2.2.2 + 2.2.3 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Three known bugs to start off with (to save people the trouble of reporting them):

  • Fast forwarding or rewinding in the Lyrics Reader when paused will cause the audio to get "stuck" in fast forward / rewind mode; you can un-stick it by double-clicking on the home button and pausing / resuming playback.
  • The "Open Last Document" link in the document reader has temporarily gone missing; also, after purchasing / activating the document reader and before opening your first document with it, the "Instruction Manual" item in the reader will vanish too. You can still access the instruction manual online, though (we've made it the top link in the web browser home page), and as soon as you open a document you'll have access to it again.
  • App seems to have clocked in at 20.1 MB, which irritatingly enough makes it impossible to download over 3G - we'll fix this in the next bug-fix update, but in the meantime you can update via iTunes or on your device over WiFi.

We didn't think any of these were severe enough to justify resubmitting the update and making everyone wait another week for it, but we've already got all three of these fixed in our internal builds, so we'll submit another update in a few days after we've established that there aren't any other significant bugs in 2.2.2 - if you find any other problems please let us know ASAP, or if there's some particular feature that would work a lot better with a tiny tweak we'd love to hear about that too.
 

jiacheng

榜眼
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

I really like the interface for tapping and adjusting characters in the block text recognizer. It's a huge improvement. But I have noticed that if the image is not totally clear that it can misidentify character boundaries or fail to see characters. It would be really awesome if there was a way to adjust, delete or insert a block where a character should be. This would greatly improve the editing process.

Another thing that is annoying is that when editing the text produced by the recognizer, your changes are lost if you go back to the image to look. it would be nice if you could somehow keep the changes that you made in the editor and also move back and forth. It would also be nice if you could tap and hold on a character in the editor and be able to zoom to that character in the image.

Also, I have encountered times where punctuation was misidentified as a character, but I was unable to enter the punctuation using the handwriting input. It would be nice if you could use other input methods for that.
 
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

The one small tweak that I would really love to see added to the next bug fix patch is the ability to populate the main dictionary search field with the full recognized contents of the OCR recognition window upon returning from an OCR session launched from the main dictionary input panel.

Since OCR is being accessed through the input panel, it seems counter-intuitive that you return from OCR without any "input" to speak of; this feature would make looking up words and entering custom sentence flashcards from books a seamless experience.

I realize that the special "text recognition and input" OCR mode exists, but this mode isn't nearly as useful for looking up words (lacking the definition box) and switching between the two modes is less than fluid.



I've also found the auto-pause OCR feature to be quite effective when using the default zoom setting, however it doesn't seem to take into account the extra jittery video which occurs when using the zoom buttons; it's very hard to get the OCR to auto-pause when at full zoom.
 

jiacheng

榜眼
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Another annoying thing that I noticed is that going into any of the Still Image OCR modes gives an orientation error when I'm holding the phone in any orientation other than upright portrait. I'm not sure what the purpose of this error is since once you are in, you can rotate the phone as you please and it works perfectly fine.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

jiacheng said:
I really like the interface for tapping and adjusting characters in the block text recognizer. It's a huge improvement. But I have noticed that if the image is not totally clear that it can misidentify character boundaries or fail to see characters. It would be really awesome if there was a way to adjust, delete or insert a block where a character should be. This would greatly improve the editing process.

Very good point, yes - just a really dicey UI to get working well (giving people a way to position the new blocks precisely, e.g. - easy with a mouse but really tricky on a touchscreen).

jiacheng said:
Another thing that is annoying is that when editing the text produced by the recognizer, your changes are lost if you go back to the image to look. it would be nice if you could somehow keep the changes that you made in the editor and also move back and forth.

That one I'm not sure how we could do - matching up changes from the editor with changes in the document would be really really hard. So I think editing the text on the image before going into the editor would probably be a safer bet...

jiacheng said:
Also, I have encountered times where punctuation was misidentified as a character, but I was unable to enter the punctuation using the handwriting input. It would be nice if you could use other input methods for that.

