Official iPad Thread
- Thread starter mikelove
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Re: Official iPad Thread Freeze Issue
Hi Mike, I'm using the newest version of Pleco that is possible to DL from the appStore as of 03/April. On a 32gb iPad the non-upgraded version of my Pleco is freezing after searching an english word then clicking on an option. Search the word "dog" and when I click on gou nothing happens and the app is frozen. no clicks are registered and It stays like till i force an exit out to the home screen by pressing the home button. Then when I relauch Pleco I see the "inializing" screen and after a few moments, before it opens up the dictionary view, the app launching aborts and I'm back at the home screen. If I click on Pleco now the third time it correctly brings me into Pleco and offers me the "Welcome to Pleco" screen and dictionary lookup window. Please let me know if I'm missing anything that may be causing this crash. Also I'd be happy to be a beta tester for the Ipad version.
Thanks!
Hi Mike, I'm using the newest version of Pleco that is possible to DL from the appStore as of 03/April. On a 32gb iPad the non-upgraded version of my Pleco is freezing after searching an english word then clicking on an option. Search the word "dog" and when I click on gou nothing happens and the app is frozen. no clicks are registered and It stays like till i force an exit out to the home screen by pressing the home button. Then when I relauch Pleco I see the "inializing" screen and after a few moments, before it opens up the dictionary view, the app launching aborts and I'm back at the home screen. If I click on Pleco now the third time it correctly brings me into Pleco and offers me the "Welcome to Pleco" screen and dictionary lookup window. Please let me know if I'm missing anything that may be causing this crash. Also I'd be happy to be a beta tester for the Ipad version.
Thanks!
character
状元
Looking forward to screenshots of the enhanced reader. :wink:
Actually, I do have another iPad feature request: with the larger screen, how about a search 'scratch pad' making it easy to enter a bunch of characters (via HWR, say) and then select different subsets on which to search?
Actually, I do have another iPad feature request: with the larger screen, how about a search 'scratch pad' making it easy to enter a bunch of characters (via HWR, say) and then select different subsets on which to search?
numble - you'd actually do a New Registration, then a Restore iTunes Purchases to credit your iPad with the same items you purchased on iPhone.
servano - sorry about that; we're still waiting for Apple to approve our bug-fix update. (maybe Monday) We could still use a few more iPad beta-testers, so email or PM me with your iPad's UDID (you can get that from the "Contact Support" screen in Pleco, or by connecting it to your computer, opening up iTunes, choosing your iPad in the left-hand list, tapping where it says "Serial Number," then choosing "Copy" from the Edit menu to copy it) and I'll let you know once 2.1.0 Beta 2 is ready (within a couple of days, I think).
character - good idea; the next big project after flashcards is a comprehensive search interface redesign that'll incorporate a bunch of enhancements like this; we're very interested in coming up with a better mechanism to handle / break down longer search terms.
servano - sorry about that; we're still waiting for Apple to approve our bug-fix update. (maybe Monday) We could still use a few more iPad beta-testers, so email or PM me with your iPad's UDID (you can get that from the "Contact Support" screen in Pleco, or by connecting it to your computer, opening up iTunes, choosing your iPad in the left-hand list, tapping where it says "Serial Number," then choosing "Copy" from the Edit menu to copy it) and I'll let you know once 2.1.0 Beta 2 is ready (within a couple of days, I think).
character - good idea; the next big project after flashcards is a comprehensive search interface redesign that'll incorporate a bunch of enhancements like this; we're very interested in coming up with a better mechanism to handle / break down longer search terms.
I'd like to reiterate my idea that I think some sort of RSS/news feature would be really amazing for the Pleco Reader. The many news readers (NPR, BBC, NYT, WSJ, even Yahoo's app is pretty good, etc.) and ereaders that have been released are really good, and they all seem to emphasize that a specialized reader is better for reading than reading within a web browser. I'd love something that easily sourced material to read, though I'll say the Pleco reader currently isn't as pretty as all these other readers.
Re: Official iPad Thread -
Thanks for the above info Mike. Followup iPad question: I'm about to upgrade from free pleco to the full dictionaries and all the options package. In addition to my iPad I also have an iphone that I've started to like using basic Pleco on. Here's the question: If I purchase the full package now (the Complete Pleco bundle for my iPhone) will I have to purchase that bundle again when you come out with the iPad optimized version? Or will the iPad optimized version just sync to my computer and run the same license without me having to have paid for an iPad Pleco license in additional to the one on the iPhone?
Thanks for the help and great product. Please let me soon as I'd like to buy the full version soon if I'll be able to use it on my iPhone and full iPad version later.
