Feature Request: Send Selected Items to Pleco Via Share Selection

[Alex Karahalios]

iOS has a nifty feature which allows apps to place themselves in the share "menu" so that selected items such as text or photos can be sent to an app. Unfortunately, Pleco does not appear in the share menu. It would be nice to have some entries in the share menu such as

1. Send to Pleco Dictionary - which would look up the selected item
2. Send to Pleco Reader - which would invoke Pleco Clipboard Reader with the selected item
3. Send to Pleco OCR - which would invoke Pleco Still OCR

I'm sure there are other uses for the share menu not mentioned here.

Currently, I am forced to select an item and then copy the item and invoke Pleco. This is not too bad on the iPad, where I can slide the screen over and expose Pleco on the sidebar, although I often have to select the appropriate function, such as Clipboard Reader or Dictionary.

Thanks

 

[mikelove]

Working on an App Extension for this for our big 4.0 update.

 

[ouboss]

Any shareable progress on the app extension and what it would ideally be able to do? I really like android version's screen reader, and ios' lack of a truly similar function is a key reason I won't consider iPhone for my new phone, among other things

 

[mikelove]

It won't be able to do anywhere near as much as Screen Reader, since iOS apps can't superimpose themselves over other apps or extract text from them directly. (unless Apple adds that ability in iOS 11, but that seems unlikely) Apple also restrict background apps severely enough that we can't really do a popup Clipboard Monitor notification - I believe we could do one that would work for a few minutes but then you'd have to reopen Pleco to get it working again. Currently we've come up with two extensions:

a) A Today extension (so you can see it in the iOS sidebar menu or by 3D Touch'ing on our app icon) that looks up text in the clipboard; and
b) A Share extension you can send text or images or web pages or whatever to to pop up a definition or reader or OCR screen on those.

We're thinking of eventually developing an intelligent screenshot text extraction extension too - you'd take a screenshot and then our Today extension would automatically detect that, OCR it, pick the text you were most likely to be interested in (e.g. the bottom-most bubble from the person you're talking to in WeChat) and pop up a little reader for that - but we're a little worried about the impact on battery life (both in its own right and because Apple might have a problem with it).

We've also been trying to figure out a way to run web-based WeChat in our embedded web browser (so you can tap-lookup words) but haven't come up with a good one yet.

 

[Matt P]

An Integration with WeChat would be huge. I'm always copying text from WeChat to see what it actually means in Pleco...

 

[mikelove]

We've actually approached WeChat about this but no luck so far, and no way at the moment for us to do it on iOS without their help. (we can and do offer WeChat integration on Android)