Right, we should probably use the version of the handwriting recognizer that does punctuation too (as we do in the document editor / flashcard editor screens).

llammamama said:
The one small tweak that I would really love to see added to the next bug fix patch is the ability to populate the main dictionary search field with the full recognized contents of the OCR recognition window upon returning from an OCR session launched from the main dictionary input panel.

Already can - option is right below "Take over Wild button" after you turn on "Take over Wild button"; only happens if the recognizer is paused, though.

llammamama said:
I've also found the auto-pause OCR feature to be quite effective when using the default zoom setting, however it doesn't seem to take into account the extra jittery video which occurs when using the zoom buttons; it's very hard to get the OCR to auto-pause when at full zoom.

Good point - right now we automatically scale the thresholds for image movement based on the zoom factor (so it correlates with the same distance on the screen), but perhaps we shouldn't be, or at least we should add a way to turn that off.

jiacheng said:
Another annoying thing that I noticed is that going into any of the Still Image OCR modes gives an orientation error when I'm holding the phone in any orientation other than upright portrait. I'm not sure what the purpose of this error is since once you are in, you can rotate the phone as you please and it works perfectly fine.

That's because Apple's picture selection interface only works in portrait mode - it's fine to go landscape after that but you can't select a picture in anything but portrait.
 
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

mikelove said:
llammamama said:
The one small tweak that I would really love to see added to the next bug fix patch is the ability to populate the main dictionary search field with the full recognized contents of the OCR recognition window upon returning from an OCR session launched from the main dictionary input panel.

Already can - option is right below "Take over Wild button" after you turn on "Take over Wild button"; only happens if the recognizer is paused, though.

Oh, great! It really does amaze me how convenient and useful pleco is.. you've spoiled me for all other flashcard applications.

On a side note, though, I think this is definitely one of those unnecessary options which is adding to the settings menu clutter. I have a hard time imagining a reason why someone would turn this feature off if it was on by default, especially since it only takes effect when exiting in "paused" mode and can be cleared with a single tap.

I'm a long time user of Pleco and I've been looking for this specific feature, but since my eyes glaze over when I scroll through the options tab I didn't see this feature until I was told specifically that it existed. I'll admit that I'm as guilty as anyone for helping to add to the laundry list of little features + options, so I'm looking forward to seeing what you're able to do to wrangle in the settings menu in v2.3
 

keyclick

秀才
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Lyric Reader idea...

Love the lyric reader. It's a tremendous addition! I wanted to be able to read transcripts of podcasts, etc while listening, but with the non-multitasking version of ipod touch, it required two separate devices. Now, I can listen, read along, and also look up unknown characters in one application.

My suggestion would be, how about an setting option that would pause the audio playback whenever a character is touched for lookup. Touching again, which removes the popup definition bubble already, would resume playback. I have a hard time keeping my place in reading along with speech... and by the time I look up a character, the audio is far ahead, and i lose my place.

I dont know how much access you have to the built-in itunes player you use for audio playback (ie you can hyjack the pause and play buttons from the player interface), but it seems simple enough if you have that degree of control.

Thanks again!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

llammamama said:
On a side note, though, I think this is definitely one of those unnecessary options which is adding to the settings menu clutter. I have a hard time imagining a reason why someone would turn this feature off if it was on by default, especially since it only takes effect when exiting in "paused" mode and can be cleared with a single tap.

That doesn't help if you're in the middle of entering another search and want to quickly look up something - it might be annoying to have your previous search deleted. At least that's what we were thinking - don't pulverize the users' data unless they tell us to.

keyclick said:
My suggestion would be, how about an setting option that would pause the audio playback whenever a character is touched for lookup. Touching again, which removes the popup definition bubble already, would resume playback. I have a hard time keeping my place in reading along with speech... and by the time I look up a character, the audio is far ahead, and i lose my place.

