle to make a change like that at this late stage, but it's much better to do it now rather then later, since once we start charging people for it and paying royalties we're more-or-less stuck with that library for a while unless we want to a) double-pay royalties or b) force everybody to buy it again.
We're still pondering some of the decisions we've made on search too, so feedback there is welcome - for example, we'd still love to come up with a better way to merge full and non-full-text English searches (which right now are toggled between with a button).
Anyway, here's the download link:
(link removed, see this post to download Beta 2)
You're probably going to want to say "yes" to the bundle file upgrade prompt, since a bunch of things work better with the upgraded files. (we're going back and forth about whether or not to make this a mandatory update in the finished release - we probably won't, since we don't want people who've enabled automated background Google Play app updates to suddenly discover they can't use Pleco, but at the very least we'll put up a variety of annoying alerts until people upgrade)
Change list:
General
Dictionary UI
Search engine
Flashcards
OCR
Reader
Bug Fixes
Most bugs we've covered in incremental minor updates, but a few new ones:
New dictionaries are not included yet, though we have updated several existing ones; those updates are incomplete in that they don't yet reflect the new type design that we're still waiting on, but they do reflect many of the other database format changes we're making like our new variant-handling system. Another big item-we're-waiting-on is text to speech; we've got all of the code for that in place - speech icons next to example sentences and everything - but there's a licensing wrinkle in that we've just found a new TTS library we can use that's enough of an improvement over the old one that we think we might like to switch to it. It's a hassle to make a change like that at this late stage, but it's much better to do it now rather then later, since once we start charging people for it and paying royalties we're more-or-less stuck with that library for a while unless we want to a) double-pay royalties or b) force everybody to buy it again.
We're still pondering some of the decisions we've made on search too, so feedback there is welcome - for example, we'd still love to come up with a better way to merge full and non-full-text English searches (which right now are toggled between with a button).
Anyway, here's the download link:
(link removed, see this post to download Beta 2)
You're probably going to want to say "yes" to the bundle file upgrade prompt, since a bunch of things work better with the upgraded files. (we're going back and forth about whether or not to make this a mandatory update in the finished release - we probably won't, since we don't want people who've enabled automated background Google Play app updates to suddenly discover they can't use Pleco, but at the very least we'll put up a variety of annoying alerts until people upgrade)
Change list:
General
- Switched to the new Holo theme on Android 4.0 devices (and it looks pretty darn cool), and switched from halloween orange to clean Android blue even on Android 2.x devices.
- Also on Android 4.0, optimized every single screen (we think) for day and night mode. (this was not possible on older devices because they didn't support light-themed settings screens)
- Enabled hardware acceleration on supported Android 4.0 devices.
- Eliminated our old launcher apps after we were accused by a competitor of spamming Google Play with them, and replaced them with an option in Settings / General to install shortcut icons that accomplish pretty much the same thing.
- Changed our app's startup mode so that it should now return you to your last location when you launch it from a program launcher icon; if you preferred things the old way, one of the new launcher icons mentioned above lets you always return to the main dictionary search screen.
- Added an "invert back button" option (Settings / General / Startup) to reverse the current back button behavior so that now it will open the keyboard if it's closed / exit the app if the keyboard is open, as opposed to the default behavior of closing it if it's open / exiting the app if it's closed.
- Added support for pronouncing English words through Android's built-in speech synthesizer on compatible devices.
- Updated app icon.
Dictionary UI
- Added options to use custom English/Pinyin fonts as well as custom Chinese ones, and made the custom Chinese font apply in more places (like radical input).
- Switched to the new menu-button-at-the-top-right-corner-of-the-screen UI on devices without hardware menu buttons. (owners of buggy HTC devices without hardware or software menu buttons, rejoice!)
- Switched to a much much prettier font (Tablet Gothic Compressed Semibold by TypeTogether, if you're wondering) for dictionary abbreviation icons.
- Improved our welcome / no results found messages and added a "Waiting" one for long searches.
- Added a dedicated "Dictionary Browser" screen (accessible through Manage Dicts or by tap-holding on a search results entry) to let you view all of the entries in a dictionary in order and (for a user dictionary) easily edit / delete them.
- Added an "always save first result" option (Settings / Dictionary / Main) to save the first entry in the results list to history even if you don't bother tapping on it to view it in detail.
- Added an automatic database update check option.
- Improved the reliability of background file downloads.
- Improved the usefulness of "Components" data in the "Chars" tab of dictionary entries - it should now provide definitions / character searches for a lot of components that were previously missing them. (requires database update in Add-ons)
- Added an option to support "Words" items by frequency when they're set to be merged multi-dict (Settings / Dictionary / Definition Screen Interface / Words)
- Added an option to force the speech recognizer to recognize English instead of Chinese. (Settings / Dictionary / Search / Input Methods)
- Added an option to shrink the text in the search input box. (Settings / Dictionary / Main Screen Interface / Portrait or Landscape)
- On tablets, made the handwriting and radical input areas only take up the bottom half of the screen by default, and added an option (Settings / Dictionary / Search / Input Methods) to switch them back to fullscreen.
Search engine
- Merged multi-dict search now works in all search types and is enabled by default.
- Merged full-text English searches now factor in frequency in their search result ranking as well as relevance and number-of-dictionaries-the-word-appears-in.
