2.2.13 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[Alexis]

Bug(?): When highlighting a character and selecting 'Search', both on the dictionary and flash card screen, the dictionary search order is not respected.

 

[mikelove]

Bug(?): When highlighting a character and selecting 'Search', both on the dictionary and flash card screen, the dictionary search order is not respected.

What do you mean? Have you configured Pleco to always return to the first dictionary on a new search?

 

[Alexis]

Bug(?): When highlighting a character and selecting 'Search', both on the dictionary and flash card screen, the dictionary search order is not respected.

What do you mean? Have you configured Pleco to always return to the first dictionary on a new search?

Ah yes, My Dict Search Order is set to 'from first'.

 

[mikelove]

Ah yes, My Dict Search Order is set to 'from first'.

OK, that explains it - thanks, shouldn't be difficult to fix.

 

[goldyn chyld]

Sometimes when I delete a word from Flashcards / Uncategorized, the app crashes. Not sure how to reproduce it though...

 

[mikelove]

Sometimes when I delete a word from Flashcards / Uncategorized, the app crashes. Not sure how to reproduce it though...

Can you think of anything the crash-causing words have in common? Where are you generally deleting them, in Organize Cards (Edit / tap on the word / Delete)?

 

[goldyn chyld]

Sometimes when I delete a word from Flashcards / Uncategorized, the app crashes. Not sure how to reproduce it though...

Can you think of anything the crash-causing words have in common? Where are you generally deleting them, in Organize Cards (Edit / tap on the word / Delete)?

Hm, I can't think of anything at the moment. I delete them from Uncategorized / Edit / tap on the word / Delete.

 

[mikelove]

Hm, I can't think of anything at the moment. I delete them from Uncategorized / Edit / tap on the word / Delete.

OK, we'll see if we can turn up anything in our crash logs... thanks!

 

[pravit]

Not sure if this has been reported before, but I sometimes encounter the following issues:

With the GuiFan dictionary enabled, upon selecting a word in the reader and hitting the "Search" button to bring it up in the dictionary view, I am taken to a definition in a different dictionary. Need to cycle through dictionaries to get back to GuiFan. This happens somewhat infrequently but I have noticed it more than a few times, at least once a day. Not sure if it's necessarily related to GuiFan; that's just the dictionary I have set up as the default.

Selecting a word in the reader and hitting the "Search" button to bring it up in the dictionary view sometimes crashes Pleco altogether. More rare than the above issue.

Battery life - not sure if this has anything to do with Pleco, most likely not, but I've been using it a lot for reading lately, and I have noticed my batteries draining faster than I would expect. This is with Night Mode on. I would have thought using the reader and looking up a word every few minutes or so is not particularly battery intensive, but it drains about as fast as if I were constantly browsing the web on WiFi.

This is on an iPad 3 with iOS 6 and latest Pleco installed.

 

[mikelove]

With the GuiFan dictionary enabled, upon selecting a word in the reader and hitting the "Search" button to bring it up in the dictionary view, I am taken to a definition in a different dictionary. Need to cycle through dictionaries to get back to GuiFan. This happens somewhat infrequently but I have noticed it more than a few times, at least once a day. Not sure if it's necessarily related to GuiFan; that's just the dictionary I have set up as the default.

Have you set up Pleco to return to the first dictionary on every new search? If so, this is a known issue and should be addressed in the next update.

Selecting a word in the reader and hitting the "Search" button to bring it up in the dictionary view sometimes crashes Pleco altogether. More rare than the above issue.

That one's news to us - any pattern to this that you can see?

Battery life - not sure if this has anything to do with Pleco, most likely not, but I've been using it a lot for reading lately, and I have noticed my batteries draining faster than I would expect. This is with Night Mode on. I would have thought using the reader and looking up a word every few minutes or so is not particularly battery intensive, but it drains about as fast as if I were constantly browsing the web on WiFi.

Hmm... were these web pages in Chinese? If not, part of the reason for the difference might be that the iPhone generally doesn't reserve a very large portion of RAM for font caching, which means that it has to keep loading Chinese characters from flash memory over and over again; this should actually improve considerably with our new Chinese font, since it's much smaller (and hence much more cache-friendly) than the built-in iOS one.

But there could certainly be some sort of battery draining issue we're not aware of too - we'll add it to our list of items to retest for the big update.

 

[pravit]

Have you set up Pleco to return to the first dictionary on every new search? If so, this is a known issue and should be addressed in the next update.

My dict search order is "From Current".

That one's news to us - any pattern to this that you can see?

No, it's quite random - next time it happens I'll try sending a crash report.

Hmm... were these web pages in Chinese?

I actually use the Reader solely to read text files that I've loaded onto my iPad, so I'm not actively using the WiFi at all when reading - that's why I thought it was strange the battery drained so quickly. But the text files are entirely in Chinese, so maybe that's related to the font caching issue?

 

[mikelove]

My dict search order is "From Current".

Hmm... so you're definitely in Guifan when you're doing the search (you didn't switch to it from a different dictionary in the definition screen) but then you end up in a different dictionary when you switch back? Any chance that other dictionary might have a better / more complete match for the word then Guifan did?

No, it's quite random - next time it happens I'll try sending a crash report.

OK, thanks!

