fixed what ain't broke

[LantauMan]

Sigh. I must reluctantly express my disappointment with the new Android version. Note that I'm no whiner. I've described Pleco as genius programming in more ways than one. But sadly, I see a case here of fixing what wasn't broke in the first place. I understand that you needed to conform to Google's preferred templates, so though I preferred the old UI, I suppose I'll get used to the new one. But the only advantage I see in the new version is the Cantonese Yale pronunciations. I'll list all the things I find broken that weren't broke before, one at a time. But I'll start with three easy-to-explain ones.

1) Popup definition has no arrow to take user to the dictionary item. This was absolutely crucial to my use of Pleco in the past. To click on a Chinese sentence example (or any definition) and be able to click on the pop-up definition to take me to the full definition page.

2) One-page combined dictionary results. Nice idea. But in practice, not. Note that my main use of Pleco is in conversation, during Skype lessons, in person, or when shopping. I need rapid-fire results in the dictionary, which the last version of Pleco consistently offered. Now it takes 2-5 seconds for the definition screen to load, presumably because it's loading all 5 dictionaries I installed. Nice to be able to scroll down through all the examples and different meanings. And yet, not really any better than the old behavior of clicking the little dictionary icon to proceed through the different dictionaries one at a time. I prefer the speed of loading one dictionary, and switching to others later, over waiting for all five dictionaries to load.

3) Lost the option to keep the screen on indefinitely while using the dictionary. I need that back!

4) Minor typo: In the CC and ABE dictionaries, "liquor" is misspelled as "liqor"

I'll start with these. More later.

Using it on HTC Sensation with stock Android 4.0.3

 

[mikelove]

1) We just changed the icon for that one - it's now four arrows pointing outwards. (makes more sense than the > which was an iOS-specific symbol and confuses even many of our iOS users)

2) That doesn't sound normal - actually on most devices we've benchmarked loading of that screen as slightly faster than in our old app. (in the old version we laid out + rendered the entire entry at the start, now we just render the bit that's on the screen and don't lay out or render anything at all from entries that aren't on the screen)

However, the HTC Sensation is an extremely old device (released more than 3 years ago), near the edge of our minimum system requirements; a couple of things that might help with performance:

a) Create a new dictionary group (Settings / Manage Dictionary Groups) with only the dictionaries you most care about and do your searches in that instead of in [C].

b) Collapse any dictionaries you're not consistently interested in by tapping on the collapse buttons in their headers in the definition screen.

c) Permanently configure the definition screen to only show the first entry and leave the others initially collapsed (Settings / Definition Screen / Dict hiding).

d) Download the open-source DroidSansFallbackFull, DroidSansRegular and DroidSansBold fonts, go into Settings / Fonts in Pleco and install those as custom font files.

3) We got rid of that because there seem to be a lot of third-party apps that can do the same thing more intelligently than our system did - search GPlay for "screen on" and you'll see a bunch of them. They don't seem to require root, nor should they need to based on how Android's auto-screen-off system works, and many of them allow for app-specific configurations and the like.

4) Not seeing this in ABE - any chance you might be using an outdated version of that database? (check the Add-ons screen / Updates) That could actually cause performance problems too.

 

[LinZheFu]

Agree - I am a big fan of Pleco and have caused many other people to use it and purchase tools on it, so I'm a supporter and evangelist, but today I really wish I could go back to the previous version. Was in shock this morning when everything was different, unreadably small, cluttered, and the dictionary button didn't work (apparently because all the dictionary entries are already loaded, which I really don't want at all). Then I saw that the reader wasn't working - the book I had been reading disappeared, apparently because the update reset the location where it looks for files. Fortunately, I was able to navigate back to the folder I had been using, but when I selected my file, I wasn't sure what to make of the message about copying, updating, or deleting bookmarks. But I can at least access my book now, though it is far less readable than before and now I get unwanted line breaks in portrait mode where there weren't any before. Frustrating. Anyway, I was rather frustrated with the upgrade, but have since seen that I can at least make it a little more visible by going into settings and making adjustments to font sizes, etc.

