First impressions of 3.99.17

[ctop]

First of all, congratulations to finally get this rolling! Overall, it feels very polished and the attention to details is very much observable.
Here are some points that I noticed:
- Reader: Finally being able to use the keyboard to move around is the single greatest improvement for me. It feels so great and makes reading so much more comfortable.
- Ruby: This is a great idea, I like it a lot. Does it only work for simplified characters? I do prefer traditional characters, so this would be a bit disappointing, especially because I do not see why such a restriction is necessary.
- Characters: On that front, it would be great, if I could somewhere register my preference for traditional characters, so that the priority in the top line of the definitions and the search result list would be reversed. I looked in the settings for something related, but could not find it.
- History: It seems I can't yet see the history of my other devices, like I could in the old version. This might of course be an artifact of the beta testing environment
- French: It is great to be able to search in French, especially since I have the Ricci. However, on the definition screen is no popup -- I seem to remember this was promised when the Ricci came out. It would be a great feature, for non-french speakers.

But as I said, overall it is a Great Leap Forward!

All the best,
Christian

 

[mikelove]

Thanks!

If you set 'Chinese character set' in Settings / Chinese Language to "traditional", that should get that to appear first and with ruby on top of it.

Other device history: we were unaware that feature was still functional; has it actually worked for you recently? We don't support it in 4.0 - we plan to support it again with our future Pleco sync service - but if you've got history from a bunch of devices you'd like to aggregate you can send us history backups from all of those devices and we can combine them for you in a JSON file to import in the new app.

French popups: if you highlight a word in a French definition you can tap the share button and 'look up (system)' to bring up the iOS system dictionary interface, which includes the Oxford-Hachette French-English dictionary as one of its dictionary options. The reader bubble is capable of supporting any language now, but we haven't gotten around to actually encoding a free French-to-English dictionary for Pleco yet - it remains on our to-do list, though, and once we do have it'll only take a few hundred bytes worth of JSON configuration files on our end to build a reader bubble around it.

 

[ctop]

Thanks!

If you set 'Chinese character set' in Settings / Chinese Language to "traditional", that should get that to appear first and with ruby on top of it.

Ok, that is the thing I missed, thank you I guess it is too long since I first set up a Pleco installation.

Other device history: we were unaware that feature was still functional; has it actually worked for you recently? We don't support it in 4.0 - we plan to support it again with our future Pleco sync service - but if you've got history from a bunch of devices you'd like to aggregate you can send us history backups from all of those devices and we can combine them for you in a JSON file to import in the new app.

It still shows up on my other devices, which might be due to the fact that they have not been updated recently. I think it is a nice feature if it works automatically, so that one can smoothly change to another device, but let you have combining them manually by you seems a bit over the top. Looking forward to the sync service

French popups: if you highlight a word in a French definition you can tap the share button and 'look up (system)' to bring up the iOS system dictionary interface, which includes the Oxford-Hachette French-English dictionary as one of its dictionary options. The reader bubble is capable of supporting any language now, but we haven't gotten around to actually encoding a free French-to-English dictionary for Pleco yet - it remains on our to-do list, though, and once we do have it'll only take a few hundred bytes worth of JSON configuration files on our end to build a reader bubble around it.

If it is that straightforward, would it not be possible to make this a user-configurable feature? I'd certainly love to do that myself, rather than relying on the system lookup. It is of course a nice feature that we can check the system dictionaries, but it is a bit of a clumsy workaround and the inline bubble is so much more convenient, IMHO.
All the best,
Christian

 

[mikelove]

If it is that straightforward, would it not be possible to make this a user-configurable feature? I'd certainly love to do that myself, rather than relying on the system lookup. It is of course a nice feature that we can check the system dictionaries, but it is a bit of a clumsy workaround and the inline bubble is so much more convenient, IMHO.

It is user configurable now, in theory - you could create your own French-to-English user dictionary, create the associated search types for it, create a new Reader Screen to use it, and customize the 'entry body' presentation for Chinese Word card types with a formatter to override the reader screen employed for Ricci entries. But that's a lot of complicated steps and not something very many people are likely to do on their own, and I don't think streamlining the configuration file changes does much good if users still have to supply their own French-to-English dictionary, so it feels like the best approach is to wait until we have that ready.