Feature Requests: Reader and Updates

[pprendeville]

Mike, any plans to offer users more control in the reader TTS. For example, highlighting a particular section and just reading that section with a repeat/loop option for reinforcement.

This is not so much a request but more of an observation. In terms of the updates, when there's a big update it can sometimes be difficult to spot all the new features. Perhaps some sort of intro when you re-open Pleco after the update in order to highlight new features? For example, the"Hex" button in the colour picker....I don't have a clue what that means or where to find it. Appreciate the slower TTS. Not sure how others feel, just my own 2 cents.

 

[mikelove]

Trickiest thing about that right now is highlighting arbitrary ranges of text in documents other than text files. We don't really have a good way to do drag selection in our web browser overlay yet (used not only in web pages but in EPUBs and DOC files as well) - could theoretically do it via JavaScript but it'd be really slow - and can't even always reliably get the range of text in between two points since on some pages that can end up rather convoluted / jumbled. (this is also why it's taking so long to get annotations in the reader)

We're hoping Apple fixes the (many!) issues in their new WKWebView component (ostensibly a way of embedding a web browser in your app with the full performance of Safari) in iOS 9, which will make the JavaScript option less horrible performance-wise, but if not we'll probably do some slightly convoluted solution using buttons to expand the current selection one sentence or one paragraph at a time.

As for update info, that makes sense but I'm a little wary of it because on a couple of occasions now we've added a new feature / option only to find that it's broken in some way (most recently vertical scrolling PDFs, which were actually added in 3.2.3 but didn't work correctly until .4) - we can immediately modify the version history on iTunes and in the manual after the release, so that we aren't telling people to try out a broken feature, but we can't modify text that we embed in the app, and I'd hate to create a situation where a lot of users cheerfully turn on a new option only to find that it's horribly broken and makes the app start crashing a lot. Would be less of a problem on Android because we can turn around urgent bug-fixes on that in a few hours, but on iOS it takes a week or more to get an update approved so we need every bit of bug mitigation we can get.

So we could probably only do this if we had the ability to fetch update notes from our server, which is a good bit more work to set up.