- Introduced "Dictionary Groups," which allow you to specify a subset of your dictionaries and perform a merged search that includes them but no others. These are cycled through just like regular dictionaries, and can be configured the same way through their own screen in Settings / Dictionary. You can use this system to (among other things) prioritize full-text English over regular English searches - all of the built-in merged options are listed as groups too. You may want to disable "Use in toolbar" for some (or even all) dictionaries in Manage Dicts in conjunction with this, so that you can very efficiently switch between search types.
- Added / enabled-by-default an option to reset to the first dictionary group if merged search is selected and you've switched to a single dictionary
- Multi-word full-text English searches are much faster, especially when they involve very common words, and all full-text English searches handle partial searches much more intelligently (essentially they match on whatever word is alphabetically first across all dictionaries)
- Chinese wildcard searches are also much faster and are no longer limited to the first few characters of a word
- Full-text English searches are now supported in user dictionaries; you have to manually enable this feature for a particular dictionary in Settings / Manage Dicts, but it will automatically update the index when you add / delete / edit entries after that.
- Added / enabled-by-default an option to intelligently handle regional spelling variations in full-text English searches (Settings / Dictionary / Search Settings / Full-text / Fuzzy English); if you type in "color" you'll also get "colour" matches and vice versa
- Regular English-Chinese searches now return just the results that begin with your search term, rather than giving you every entry from the entire dictionary with the search term simply the top visible row.
- Variants are now handled much, much more intelligently. Though a seemingly rather boring new feature, this was actually the trickiest single part of the whole overhaul: merged searches should be able to intelligently distinguish between unique words and different ways of writing the same word so you'll get fewer unnecessary results, and finally (finally!) most of the definition-less "alternate form of" / "see" / etc entries point to the actual definitions instead of requiring you to tap on a link. This is still a bit buggy for data file related reasons - takes a lot of work to correctly tag variants in all of them - but even in its current form it should be a vast improvement over what we had before.
- English and Pinyin searches will now return a "no results found" if you enter a string that's too long, rather than returning the longest match - the former behavior was responsible for a lot of weird glitches (unwanted toggling between English and Chinese search, for example) and just in general didn't seem like the most logical / intelligent way to handle those cases.
- Searches are now interruptible, the upshot of which is that in some searches you'll find that results come back a lot faster because the system doesn't have to wait for the previous search to finish first.
Flashcards
- Added a simple one-button option to install (without an internet connection) premade flashcard lists; currently limited to HSK but about to support several others as soon as we get the copyright status checked out.
- Flashcard sketch box is now much faster / smoother and lets you operate the reveal / correct / incorrect / etc buttons while it's visible.
- Added an option in Interface to shrink the buttons on the bottom of the session screen.
- "Limit unlearned" option in Card Selection turned into a "Limit new cards" option which will let you specify a maximum number of new cards to introduce per day instead of a maximum number total to have around at one time.
- Added a new option in Card Selection for Repetition Spaced tests to show new cards at the start of the session.
- Added an option in Scoring to show text below score buttons in Rep-spaced to tell you how long the interval will be before the next repetition if you select this score.
- Added a menu command to directly resume the current flashcard session from the main screen on Android 4.0 devices.
- Fixed some buggy settings in Search Cards.
- Added options on Card Info to restore / discard the "dormant" custom definitions that are saved when you convert a card with a custom definition to a built-in dictionary one, and an option to skip those definitions when exporting in Export Cards.
- Added a "view dictionary entry" tap-hold menu command in Organize Cards.
- Improved explanatory alerts when skipping over invalid cards during a session.
- Enabled the "undo" command in the period between tapping on the "correct" or "incorrect" button and choosing a particular score in SRS tests.
- Gave card filter options more intelligent names.
OCR
- Added a "Crosshairs mode" option in live OCR - you can enable it through the corresponding menu command. This should let you OCR without having to manually resize the recognition area, which a lot of people seem to find annoying. We're still tweaking the text detection algorithm (it can get confused by computer monitors on some devices, for example) but in general it's working pretty well and in future releases we plan to combine this with more sophisticated motion tracking to really offer a whole new experience in live OCR - something that both totally eliminates "jitter" and improves recognition accuracy too.
- Greatly improved the usefulness of the OCR continuous autofocus system, which you can enable in Settings / OCR / Live; it now works in macro mode and on pre-Android-4.0 devices, and is tied into the motion detection and character recognition systems so that it will (hopefully) only refocus when needed.
- Added direct clipboard copy commands to the menu bar.
- Killed the annoying motion detection popup the first time you run OCR and made motion detection always on by default.
Reader
- Added a useful little shortcut: if you tap-hold on the "expand" button (|->, second from the left) it will immediately select an entire sentence, and if you tap-hold on it again, an entire paragraph.
- Added optional (Settings / Reader) support for scrolling documents with direction pad buttons, mainly useful on some Sony e-readers which use those button codes for page scrolling.
- Added an option (Settings / Popup Reader) to hide the popup reader search button in case you have a tendency to hit it accidentally and get taken away from your document.
Bug Fixes
Most bugs we've covered in incremental minor updates, but a few new ones:
- Fixed several crashing bugs, including an additional, catch-any-lingering-problems fix for Android 4.1's notorious formatted text crashing bug.
- Fixed rendering issues in the document reader and other places.
- Fixed issue which caused search box sentence breakdowns to be interrupted by punctuation marks
- Fixed issue which could cause erroneous conversions from tone marks back to tone numbers in certain instances
- Fixed issue with flashcard multi-choice definition questions not always expanding correctly