Pleco for Android 3.1.2

[mikelove]

Seemed about time to start a new thread - version history here.

As a general philosophical thing, our focus with the 3.1.x releases is a) fixing bugs and b) fixing usability regressions relative to our old app; UI improvements beyond that are more the domain of 3.2. (since preventing our app from getting worse is a more urgent priority than making it better)

So the three significant tweaks in 3.1.2 were expanding the tappable areas of things (especially the audio button at the top of entries), adding a desaturated option for the document reader to bring back the reading-in-the-dark-friendliness that you could get with our old color scheme options, and adding an optional button to the search bar to copy text from the search field to the clipboard, a function that went away in 3.1.0, was brought right back in 3.1.1 for most users, but needs a dedicated button option for those with buggy manufacturer firmware (<cough>Sony<cough>).

Please let us know about any more bugs / regressions in functionality and we'll try to address them promptly, but aside those it's probably going to be a couple of months before you see any major changes - we've been working on Android-specific stuff almost exclusively for the last 4 months and need to shift back to cross-platform + iOS improvements now.

 

[isidoro]

Hi,
Is there any way to open a file with an extension different to *.txt in Pleco's reader?
Previous versions had an option to ignore file extension, but I can't find it in version 3.1.

Thanks.

 

[Genii]

I'm not sure whether I'm missing an option, but I couldn't find any setting for the following:
When doing a Chinese search, let's say for example ni3, the default result window shows a summary of all matching characters of all Chinese dictionaries.

It only shows one definition per matching character. In fact, it shows the definition of the dictionary that is on the first place in the according dictionary group. That's fine. But I want it to show me directly multiple definitions for the same character from different dictionaries.
To get definitions from other dictionaries at a glance, I have to click on the character first to open the definitions screen:

Here it gives me the definitions of PLC/HDD/CC/ABC and UNI. Is there any way that it shows me some of these definitions for 你 already in the first search result screen? I am missing an option that allows me to set the number of displayed definitions per character in the 'All Chinese Dicts' screen to a higher value.
This would allow, for example, to see immediately the English, German and French definition of each ni3 character, without going to the definition screen of each character one by one.

The only way to see the definitions of other dictionaries is to manually change from C 'All Chinese Dicts' to, for example, CC-CEDICT. But this requires pressing the button each time to select another Chinese-English dictionary from the pop-up menu. And this only works for one dictionary per time. Not a nice overview of several definitions for one character.


Any help/ suggestion appreciated. Thanks .

 

[mikelove]

@isidoro - it should be doing that now; are you using Android 4.4 or an earlier version?

@Genii - if you disable "Skip on button tap" for any specific dictionary you want to be able to switch to in Settings / Manage Dictionaries, that should let you flip between them by tapping on that button instead of tap-holding.

In theory we could certainly add an option to show multiple dictionaries' definitions in the result screen, but to be honest I believe you're the first person so far to ask for this, so we'd need to see a lot more demand for it before we could consider it - I'm also worried it might be impractical in cases where the definition from your first dictionary is very long, not to mention potentially slowing down the loading of search results a bit.

 

[Genii]

Yeah, the Skip on button tap is an option. This is more old version pleco style. But since you added such a nice 'at a glance' search result screen, it is certainly worth to allow for some more customization in what is displayed.
I do not know if you can find a high demand in Pleco online community for this, as it is not a severe bug but a handy feature. It would be very useful for people who often use more than one dictionary, especially for multi-lingual results. It could as well be used to show a definition from a CN-CN and a CN-EN dictionary. It makes the access to information much quicker.
I do not think that long definition entries are much of a problem. If one wants to see a definition from that dictionary one won't mind. Just scroll down for the next entry. However, getting 'annoyed' by a long definition can already happen in this version, if your dict chosen first has a long entry. That's something that you cannot prevent. Well, only by limiting the 'preview' definition to a certain amount of characters ... but this hinders information flow as well.

So, if one of the few who read this like to have more definitions per character in the 'All Chinese Dicts' screen, then give this some momentum / like here .

