Beta 4 Feedback Thread

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Feedback on the new beta should be posted here. We're not making a whole lot of changes at this point, but if there are any features which you thought were coming in 2.0 but don't see anywhere (not even in the form of a not-yet-working-yet Preferences option) do let us know. And same goes if there are any aspects of the new design that you find annoying / confusing for reasons other than the lack of an instruction manual.
 

Shadowdh

状元
Downloaded and installed, initial impressions are good, I have a few quirks with the reader mainly but I am not sure if thats to do with the fact that my device has the HTC touch utility on it, will test more and then report back... one thing I did notice is that I had to put all the dictionaries and files into one folder otherwise P2 did not give me any entries for any dict... I like the new layout for the stroke order feature... thats just a quickie so far, over all I like it... more later...
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Glad to hear it! Both that Character Info screens and the Input screen should be large-display-enabled by the time we put the finished 2.0 out - Input already is on Palm - but even the current design makes the character a lot bigger than it used to be.

We haven't done any testing with the reader and Touchflo yet, so that could definitely be part of the problem; it's also still a little glitchy in general, adding the popup window option (which we did about 3 days ago) mixed up a few things we're still trying to sort out.
 
Has anyone managed to get fullscreen Chinese handwriting input to work yet?

I am using an HP iPAQ hx2495 and have gone through all of the preference menus, as well as trying to tap and hold on the input text character "入" at the top of the screen, but have not been able to find a way/option to allow fullscreen handwriting input. And, yes, I do have the PlecoHWR.dll installed on my unit in the unit's memory.

Thanks for any help!

Darrol


EDIT: Maybe I should clarify a little. When I say fullscreen Chinese handwriting input, I mean using the stylus to write characters directly on top of the dictionary search page. I have no problems when writing characters using the handwriting screen that pops up when I tap on "入".
 

ipsi

状元
Downloading now (hope work doesn't mind...). Will give my impressions as soon as I can. Sounds good though. How long do you expect for Beta 5? Few weeks? Few months?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
hairyleperchaun - put the recognizer on the bottom of the screen, then drag the resize bar to shrink it to the size of about one row of buttons - that should get it into fullscreen mode. (we really need to put a better interface on that, actually)

ipsi - few weeks, I think; it's pretty much all just surgical little 3-lines-of-code type changes now, though I'm sure we'll find a few more horrible multi-day hair-pulling-out kinds of bugs before we're through.
 
Thanks Mike!

That solved it for me. I am now allowed to write directly on top of the dictionary screen.

You may already be aware of this bug, but I thought I would put it out there anyway. When trying to get the fullscreen handwriting to work, I came across a reproduceable bug following these steps:

1. Preferences
2. Layout Preferences
3. Input palette location: = "Bottom"
4. List Palette location: = "Right"
5. Hide: = "None" on small screen
6. OK
7. Tap on "入"
8. Tap on "the keyboard icon"

The handwriting input palette at the bottom of the screen disappears and is replaced by the resize palette bar. However, no matter how I try to resize the handwriting inpu palette, I am not able to get ti to reappear. The only way I am able to get it back is to go into the "Misc" section under preferences and reset all of the preferences back to default, and then return to the "Layout Preferences" screen and reset the values there to my desired values.

Hope this helps!

hairyleprechaun
 

Shadowdh

状元
Ok after playing some more I have found that I had the encoding in the reader on utf 16 LE which meant the whole thing was a bit skewed as all my text files are in utf8... once I changed that it works fine, even with touchflo re-enabled. I also put the input bar at the bottom of the screen and it works nicely (although I have not fiddled with any of the misc preferences yet so did not reproduce Hairys problem)... I do have one question though, how do I change the font? It might be in there somewhere obvious but I have not noticed it yet... The more I play the more I like...
 

Alexis

状元
One thing I miss is the toolbar button to toggle font size. In pleco 1 I usually used the small font size to get a "bird's eye view" when searching for words then switched the font size bigger to see the characters better when reading the definition in detail. I see there is a preference's item, but this is would like this on a toolbar as I use it a lot.

Thanks!
Alexis
 

ssaito

探花
follow on the hairyleprechaun's comments on full-screen handwriting recognition:
the on-off toggle button seems to be stuck on, so once you set up full-screen you're not able to turn off recognition so you could select text.

thanks,
s
 

bodybag77

秀才
Hi All!!!
Thank you mike for the new beta, after fiddling some hours with my pleco 2.0b4 I've found some things worth to report :

I use HTC TOUCH with touchflo disable to maximize compatibility with pleco.

1) Random crashes looking up characters info and stroke orders, most of the time requiring a soft reset.

2) (that's a bit hard to explain i'll do my best) If i look up for a word, then the definition is displayed, it's quite impossibile to tap on the character (the magnified one, that's to say the looked up word itself) to retrieve character info, stroke order etc. If instead you tap on a character in the definition text, i.e. the example sentence, there are no problems. If you pass to the following or previous entries using the list there aren't problem to tap on the entry.

3) if you search for a less used character, not included in ABC, the search result is negative, you aren't redirected on the unihan dictionary entry, as it was on pleco 1.

4) (Maybe that's a not yet implemented feature, but it might be a bug on my specific device so I'm reporting it) the bookmark function in the reader module doesn't seem to work. On pdb files you can create bookmarks, but you cannot give them a custom name, because in the lowest part of the screen there isn't the WM6 OS icon for the input. In text files you're completely unable to create bookmarks. And more important there's no way to go to a bookmark.

Well, that's all I noticed until now, I hope I said something useful...:)

Cheers
Ugo
 

TroiOi

秀才
Hi Mike,

You rocks. Today I've downloaded beta 4 version and try a little bit. You gives me a very very big surprise when I see the Vietnamese tone in Character Info (it not works perfect though). I hope you can finish it so that I can have Chinese-Vietnamese dictionary.

