3.2.x Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[rizen suha]

Could consider an option on that - on iOS you can actually drag the selection handles to collapse to a character bit faster.

Candidly, in general this is not something we like to encourage pedagogically - popular Chinese learning is way too character-centric at the moment, when people really ought to be focusing more on words. We don't impose our pedagogical preferences absolutely by any means - we've added a bunch of features we absolutely hate based on user requests - but they do tend to influence our priorities a bit.

just to be clear. the "single character" enable/disable switch should be present on the same tool bars as the arrows (not a global, permanent setting). there _is_ space for one more button on the tool bars, both in portrait and landscape mode. for a beginner like me, who would like to learn characters in the context of words and sentences. being able to traverse a sentence character by character, showing its pop up definition and playing its pronunciation, pleco would be even more useful. thanks, regards

 

[mikelove]

There is space, but we like to keep that bar to 4 buttons because fewer buttons -> easier to hit accurately. Could theoretically consider offering it at least on larger-screened devices though, perhaps with the most critical <- / -> arrows still spaced widely.

 

[rizen suha]

There is space, but we like to keep that bar to 4 buttons because fewer buttons -> easier to hit accurately. Could theoretically consider offering it at least on larger-screened devices though, perhaps with the most critical <- / -> arrows still spaced widely.

in portrait mode, maybe the top bar could accommodate an extra button, more so if this button will be used only occasionally. in landscape mode, currently, the top bar is largely empty. (when i said "tool bars" above, i was actually referring to the top _and_ bottom bars that appear when selecting text [and by which, the arrows appear on the bottom bar]). on the ipad, certainly there is plenty of space everwhere, but, no doubt, it would be a big boon to have this functionality available even on iphone 6 sized devices.

 

[mikelove]

Doesn't really make logical sense to put it on the top bar - on phones, one bar is for moving the selection around and the other is for performing actions on it and that's a pretty clear distinction.

 

[rizen suha]

Doesn't really make logical sense to put it on the top bar - on phones, one bar is for moving the selection around and the other is for performing actions on it and that's a pretty clear distinction.

thanks, i disagree. the main concern should be functionality when this does not collide with usability. in this case, a user will easily be able to learn that the top bar includes multiple types of functionality. a common error is to dumb down interfaces for the sake of simplicity; that is, it is an error when, thereby, the user is forced to dance around to achieve what he wants. my view is that it is essential that useful real estate does not go... unused. thanks, kind regards

 

[mikelove]

Have to disagree with you there - this isn't even just about simplicity, it's about clear thinking; even experienced users will learn to associate one bar with moving around the cursor and another with doing stuff to the selected text. Plus, purely in terms of ergonomics, if you're tapping along on the bottom bar to navigate you aren't going to want to move all the way to the tap bar to collapse the selection to one character; easier at that point just to drag the selection handle, or tap on the |<- button more than once.

 

[rizen suha]

Have to disagree with you there - this isn't even just about simplicity, it's about clear thinking; even experienced users will learn to associate one bar with moving around the cursor and another with doing stuff to the selected text. Plus, purely in terms of ergonomics, if you're tapping along on the bottom bar to navigate you aren't going to want to move all the way to the tap bar to collapse the selection to one character; easier at that point just to drag the selection handle, or tap on the |<- button more than once.

thanks, ok, we disagree. on the ergonomics side: i would be enabling the switch to single character mode for going through one specific sentence, character by character, 5-10 times. that is, for a session of 3 - 5 minutes. then toggling it back to disabled (word mode). actually in a single session, i would probably be processing multiple sentences in this mode (without toggling back, in between sentences, to word mode). that is, the switch would be used much less frequently than the arrows.

 

[sobriaebritas]

a suggestion, for text being highlighted, eg. while being "spoken": the tone colors (if enabled) of the currently highlighted characters or words are not shown. it would be very helpful to (provide an option to) preserve the tone colors while highlighting. this is useful when memorizing characters + tones as these are being spoken. thanks, kind regards

Frankly, since there are so many high frequency characters with different pronunciations and tones, I cannot see the usefulness of tone colors. After all, tones have to do with sound, not with color. By the way, which colors would correspond to, say, 目的地?

 

[mikelove]

@rizen suha - maybe bury that under the 'gear' icon settings screen, then?

@sobriaebritas - I don't entirely disagree, but they're a popular enough feature that we have to take them seriously. Have been part of Pleco for 9 years now - going back to the earliest 2.0 betas on Palm/WM, and even pre-dating the book ('Chinese through Tone and Color') that popularized the idea among learners.

 

[uni421]

Lyrics reader appears broke, it stopped working around two weeks ago for files without album names, now it is simply not working at all.

 

[mikelove]

Are you using the latest version of Pleco? What about iOS, 10.0.3 or 10.1 beta or something else?

 

[uni421]

Are you using the latest version of Pleco? What about iOS, 10.0.3 or 10.1 beta or something else?

Running IOS 10.0.02 and Pleco 3.2.14

 

[mikelove]

Will investigate, thanks - frankly Apple seem to be working pretty hard to make it impossible for us to keep offering this functionality but we'll do what we can.

 

[v0rt]

Hey, Mike. I'm having trouble with bookmarks for a large EPUB in the document reader (10k+ pages in the reader). When I save a bookmark and navigate to it later, it always takes me to the beginning of the chapter instead of the specific page within that chapter. I haven't tested this with smaller EPUBs.

The bookmarks worked for the specific page in the past. I'd guess I noticed the change about two months ago but I'm not sure what the app version was when the problem started.

 

[mikelove]

Will take a look (pretty sure I know which EPUB you're referring to since it's the only one that size we've ever seen and we've had half a dozen or so users comment on our support for it by now) but this may not really be fixable until we migrate over our new non-Apple-web-view-dependent EPUB viewing option in 4.0 or 4.1.

 

[v0rt]

Following up on comment #34. Did some more testing and found the following:

1. Since this problem showed up after a while, I tried to determine whether it was linked to the number of bookmarks. Deleting bookmarks had no effect.
2. Clearing all documents from internal storage then re-downloading does not change the behavior.
3. Any other epubs downloaded show the same behavior: bookmarks go to beginning of chapter, never to actual page. This is true for much smaller epubs the length of a single book.
   
4. Txt files can still be bookmarked normally and will take me to the desired page.

Do you have any suggestions for what I can try other than the foregoing? Any way to save some useful piece of application data? Otherwise, I'm going to delete and re-install the app next to see if that offers any improvement.

 

[mikelove]

Nothing I can think of, must be a bug - what's your device model + iOS version? We can try to reproduce this here.

 

[v0rt]

iPhone 6, iOS 10.1.1. I'm pretty sure the problem started before updating to iOS 10.

 

[v0rt]

Following up on the above. I deleted and reinstalled Pleco without importing/restoring old settings. The behavior from before is unchanged: It is still not possible to bookmark specific epub pages.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks - we've reproduced this now and should have it addressed in our next bug fix update. (last-minute quirk to how iOS 10.something interprets JavaScript)