Thanks for the above info Mike. Followup iPad question: I'm about to upgrade from free pleco to the full dictionaries and all the options package. In addition to my iPad I also have an iphone that I've started to like using basic Pleco on. Here's the question: If I purchase the full package now (the Complete Pleco bundle for my iPhone) will I have to purchase that bundle again when you come out with the iPad optimized version? Or will the iPad optimized version just sync to my computer and run the same license without me having to have paid for an iPad Pleco license in additional to the one on the iPhone?
Thanks for the help and great product. Please let me soon as I'd like to buy the full version soon if I'll be able to use it on my iPhone and full iPad version later.
numble - built-in RSS is certainly a possibility for a later iPad update; the reader could use quite a few UI improvements.
servano - the license should transfer over, but I can't make any official promises about that (or about free flashcard upgrades) until the software is actually approved by Apple; there's always the chance (however remote) that they might refuse to release our flashcard-equipped / iPad-optimized application altogether, in which case we wouldn't be able to give anyone flashcards or an iPad-optimized version. In your case, though, since your iPad is in the beta-test you'll be able to transfer your licenses over to that beta version at least just fine.
servano - the license should transfer over, but I can't make any official promises about that (or about free flashcard upgrades) until the software is actually approved by Apple; there's always the chance (however remote) that they might refuse to release our flashcard-equipped / iPad-optimized application altogether, in which case we wouldn't be able to give anyone flashcards or an iPad-optimized version. In your case, though, since your iPad is in the beta-test you'll be able to transfer your licenses over to that beta version at least just fine.
Great device - I'm enjoying using Pleco on it more than on a regular iPhone, actually, even with the quirks. Really going to be able to have some fun with this in the next few updates... Incredibly fast, flashcard imports for example are just plain ridiculously speedy compared to how they run on an older device (though they're pretty swift on a 3GS too).
I do wish they'd included more RAM, though - it has the same 256 MB as the 3GS but 5x the screen pixels, so there are certain cool graphical effects that are going to be difficult (or even impossible) on it; we already had to drop transparent handwriting, for example, since it generated lots and lots of Low Memory crashes. Though we think we may be able to get it working in a later release, and it's actually not that important anyway on iPad since we embed the handwriting recognizer at the bottom of the screen instead of having it take up the whole thing (which would be just plain silly).
There's no tradtional-character handwriting or keyboard input support at all, so it seems like at least initially, Pleco may have a monopoly on fantizi-friendly Chinese dictionary apps for iPad. (I suspect Apple will add support for traditional characters in the iPad version of the iPhone OS 4.0 update this summer - skipping them now in the temporary-measure OS 3.2 probably saved some QA time)
Apps-wise, some nice things in the works but most of what's out there is still pretty rough - my Favorite App prize at the moment would probably go to Bloomberg's financial app, just a gorgeous bit of design there. (FlightControl HD is also fantastic)
I do wish they'd included more RAM, though - it has the same 256 MB as the 3GS but 5x the screen pixels, so there are certain cool graphical effects that are going to be difficult (or even impossible) on it; we already had to drop transparent handwriting, for example, since it generated lots and lots of Low Memory crashes. Though we think we may be able to get it working in a later release, and it's actually not that important anyway on iPad since we embed the handwriting recognizer at the bottom of the screen instead of having it take up the whole thing (which would be just plain silly).
There's no tradtional-character handwriting or keyboard input support at all, so it seems like at least initially, Pleco may have a monopoly on fantizi-friendly Chinese dictionary apps for iPad. (I suspect Apple will add support for traditional characters in the iPad version of the iPhone OS 4.0 update this summer - skipping them now in the temporary-measure OS 3.2 probably saved some QA time)
Apps-wise, some nice things in the works but most of what's out there is still pretty rough - my Favorite App prize at the moment would probably go to Bloomberg's financial app, just a gorgeous bit of design there. (FlightControl HD is also fantastic)
I don't think Alpha uses a custom keyboard, actually, just a smartly-positioned bar on top of it like our own Pinyin tone input bar. (though I haven't played with Alpha too extensively yet)
Custom keyboards will be great for us assuming they appear on iPods / iPhones too in 4.0; part of the reason we didn't include a custom / more Pinyin-friendly keyboard along with the handwriting and radical ones in our initial iPhone release is that we thought Apple might be adding custom keyboards in a future OS update.