But my main gripe now is the dumping of all dictionaries onto the screen. For Chinese friends and for my own study, there are times when I want the GF or GH Chinese-text dictionaries to show up as the working dictionary, and there are times when I want the German dictionaries or other special dictionaries. I don't want to have to scroll way down for each and every word to see them when I am using them. Likewise, there are other dictionaries that I prefer for various reasons, and don't want to have to scroll down for every word to find them. I don't want all that other information that is just in the way. I want to be able to simply toggle through a dictionary button and choose the dictionary I am working with. Is there some way to get that performance back? This new version does seem to be an example of fixing what was not broken, making it far less convenient and slower (especially when you have to scroll down the screen past lots of unwanted information for every word).

 

[LinZheFu]

By collapsing all dictionaries except the one I want, I can get partway back to what I want. But I have a lot of dictionaries, so when working with, say, the GF dictionary near the end, I still have to scroll when in portrait mode to see it because all the other collapsed dictionaries still waste a line of space each, making the visible working part of the screen much less. Would be nice to be able to hide them completely or make all their names and arrows on a single line. Or add an option in settings to have things work they way they used to in terms of dictionary display.

On the plus side, I very much like the Sentences button and what it does.

 

[mikelove]

Go into Settings / Definition Screen and turn on the "show dict slider" option - that allows for very efficient jumping between dictionaries. You might also consider reordering them in Settings / Manage Dictionaries to put your most used titles on top, and/or setting the "dict hiding" behavior to "hide + open first" or "hide all" so that you'll always start off with nicely collapsed dictionaries.

Another thing that might help would be to create some "dictionary groups" in Settings / Manage Dictionary Groups with useful subsets of your dictionaries; you can switch into one of them on the search screen and get only the merged results from that set of dictionaries / only see definitions from that set on the definition screen. You can also get back the behavior of switching to individual dictionaries in the search screen with a tap by disabling "skip on button tap" for any dictionary you want to be able to access that way in Settings / Manage Dictionaries, but we think for most users the groups are a better bet (since you'll usually want at least one or two dictionaries as fallbacks for whatever you're looking up).

No idea why you'd be getting different line breaks now, we didn't really change the code for laying out documents in the reader at all; if you don't find the Chinese font very readable on your phone's screen you can always install a different one in Settings / Fonts.

 

[LantauMan]

1) We just changed the icon for that one - it's now four arrows pointing outwards. (makes more sense than the > which was an iOS-specific symbol and confuses even many of our iOS users)

I have to admit, I had no inkling what that 4-headed arrow meant. It's the icon I associate with "full screen" viewing on desktop applications. Which sort of makes sense considering its function, though its location doesn't make that obvious.

Also, that "Dict Slider" is too tiny. One needs careful, precise aim with normal-sized fingertips to not straddle two abbreviations at a time.

As for load time and my "extremely old" HTC phone, the fact remains that Pleco 2.x not only booted up faster, but loaded definitions faster.

As for keeping the screen on, I'm not happy at your advice to install yet another always-on app to take up memory and drain battery. The ones I've check that have app-specific settings (which is what I'd need) all tend to get pretty low ratings as well. Please don't do this to me, and bring back the option to keep the screen on when the Definition screen is open.

 

[mikelove]

Since you're using a phone that's not running the latest version of Android and therefore is not at risk of a compatibility break, in your case it might be best to simply revert to the old version for now - you don't seem to think there's much benefit to the new features, and you can always update later if you get a new phone. (quite frankly, we were on the fence about supporting Android 4.0 anyway, simply because Google improved performance so dramatically in 4.1 with Project Butter)

The idea with the slider is that's a slider, not a toolbar - you don't need to hit an icon exactly, you tap as close as you can and then drag to the left/right until you're on exactly the right dictionary. The same system is used very effectively on iOS to jump through long alphabetical lists. (we borrow good ideas in both directions - our iOS app has Android-style draggable scrollbar handles, e.g., something that we ironically don't offer in our definition screen on Android because they're horribly buggy when dealing with variable-height items)

As for keeping the screen on, as with most of these removed settings I'm afraid we can't bring it back at the behest of a single forum user - if we did that then we'd end up right back in the unmanageable, new-user-intimidating nightmare of our old app - but we're certainly receptive to bringing it back if we get a few more requests.

 

[mfcb]

As for keeping the screen on, as with most of these removed settings I'm afraid we can't bring it back at the behest of a single forum user - if we did that then we'd end up right back in the unmanageable, new-user-intimidating nightmare of our old app - but we're certainly receptive to bringing it back if we get a few more requests.

as there are so many apps out there, that i want to have that option (dont screen off when app is on) i prefer to use tasker for that, than to have an option in each and every of these apps...