Instant access and a treo 650

B

Bullitt

Member
First off, my congrats to Mike and your team. PlecoDict is an outstanding product. I've been in China for a few years now and have only just discovered PD. I can't believe it has taken me this long to find it, but I am glad I did. It is obvious that you guys have worked really hard on making everything customizable and it makes the program fit everyones personal learning style.

Now that thats out of the way, on to my question.

I am having trouble getting Instant Access to work properly on my Treo 650.

I have enabled "from button press" in preferences and selected the button on the side of the Treo under the volume controls. (I could not get it to work with the command bar option, but the button works fine for me)

When I press the designated button, after highlighting a character, the window opens as it should, but the highlighted character is not on the search line. There is a result, but the entries are not at all related to the search

For reference, I am trying to use this feature with the messaging(SMS) program on the Treo.

What am I missing?
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Bullitt - thanks! Glad you're finding it useful.

With your Instant Access problem, try enabling the "Use clipboard" option in the Characters section of PlecoDict's Preferences - does that make any difference? If not, try checking the "Experimental" box next to it too - does that help?

Unfortunately, there really isn't a standard interface for reading text out of an application on Palm OS, so while we've tried to get Instant Access working with a lot of different applications there are some where there's really nothing we can do. But the clipboard option might help in this case.
 
J

Jim

榜眼
I think you might find the problem with using the side button is that it actually has two functions. A short press confirms and locks some setting changes such as volume changes. Other functions that you assign it to require a long press. I think this sometimes causes a conflict with Instant Access as it cannot differentiate between long and short presses.

The Treo 650 has two shift keys and I find just one is sufficient so I assign the right shift key to Instant Access. Never have a problem with it. Hope this is a suitable solution for you.
 
B

Bullitt

Member
mikelove said:
Bullitt - thanks! Glad you're finding it useful.

With your Instant Access problem, try enabling the "Use clipboard" option in the Characters section of PlecoDict's Preferences - does that make any difference? If not, try checking the "Experimental" box next to it too - does that help?

Unfortunately, there really isn't a standard interface for reading text out of an application on Palm OS, so while we've tried to get Instant Access working with a lot of different applications there are some where there's really nothing we can do. But the clipboard option might help in this case.
Click to expand...

I tried the clipboard option and no dice...

But it looks like the 'experimental' box fixed the problem. I did have a dialog box pop up and give the warnings about crashes and data loss. How worried should I be about that?

No problems thus far with the side button. Which brings me to another question, is it possible to use the volume controls on the side as a page up /down type button? I know those buttons can be reassigned in chattermail so I assume it is possible.

My thinking is that it might be useful to be able to move up and down the entries on the list on the left regardless of how long the definition is.

Not a big deal, just curious.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It's pretty unlikely that "Experimental" would cause any crashing problems, actually; basically, all it means is that instead of attempting to tell the active program to copy the selected text to the clipboard automatically, it simulates a menu button press followed by a press of the "C" button, which in most programs is the keyboard shortcut for "Copy". The main reason for that comment is that, while unlikely, it's possible some program might attach the "C" command to some other function with unknown effects. But as long as you only use Instant Access in programs where menu-C means "Copy" or something else similarly innocent you should be OK.

And it's not possible to reconfigure the side buttons to do that in PlecoDict, but there may be a third-party add-on program that lets you remap them... Google around and you'll probably find something.
 
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