Yet another one, but we're hoping we won't have to do any more betas after this; fixes a few bugs from Beta 4 that were serious enough to demand further testing, plus addresses the also-rather-worrisome complaints about audio quality and performance.
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-121201p.apk
TTS Users: You'll need to update the TTS add-on once again (just Update, through the "Updates" tab) once more in order to get it working in this new beta - sorry for the hassle. You can also re-download the old TTS add-on from Beta 3 (see below) and alternate between them.
TTS purchase links: Hui / Lulu
Design Changes
Bug Fixes
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-121201p.apk
TTS Users: You'll need to update the TTS add-on once again (just Update, through the "Updates" tab) once more in order to get it working in this new beta - sorry for the hassle. You can also re-download the old TTS add-on from Beta 3 (see below) and alternate between them.
TTS purchase links: Hui / Lulu
Design Changes
- Brought back the TTS voice from Beta 3 (Lulu) and made this available in our app alongside the new one from Beta 4 (Hui). You'll need to update both for them for either to work (since we've moved a portion of them into their download archives that was previous built into our app), but you can now have both installed at the same time and it'll even (optionally) alternate between them if you do.
Anyone who has already bought our TTS add-on should have both of the listed as purchased, email us if not - we're still debating how to handle pricing etc in the finished version, but basically we decided that since we had both licensed anyway and had already written the code to integrate each of them we might as well keep offering both. - Added a setting (under General / Audio Settings) to configure the text-to-speech system speed.
- Greatly sped up single-character and single-syllable searches by fixing a bug that was preventing them from using our new accelerated indexing system.
- Also greatly sped up all wildcard searches, especially those on some older Android devices with performance-challenged virtual memory systems; this has given a modest speed boost to other search types as well.
- Added an option (under Popup Definition) to auto-play audio after tapping on a word (but only that initial word tap) with the popup reader.
- Made all dictionary group icons use the filled-in / inverted look since it's much more aesthetically pleasing than just a border.
- Cleaned up the rendering of dictionary group abbreviation icons to make them smoother and better centered.
- Increased the tappable area of the popup reader arrow buttons.
- Made macro focus no longer on by default in OCR (since on the majority of phones now it seems to do more harm than good).
- Gave the "tap with two fingers to clear" text an opaque background when the drawing box is transparent, so you don't have the ugly appearance of text on top of other text.
- Added an OCR menu option to create a custom card (so no need to permanently change the "unknown word handling" setting, though that's still an option too).
- Changed our wildcard system so that the standard ? for single character and * for multi-character wildcards are now supported regardless of configuration settings; however, you can still configure additional wildcards as well if you prefer, and to avoid confusing everyone we've left the @ and $ wildcards in as the defaults for those. (though those really only made sense on certain Palm OS keyboards where they were easier to enter than ? and *)
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bunch of flashcard test screen rotation bugs - editable fields should now retain their content and focus correctly on a screen rotation, the drawing box should preserve its contents, and the drawing box should no longer disappear and refuse to reappear after rotation.
- Fixed a bug that prevented tap-holding on the + button in OCR from letting you select a flashcard category.
- Fixed a bug that made it impossible to select a full-text-only dictionary from the tap-hold dictionary menu.
- Made the Manage Dicts / Manage Dict Groups screens save changes more reliably.
- Made the system save clipboard checksums more aggressively so that it should accidentally trigger the clipboard lookup option less often.
- Successfully forced (we think) the built-in keyboards on devices by HTC and Sony Ericsson (among others) to not auto-replace / make suggestions in the search field, in spite of the fact that they ignore the standard Android API for doing this and display suggestions even when our app asks them not to. We also added an option in Settings / Dictionary / Input Methods to use an alternate approach for this (pretending this is a visible password field) on devices where our first workaround doesn't work.
- Fixed a bug that prevented flashcard tests from falling back on TTS when no exact recording was found.
- Fixed a database creation bug that could screw up multi-word full-text searches - update your database files in Add-ons to fix any affected databases.
- Fixed a bug that could cause interfaces to be reset when they weren't supposed to be when rotating the screen on devices running Android 3.0/4.0.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the new task-switching menus from being available in some Settings screens.
- Added an actual error message when Pleco fails to load because of a corrupted code library (a surprisingly common problem on some Android devices).
- Fixed a bug that made it very easy to accidentally create a dictionary group with no dictionaries in it (exiting the dictionary selection screen without saving).
- Fixed a crashing bug in the text file reader.
- Fixed a bug that could cause corrupted display of text containing tabs in the text file reader.
- Eliminated the annoying text encoding prompt that appeared after saving the clipboard to a file.
- Eliminated the "show reader if search string > N" option for startup searches - it made sense back on Palm OS when we originally introduced it, but between our new Reader shortcut icon and Android's "Share" and recent activity switching features it really didn't seem like it was worth having anymore.
- Fixed a bug that caused the clipboard command in the text file reader to copy the wrong data (or none at all).
- Fixed a bug that could prevent the prompt to download audio / OCR from actually downloading audio / OCR if the add-ons screen was already open in the background.
- Fixed the fuzzy rendering of the arrow buttons in the popup reader and stroke order diagrams box.
- Fixed a bug that made the "browse entries" etc items on a failed search still tappable.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the button bar in the Edit Entry screen to remain bright even in Night Mode.
- Fixed a bug that could screw up the search order of 1-character search results with "1-char for 1-char" disabled.
- Fixed (we hope) an issue that kept the keyboard from reappearing when the screen was rotated on some HTC devices.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the dictionary switch button in the compound words screen from highlighting correctly when tapped.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the dictionary switch button in the compound words screen from doing anything at all if a full-text Chinese search was included among your active dictionary search groups.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent the OCR continuous autofocus toggle button from taking effect in some situations.
- Fixed a bug that could make it impossible to click on search results to view them in cases of extremely long result lists.
- Fixed a bug that could add meaningless duplicate entries to the results of some searches (mostly wildcard ones) though these were only visible in the definition screen.
- Fixed a bug that kept the "Searching..." progress spinner from showing up on some older Android devices.
- Fixed a bug that caused the flashcard drawing box to sometimes clear when it wasn't supposed to.
- Fixed a few other rare crashing bugs, including one related to resuming from the background after a long time off.