I actually use the Reader solely to read text files that I've loaded onto my iPad, so I'm not actively using the WiFi at all when reading - that's why I thought it was strange the battery drained so quickly. But the text files are entirely in Chinese, so maybe that's related to the font caching issue?

Well I don't think it would be a huge drain, and there could very well be some battery issue in the reader that we're not aware of - knowing the pages were in Chinese would just eliminate one possible explanation.

 

[rdetrano]

I have Pleco Chinese Dictionary on an IPOD. For three years, it has been working great and I use it every day. Just today,I apparently lost the license and am suddenly back to the demo version when I turned on the IPOD. How can I get it back working?

 

[mikelove]

I have Pleco Chinese Dictionary on an IPOD. For three years, it has been working great and I use it every day. Just today,I apparently lost the license and am suddenly back to the demo version when I turned on the IPOD. How can I get it back working?

Go into "Add-ons" and tap "Restore iTunes Purchases."

 

[tiffert]

This may well be an iOS 6.12 issue, but I mention it to bring it to your attention.

Since upgrading from iOS 6.11 to 6.12 my iPhone 3GS battery drains while tethered to my computer via USB. The battery drains from 100% to a sudden shutdown without warning in about 30 min, at which point the phone screen displays the red low battery indicator and is inoperable for about 20 minutes until it wakes up with the charging icon displayed and a charge in the upper twenty percentile. It then charges back up to 100%.

This has happened two nights in a row while using the OCR functions of Pleco, which admittedly drains battery very quickly, but shouldn't (and never did pre-6.1.2) if the iPhone is connected to my computer via USB.

This only happens while using Pleco OCR, and is new since 6.12.

If I don't run Pleco, the battery seems to last as long as it used to untethered under 6.11, and while tethered to my computer via USB I do not see any battery drain.

Apparently, Pleco OCR 2.2.13 and iOS 6.12 do not mix well under these conditions.

 

[mikelove]

This may well be an iOS 6.12 issue, but I mention it to bring it to your attention.

Since upgrading from iOS 6.11 to 6.12 my iPhone 3GS battery drains while tethered to my computer via USB. The battery drains from 100% to a sudden shutdown without warning in about 30 min, at which point the phone screen displays the red low battery indicator and is inoperable for about 20 minutes until it wakes up with the charging icon displayed and a charge in the upper twenty percentile. It then charges back up to 100%.

This has happened two nights in a row while using the OCR functions of Pleco, which admittedly drains battery very quickly, but shouldn't (and never did pre-6.1.2) if the iPhone is connected to my computer via USB.

Hmm... have you noticed Pleco's framerate increase at all along with this update? Does the battery drain occur even with the OCR system paused most of the time? (if it is)

To be honest, developers only have a limited amount of control over battery drain - the main trick we have is to try to make the processor do less, but in OCR, the OS is using something like half of the available processor capacity just to process input from the camera and display it on the screen, which won't go down much regardless of what we do, and we're using pretty much all of the remaining capacity for OCR; letting it idle for long enough to have a meaningful impact on battery life would likely leave OCR running at such a low framerate that you'd be better off with a still image.

But the fact that we ordinarily do max out the processor, and that that appears to have had no ill effect on your 3GS before, leads me to think that this is most likely an issue with power management in 6.1 - the system is letting the processor run at a higher speed for longer than it should and consequently draining the battery rapidly.

Try this: go into Settings / OCR / Live, turn off Motion Detection, set "Max defn update speed" in Lookup Words to 1/2 second, and turn on "shrink big images" if it's not already on - does that help with the battery drain? (this is basically getting Pleco to do the minimum amount of OCR'ing that it can currently be configured to do)

 

[mtc8s]

If I try to move from the flashcard screen to another screen - card information, for instance - it takes approx 30 seconds - is this a common problem, or is it due to the manner in which I've configured my version?

 

[mikelove]

If I try to move from the flashcard screen to another screen - card information, for instance - it takes approx 30 seconds - is this a common problem, or is it due to the manner in which I've configured my version?

We've had one or two other reports of this, but they've all turned out to be related to memory leaks in iOS or in other background applications - does it speed things up if you power your phone completely off and on again?

 

[Shun]

If I try to move from the flashcard screen to another screen - card information, for instance - it takes approx 30 seconds - is this a common problem, or is it due to the manner in which I've configured my version?

We've had one or two other reports of this, but they've all turned out to be related to memory leaks in iOS or in other background applications - does it speed things up if you power your phone completely off and on again?

It can take about 3 seconds on my iPhone 4. When I completely close Pleco and open it again, it is fast again. Naturally, when I reboot the iPhone, Pleco is even faster. Background apps probably take up memory even without memory leaks, quitting Pleco seems to clean something else out, as well.

Time to upgrade to a new iPhone with more RAM.

(PS: How I completely close Pleco? Press the Home button, then double-tap it again, tap-hold Pleco until it jiggles, then tap the red bar in the upper left corner.)

 

[mikelove]

It can take about 3 seconds on my iPhone 4. When I completely close Pleco and open it again, it is fast again. Naturally, when I reboot the iPhone, Pleco is even faster. Background apps probably take up memory even without memory leaks, quitting Pleco seems to clean something else out, as well.

But after you reboot the phone, does Pleco stay fast for a while, or does it slow down even if you're just staying within it? Also, do you do a lot of flashcard exports or database backups?