Beta 3 Bug Reporting

[mikelove]

To be honest, if we were a lot bigger and / or didn't have such an enthusiastic customer base we wouldn't have released any of these betas, we would have waited until we had something that was feature-complete and nearly bug-free, put that out or a month or two of tweaking / compatibility-checking and then hopefully had a finished version. But we were getting enough e-mails literally pleading with us to just release something, however buggy, so that people could get access to a few of the must-have new features (like a C-C dictionary and audio) that we decided to go ahead and release something very early even though it's barely usable yet.

For our purposes, it really doesn't make sense to go through and worry about crashing bugs / compatibility issues / etc until we've got all of the features / interfaces fully implemented; otherwise we'll end up spending lots of time finding / fixing problems that will reappear (or need to be fixed again in an entirely different way) once we add some other missing feature. Hence the lack of stability improvements from Beta 1 to Beta 3. So I'm sorry you decided to try Beta 3; the reason it's posted in that separate thread is because it's so very buggy on Palm (I should put an extra note in about that, actually) and at least half of the people trying it have had experiences similar to yours. We'll certainly make it widely known once we have a beta that we actually think is stable, but for right now it probably does make sense to just clear up everything and stick with the stable version.

Re your feedback, Preferences are definitely going to get cleaned up and many of them indeed do not work at all now, and most of the reader buttons aren't implemented yet either - this is another example of releasing betas not really fitting with our development cycle, it's a waste of time to implement the user interface for something when the underlying design might change. Not sure what's going on with that palette selection screen, that actually does seem to work on our TX here. With Info, are you sure you installed the Unihan character reference database? If that's not installed that could definitely cause Info to crash... potentially might happen on Stroke Order too if that's not installed/unlocked though it should be fine as long as you don't switch into that tab.

 

[gato]

I notice fewer people are trying out the new betas. I think the users are now sufficiently realistic about the betas that it might make to hold off on releasing any newer betas until they are more stable (I guess we are getting close). This way you don't have to spend time answering questions about bugs that you already know about.

 

[gandq]

Dear Mike,

I am sorry to have distracted you from your work with my post. I guess my main motivation was to express my frustration and seeing the long response you wrote, even though it makes things clearer for me in terms of what to expect from a beta, I now feel a bit ashamed.

I am looking very much foreward to the next Plecodict. Already purchased the upgrade long ago - for what other software would one do something like that, buy a product that is far from being finished yet? Shows how great Plecodict already is an how much trust people rightfully have in you.

Keep up your great work!

Cheers,


jo.

 

[mikelove]

gato - well we'd like to get the newly-introduced crashing problems in Beta 3 fixed at least, but yes, I don't think Beta 4 will come out until we really have something that feels reasonably polished. So probably a Beta 3(a) with those crashes fixed on Palm and the new audio/HWR fixes on PPC, and then hopefully in a month or two a Beta 4 that people can really start using.

gandq - thanks! There's no reason to feel bad, I wrote the long response partly because I thought there was still some confusion about what our betas are like (which is mostly my fault, really shouldn't be calling any of these releases Betas however confusing I may have thought the term Alpha would be for some people).

 

[Attila]

PPC question/with list?

Wonderful software! I'm just starting to play with it, and some things don't work as it's a beta, but this is great anyway!!!

As you said it's not stable, I just mention the followings:
- is it normal that the Character info/first tab doesn't show the character itself? (just blank, or if I switch to stroke order and draw it and switch back, the blank space is transparent, showing what was drawn on the stroke order page)
(when I tap on a character, the Char Info pops up immediately, is this configurable?)
- I wish the buttons on the toolbar be smaller (i've got VGA screen), they still take a lot of space I think
- sometimes I switch to landscape mode to have more space for the list/definition page. I guess the sw doesn't recognize it, since it doesn't allow the list pane to have more space to the left side (can't resize to the half of the screen), and so on...

And maybe a big wish I know. The Compounds page is already really a big help!!! Wenlin has (at least for me) an even more useful feature by not only listing the words starting/containing the selected character, but also characters that include that particular characters. It's a killer-usage

Best regards,
Attila

 

[mikelove]

The Character Info glitch isn't normal, but we're aware of the problem - basically the character's sized a little too big for the space and our new and still slightly glitchy text rendering system drops it altogether rather than just clipping it to the space.

Toolbar buttons are a tricky thing to balance because of the wide variation in Pocket PC screen sizes - a Dell Axim has almost twice as much screen area as an HTC Touch yet they're running at the same resolution in some configurations. So in general we'd rather make them too big than too small since it's a lot more annoying to be unable to hit a button accurately than it is to have the button taking up a little more space than it needs to.

And yes, screen flips don't work yet (though if you exit and reopen the software the screen *should* be rearranged correctly for the new orientation) but that's another thing we're working on.