The way HWR run still makes me a little bit uneasy due to the familiar with Pleco 1 version. The reader rocks. But still, it does not have the capability to read directly from Text file (I wish it can cause I have too many txt files to read :) ). Hope it will run next time.

Beside, if the pop up definition can include one tone like: Vietnamese. Then it's perfect.

Again, thanks Mike for your Vietnamese in Character Info. I'm very glad if I could help you finish this part :)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks for the feedback! Though it seems like I might want to merge the bug report and feedback threads...

hairyleprechaun - didn't know about that one, though the resizer in general is still kind of quirky. That reset preferences button is something we should have added a long time ago...

Shadowdh - ah, that would definitely explain it. The font size can be changed in the Display section of Preferences, there's no way to change the face yet since we're a little worried about what random font faces might do to our new custom font-rendering engine - you may be stuck with ZYSong/Tahoma until 2.1 at least.

Alexis - I think you might have mentioned this before, actually, or maybe someone else did. It was one of the many Options We Didn't Think Anyone Was Using which we took out in 2.0 but since it would only take a few lines of code to add it back in I suppose it might be possible - a bit trickier on Pocket PC where there's no clearly-defined 'big' versus 'small' font, but perhaps it could be a Palm-only option.

ssaito - sounds like another wacky preferences glitch, we'll take a look.

bodybag77 - on #1, does this always happen as soon as you launch that screen or does it sometimes not happen until you switch to the stroke order tab? Any particular pattern to which characters cause problems or is it completely random? On #2, this works fine on our test system - have you changed any of the preferences settings about font sizes or stylus actions? On #3, this is something we didn't get around to implementing for this beta but will definitely have working in the finished version. #4 is just an embarrassing oversight in our part, when you're testing on a device with a keyboard sometimes you forget that not all Pocket PCs have them - we'll make sure to fix this for the next beta.

If the bookmark creation screen was working correctly, you could go to bookmarks by tap-holding on the bookmark button and selecting the bookmark from the menu that pops up, or by tapping on the percentage text and selecting the bookmark from the menu on that screen.

TroiOi - thanks! The Vietnamese data is actually just part of the Unihan database, we haven't done much about it on our end but I'm glad it's proved useful. Good point about handwriting recognition - there was actually supposed to be an option to use the old screen, it seems to have vanished somewhere now but since as with Alexis' font sizes it would take only a few lines of code to enable it we might see if we can; a lot of people would probably feel better with the old-style screen. The reader should have no trouble working with text files, though - what happens when you try to open one? Are you sure you had the encoding set correctly?
 

TroiOi

秀才
Hi Mike,

I try to use GB 2312 text file with file size just about 35K (I have some files more than MB) and it does show nothing. If I try to open file more than MB then it resets :(. Maybe I will try to open UTF-8 next times to see if it works. But I usually use GB 2312 cause it works fine with CJKOS.

Otherwise, I use the prc from ipsi posted earlier and specify UTF-8. The reader works fine. I will consider it.

About the Vietnamese tone in Unihan. I understand now. It still missing some special character when the program try to display. For example: huran = hốt nhiên. But it does show only "ht" without "ố". But it fines :).

And thanks for your prompt response. Hope your customer meeting goes fine :).

BTW, I have heard about the Turtle dictionary but found nothing like that to buy?
 

sfrrr

状元
OK, so I haven't been paying close enough attention--there. I've said it for you.

Aren't there new dictionaries with 2.0? Are they in the beta 4? Are they a figment of my imagination? Or what?

Sandra
 

ipsi

状元
I think the new dictionaries will come out with the finished version of 2.0? I'm not sure, but there's definitely the TCM one and the Tuttle one.
 

bodybag77

秀才
mikelove said:
bodybag77 - on #1, does this always happen as soon as you launch that screen or does it sometimes not happen until you switch to the stroke order tab? Any particular pattern to which characters cause problems or is it completely random? On #2, this works fine on our test system - have you changed any of the preferences settings about font sizes or stylus actions? On #3, this is something we didn't get around to implementing for this beta but will definitely have working in the finished version. #4 is just an embarrassing oversight in our part, when you're testing on a device with a keyboard sometimes you forget that not all Pocket PCs have them - we'll make sure to fix this for the next beta.

If the bookmark creation screen was working correctly, you could go to bookmarks by tap-holding on the bookmark button and selecting the bookmark from the menu that pops up, or by tapping on the percentage text and selecting the bookmark from the menu on that screen.

1) Yep, they seem pretty random. plus now there's a new scenario : sometimes the box of the character info are completely empty, need to restart the app.

2) This problem just disappeared when i started the app last time without touching pref etc. Maybe because i figured out the exact point i have to tap on, that's on the very left of the character (for the first character of a definition this spot is pretty close to the rim of the pda screen, so a little bit difficult to find)

3) thank you please remember to add it on the final version, because it's a very useful feature when the ABC dict fails. ah another question ..will we be able to look up words on the free Adso dict?

4) Thank you for the keyboard, for us keyboard-less. UPDATE : i've created a bookmark in the sample pdb file, of course i had to leave it with the default name, but when i tap hold the bookmark icon and go to the newly created bookmark it direct me to....a wrong page. I put a bookmark at the beginning of the nineth chapter 86% of the document, and when i selected the bookmark it send me to 49%. Instead if i tap on the percentage text, in the select bookmark cascade box there aren't bookmark at all.

Ok..that's all now i return to read 兄弟 by Yu Hua (thanks to Pleco Reader i can read the ebook version comfortably on the bed)

Cheers
Ugo
 
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