That's a great idea - quite feasible to implement (we do have that level of control over the system) and it seems like it would be useful for a lot of people. Probably can't make it into 2.2.3 but it'd be a good candidate for a later release anyway.... thanks!
 

jiacheng

榜眼
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

mikelove said:
That's because Apple's picture selection interface only works in portrait mode - it's fine to go landscape after that but you can't select a picture in anything but portrait.

How about just put up a dialog informing you to rotate your screen and an "OK" or even an "OK/Cancel" button, but still go into the picture selection with a single tap. Seems like overkill to require you to re-select the OCR mode for something as inconsequential as having to rotate your screen.
 

scg

Member
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Greetings,

this might be rated as "documentation bug": flashcard priorities are listed as 1 "very high" to 5 "very low", but they seem to have the opposite effect.

I changed the priorities of my HSK flashcards to "very low" for level 6 and "very high" for level 1. In the next few tests (score-based, frequency-adjusted), only "very low priority" flashcards from level 6 came up as new cards. Reversing the priorities had the desired effect of adding HSK level 1 cards first.

(If I could have checked somewhere whether this is a known problem, please let me know -- I only just got here...)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

jiacheng said:
How about just put up a dialog informing you to rotate your screen and an "OK" or even an "OK/Cancel" button, but still go into the picture selection with a single tap. Seems like overkill to require you to re-select the OCR mode for something as inconsequential as having to rotate your screen.

Won't work reliably, I'm afraid - orientation changes and handoffs are a very funny business, one of the weaker points of the iOS programming interfaces in general.

scg said:
this might be rated as "documentation bug": flashcard priorities are listed as 1 "very high" to 5 "very low", but they seem to have the opposite effect.

I changed the priorities of my HSK flashcards to "very low" for level 6 and "very high" for level 1. In the next few tests (score-based, frequency-adjusted), only "very low priority" flashcards from level 6 came up as new cards. Reversing the priorities had the desired effect of adding HSK level 1 cards first.

I just tried to reproduce this problem here and couldn't - the "very high" cards were added to the test first. How have you reconfigured your other flashcard settings from their defaults? Which of the built-in profiles did you start out with?
 

Feilian

秀才
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Hello !

Just a small problem. The block text recogniser really has some problems recognising some ponctuations marks : it always recognise semi-commas as 飞, quotation marks " " are recognised as a different character each time. It is not that important but since the recogniser is doing wonderfully to recognise even (very) long texts, it can be quite long to manually correct all these errors.
Is there already an option that may improve this ?

Thanks for this wonderful program !

Christian Popa
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Feilian said:
Just a small problem. The block text recogniser really has some problems recognising some ponctuations marks : it always recognise semi-commas as 飞, quotation marks " " are recognised as a different character each time. It is not that important but since the recogniser is doing wonderfully to recognise even (very) long texts, it can be quite long to manually correct all these errors.
Is there already an option that may improve this ?

There is a recognizer library mode with better support for punctuation + alphabet characters but we haven't made enabling it a user-accessible option yet - might happen in 2.2.3, though.
 

character

状元
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

The problem is that a lot of beginner's texts have things such as large first characters, subscripts, underlined names, etc. Perhaps work could be done to not process text if it is significantly larger/smaller than the rest of the text in the camera's view.

Handling these sorts of problems are hard work, but the solutions are also likely patentable, which may help you against competitors.
 

johnh113

榜眼
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Dear Mike,

I've always wanted to be able to select pinyin, and now I can. But when I hit the search button it crashes out of Pleco. I click and hold on the pinyin to select it. I get a popup menu with the word search. I click on search and it crashes.

John
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

character said:
The problem is that a lot of beginner's texts have things such as large first characters, subscripts, underlined names, etc. Perhaps work could be done to not process text if it is significantly larger/smaller than the rest of the text in the camera's view.

Handling these sorts of problems are hard work, but the solutions are also likely patentable, which may help you against competitors.

I hate hate hate software patents, honestly - I can't see moving towards a model where they're a major part of our business. There are an awful lot of things wrong with American IP law, but software patents are just plain evil, a huge anti-competitive economic drain that the Supreme Court ought to have abolished a decade ago.