Searching for characters by their component parts is something we'd very much like to add but we won't be able to do so until 2.1 at the earliest - just getting the necessary data set put together will be a bit of a challenge for that.

 

[ipsi]

Flashcards are a bit flakey with the latest Palm Fix:

When importing from a PalmDoc file in internal memory (UTF-8), it sets the creation date as 1-1-70, and they can't be found when searching by creation date (<, =, >).

Importing also seems to ignore categories in the file, and doesn't even assign them the default category...

That's a bit severe. Makes it very hard to use the Flashcards...

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, we know about that one - the schema changes caused some issues with import and we didn't get to fix them in time for beta 3. System should still be usable, though, just a bit tricky to organize (but since another schema change is not too far away you're probably not going to want to spend a lot of time organizing cards anyway).

 

[ipsi]

Fair enough. I'm waiting for the 1.3 -> 2.0 converter before I start using the cards on a frequent basis anyway.

 

[mikelove]

Probably for the best, as I've said before this is one of the reasons why we're not releasing that converter until 2.0 is pretty much done.

 

[ipsi]

Fair enough. I would suggest leaving it until 2.0 is fully done, and you know you won't be making changes. It's also one less program to hear bugs about.

On a totally unrelated note, I've been wondering what the uptake for the 2.0 Beta has been like. While I'm sure you can't disclose specifics, I'm wondering if the number of people ordering the Beta (paying for extras) is less than, about as much as, or more than you expected?

 

[mikelove]

A bit less than expected, actually, which I'm actually pleased about since it means that the numerous warnings about not installing this until it's done have worked better than I thought they would - we've got more than enough people to ensure an adequate test pool and that's really all we wanted, we're quite OK with waiting until we have a finished product before the significant money starts coming in. An added bonus to waiting is that there are one or two Top Secret New Licenses that may be appearing with the finished version, and we'd love to be able to upsell those while people are buying the other new upgrades.

 

[daniu]

Hi Mike!

Want us to salivate?

best regards
Daniel

 

[fplanjer]

Hi,

First of all, I think Pleco 2.0 is great. It runs quite alright on my new iPaq214 (WM6). I understand some functions are missing (magnify, dropdown history in search screen). Overall it looks like pleco 2 is going to be a great step forward from Pleco 1.

One consistent crash I run into thought is when going to the character info screen. If I open the screen and switch really quick to the stroke order or compounds tab, pleco is alright. If I wait to long, or switch from the stroke order or compounds tab to the details tab, pleco crashes. When I then click 'Send' or 'Don't send' error reporting, pleco tries to open the details tab again, resulting in another crash. I can then either reset my PDA, or really fast click on another tab or the "ok" button to close the screen.

I hope this info will help in finishing pleco 2.

regards, Felix

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the note on that. Not sure what might be causing it, though - the iPAQ 214 has such massive amounts of memory that it's really not possible it could be an out-of-memory error, but maybe it has something to do with the still-very-hacked-together VGA resolution scaling...

 

[bodybag77]

I think i found a bug with HWR.
Before post i searched to make sure this topic hasn't already been discussed.
I have an HTC Touch, and something strange happens when I input charatchers with the HWR. When I input the first character everything is ok, i can write it smoothly and it's recognized without problems. When I go to input the second character into the input box, the whole thing become very unresponsive, the strokes became very sluggish and hard, and it became impossibile to write a character (if you push very hard with the pencil you can draw very straight and unnatural lines)

Is this a known issue due to be corrected in the next build? is there any workaround to avoid the problem when i want to search a two or three character word using the handwriting recognition?
Thank you very much for this great software and for your help

Ugo

 

[mikelove]

It has been reported, but not in an easy-to-find way. Basically this is an issue with the HTC's built-in TouchFlo scrolling feature; after the first character, a list of possible matches comes up in part of the screen, and that list contains a scrollbar; whenever TouchFlo detects a scrollbar on the screen it starts trying to capture pen movements as finger scrolling.

We've actually worked around this in Beta 4 by getting rid of the scrollbar (though this doesn't help with handwriting input on the main screen); you can work around it in the meantime by disabling TouchFlo on your phone, which depending on the ROM version can be done either through a control panel or by installing one of a number of registry hack utilities - just do a Google search for "disable TouchFlo scroll" and you should find lots of links.

 

[bodybag77]

Awesome! it worked. Thank you for the quick reply and for the fact you haven't told me "use the search function, because this is an already discussed topic" like in other forums do. I disabled the wheeloffortune-like touchflo scroll, and now it works perfectly. And now i know why i coulnd't use the on screen HWR in the 1.3 version . If someone has the same problem there's a freeware (pocket toolman) specifically designed for HTC that among other things can disable automatically the scrolling feature. Except for the hwr thing, beta3 works more than acceptably on my HTC Touch, some problems in the reader module and a couple of times it crashed heavily forcing me to a soft-reset!
Keep up the great work you're doing !

Ugo