I'm not wild about popovers - feel like kind of a kludge to make it easy to take an iPhone-sized view and make it functional on iPad with minimal effort. They're great for certain specialized things, like our document reader, but I don't think we'll be using a popover to, say, display dictionary search results on iPad anytime soon. My current least favorite thing about the iPad's OS is the popover view used in the mail orientation in portrait mode - don't see why they can't at least provide the option to display a message list in that orientation too.
The iPad's OS in general feels very very transitional to me; they wanted to get it out now so that by this summer when they launch OS 4.0, start selling iPads worldwide, and possibly drop the price by $100 or so, they'll be a nice base of iPad-optimized apps available. A lot of the new stuff they concocted for the iPad UI feels like it was intended to make life easy for developers porting from iPhone. Might also have been designed to give developers (especially game developers) a head start on scaling everything up to the higher resolutions we'll no doubt be seeing on the iPhone HD; they probably won't actually add the interfaces for high-resolution development to the SDK for 4.0 until very late, when they actually announce that new iPhone, but they can help move things in that direction with the iPad before then.
Custom keyboards will be great for us assuming they appear on iPods / iPhones too in 4.0; part of the reason we didn't include a custom / more Pinyin-friendly keyboard along with the handwriting and radical ones in our initial iPhone release is that we thought Apple might be adding custom keyboards in a future OS update.
I'm not wild about popovers - feel like kind of a kludge to make it easy to take an iPhone-sized view and make it functional on iPad with minimal effort. They're great for certain specialized things, like our document reader, but I don't think we'll be using a popover to, say, display dictionary search results on iPad anytime soon. My current least favorite thing about the iPad's OS is the popover view used in the mail orientation in portrait mode - don't see why they can't at least provide the option to display a message list in that orientation too.
The iPad's OS in general feels very very transitional to me; they wanted to get it out now so that by this summer when they launch OS 4.0, start selling iPads worldwide, and possibly drop the price by $100 or so, they'll be a nice base of iPad-optimized apps available. A lot of the new stuff they concocted for the iPad UI feels like it was intended to make life easy for developers porting from iPhone. Might also have been designed to give developers (especially game developers) a head start on scaling everything up to the higher resolutions we'll no doubt be seeing on the iPhone HD; they probably won't actually add the interfaces for high-resolution development to the SDK for 4.0 until very late, when they actually announce that new iPhone, but they can help move things in that direction with the iPad before then.
One more iPad screenshot, of the text input interface. (as before, tap on the screenshot to reveal the whole thing)
Transparent handwriting is (for the moment) too much of a memory hog to enable on iPad, and taking up the entire 10-inch screen with a handwriting box is a waste of space, so our handwriting box now appears on the bottom of the screen just like Apple's (though still bigger, smoother, faster, more accurate, multitouch-enhanced, and with traditional character support).
Moving your finger back and forth between the top and bottom of the screen is kind of annoying, so ultimately we're planning to relocate the input selector from the top of the screen to the bottom and put a few additional functions on it, but as a quickie workaround for this first release, we added a "Key" button to the handwriting input box (and a corresponding "HWR" button to the on-by-default keyboard tone bar).
You might also notice that the split-screen view can now work even with input open; we've managed to implement this on iPhone / iPod as well, though it's disabled by default on those, and on both platforms it only works when the definition is on the left or right side of the screen (not at the top / bottom, even though that's an option in portrait orientation).
Transparent handwriting is (for the moment) too much of a memory hog to enable on iPad, and taking up the entire 10-inch screen with a handwriting box is a waste of space, so our handwriting box now appears on the bottom of the screen just like Apple's (though still bigger, smoother, faster, more accurate, multitouch-enhanced, and with traditional character support).
Moving your finger back and forth between the top and bottom of the screen is kind of annoying, so ultimately we're planning to relocate the input selector from the top of the screen to the bottom and put a few additional functions on it, but as a quickie workaround for this first release, we added a "Key" button to the handwriting input box (and a corresponding "HWR" button to the on-by-default keyboard tone bar).
You might also notice that the split-screen view can now work even with input open; we've managed to implement this on iPhone / iPod as well, though it's disabled by default on those, and on both platforms it only works when the definition is on the left or right side of the screen (not at the top / bottom, even though that's an option in portrait orientation).
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character
状元
How about relocating the search bar to the bottom as well? That way users can usually keep their hands in the same spot and rarely obscure their view of the dictionary entries.mikelove said:
An alternative would be putting all the controls in a column (user configurable left/right) and having the other column for search results/entry display.
Certainly a possibility for a later release; with OS 4.0 right around the corner, I'm inclined to wait for that before making any more significant UI changes, but putting the search bar close at hand would definitely help reduce finger travel (albeit perhaps at the risk of hurting intelligibility / "flow").