Also, the sort of research this would require is somewhat beyond our abilities anyway - we mostly license complicated algorithmic stuff like OCR engines from other companies, we're not big enough to develop anything like that ourselves. I don't know of any OCR algorithm in existence that does a really good job with mixed / decorated text like that, at least not for Chinese...

johnh113 said:
I've always wanted to be able to select pinyin, and now I can. But when I hit the search button it crashes out of Pleco. I click and hold on the pinyin to select it. I get a popup menu with the word search. I click on search and it crashes.

Yikes, that shouldn't be happening... what text did you select? Could you send me your crash logs? To find those, sync your iPhone with your computer, then go into:

Mac OS X : /Users/(your username)/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/(your device name)
Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\(your username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\Logs\CrashReporter\MobileDevice\(your device name)
Windows Vista / 7: C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Logs\CrashReporter\MobileDevice\(your device name)

to find the logs. (on Windows, that "Application Data" folder may be hidden - choose "Folder Options" from the "Tools" menu, go to the "View" tab and check the radio button to "Show hidden files and folders" to make hidden folders visible.)
 

scg

Member
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

mikelove said:
I just tried to reproduce this problem here and couldn't - the "very high" cards were added to the test first. How have you reconfigured your other flashcard settings from their defaults? Which of the built-in profiles did you start out with?

I've got roundabout 6500 cards, 5000 of which are in the HSK tree. I did not change any flashcard settings except the priorities. Those I changed as follows:

hsk | priority
1 | 3 -> 1 (very high)
2 | 3 -> 1 (very high)
3 | 3 -> 2 (high)
4 | 3, no change
5 | 3 -> 4 (low)
6 | 3 -> 5 (very low)

I did not touch the priorities of non-HSK cards.

The profile is a copy of the "weighted" built-in profile.

Anyway, I'm quite happy now with my "upside-down" priority settings, and no one else seems to have noticed. If I can pin down any factors that caused this, I'll get in touch again. Thank you for your quick response!
 
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

Ok so I just experienced this pretty scary bug while using the OCR just moments ago. All of a sudden the picture got blurry and froze, and there was a slight crackling/pop sound, and it triggered my phone to restart.

I can only guess what led to it, but I suspect it was an overload of data OCR tried to process. I like to make notes in my Chinese texts and sometimes the character(s) get a bit messy with my handwriting above them. Apparently, it presents quite a burden for the OCR to try and figure out some of the printed characters with handwritten notes or whatever stuff around them, which led to this "short circuit" or whatever you could call it?

I'm on iPhone 4, 4.2.1, Pleco 2.2.2.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

scg said:
Anyway, I'm quite happy now with my "upside-down" priority settings, and no one else seems to have noticed. If I can pin down any factors that caused this, I'll get in touch again. Thank you for your quick response!

OK, no problem! We'll keep trying to reproduce this... thanks!

goldyn chyld said:
Ok so I just experienced this pretty scary bug while using the OCR just moments ago. All of a sudden the picture got blurry and froze, and there was a slight crackling/pop sound, and it triggered my phone to restart.

I can only guess what led to it, but I suspect it was an overload of data OCR tried to process. I like to make notes in my Chinese texts and sometimes the character(s) get a bit messy with my handwriting above them. Apparently, it presents quite a burden for the OCR to try and figure out some of the printed characters with handwritten notes or whatever stuff around them, which led to this "short circuit" or whatever you could call it?

It's unlikely that would be it, actually - not really the way the system works; more likely there was just a really obscure bug somewhere, probably a combination of something in the OCR library and something in iOS camera system. Anyway, scary though it may be it's very unlikely there'd be any actual hardware issue - just a particularly ugly crash.
 
Re: 2.2.2 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

I don't know - since the bug occurred when OCR was processing/identifying a character with my handwritten notes above it... But I really do hope it didn't affect my hardware in any way... Do you think it could have had any adverse effect?
 
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