 

[isidoro]

I'm using Android 4.4.2 on Motorola Moto G.
- If I press: Pleco Menu - File Reader - Open New File, only *.txt files are enabled (I'm trying to open a lyric format from ttpod: *.trc)
- But I've discovered that if I first open a *.txt, and press Open File from Reader addon menu, all file types are enabled, so I can open those *.trc.

 

[mikelove]

@Genii - understood, thanks.

@isidoro - ah, that explains it nicely - thanks; should be easy to fix in 3.1.3.

 

[Jonas Bollack]

Hey all,

I've been having this weird display error with pleco for the last few releases (not sure if someone had a similar issue before). Using a Galaxy Note 3 (SM-N9002) running Android 4.3.

 

[mikelove]

Try deleting and reinstalling Pleco - it could be that its symbol font file has somehow gotten corrupted and that's causing it to fall back on an OS-supplied font for some icons instead of our own.

If not, it might be a bug in your phone's firmware - overriding our font to draw its own giant colorful characters there instead. (exactly the sort of thing Samsung might consider a "feature" but for everybody else's purposes it's a bug)

 

[Jonas Bollack]

I just re-installed Pleco and the problem persists. I'll probably leave this cosmetic issue be until there is a new 4.4 ROM available for the device. Then I'll start looking into fixes. Thanks anyways for the quick reply. In case I come up with a fix myself, I'll inform you here how I managed to fix it!

 

[HW60]

Entering a character in the Search Screen and tapping on the search result, I get the definition screen with information from UNIHAN dictionary and a button which looks like a setting button and opens a screen in which I can add a new field. Using the back arrow from there without doing anything terminates Pleco.

 

[mikelove]

@Jonas Bollack - OK, please do let us know if it doesn't go away in 4.4 (we can at least try to file a bug report with Samsung).

@HW60 - we had one other report of this recently but we can't seem to reproduce it; did you submit your crash log to GPlay?

 

[HW60]

It is easy to reproduce on my tablet, I sent a report to Google just now.

 

[Genii]

Entering a character in the Search Screen and tapping on the search result, I get the definition screen with information from UNIHAN dictionary and a button which looks like a setting button and opens a screen in which I can add a new field. Using the back arrow from there without doing anything terminates Pleco.

I can confirm/reproduce this as well. It is not restricted to Unihan, but appears in the 'Edit Screen' for dictionary entries in all dictionaries. Once you look up a definition and click on the pen to edit the entry, every action you do results in a crash of Pleco (pressing cancel, save, the back button, pressing the 'fish', ...).
Exception class name: java.lang.IllegalStateException
I'll send a crash report as well, ok?

 

[mikelove]

Great, seeing these reports here now - should have a fix soon, thanks!

 

[Scoox]

There are loads of nice features in this release, too many to name, and I am really grateful for those. Here I just report the stuff I don't particularly like, just so that you know I am not a serial moaner.

The new v3 icons are meh. The old icons with a white border around them and uniform background color (i.e. without a gradient) had a unique look which made them easier to spot next to other icons, it was the "Pleco look", now the icons look like a million other icons, no soul, no character, nothing. I assume you did this for branding reasons, to make the distinction between v2 and v3 evident. So will you change the icons when v4 again? Seriously, there's no need. It just forces users to constantly having to re-adapt.

 

[Scoox]

Returning to the blue fish icon in the top left corner, I still would like it removed completely:

1) It is not standard practice to include an icon next to the slide-out panel tab. The Play Store app has a one, Google Maps doesn't.
2) The presence of the logo is very unlikely to have any impact on sales.
3) I operate my device with my left hand and I keep tapping the fish icon when trying to focus the input box with my thumb. This causes the slide-out menu to pop out which is very annoying.
4) The space it occupies could be used for something more useful. For example, the search box could be wider. I have the History and Copy buttons enabled next to the search box which leave me with a tiny search box.

The buttons next to the search box (History, Copy, dictionary selection) are too generously space out, which makes the search box even narrower.

I assume the idea of a slide-out menu is justified for pad users, where filling up the whole screen with the menu would be a waste., however sliding my thumb from left to right to pull out this menu doesn't seem to work very well. The pull-out area is too narrow and I find it difficult to pull out the menu by sliding my thumb left-to-right because I use a protective cover which nearly overlaps the screen edge and also a screen protector which potentially reduces touchscreen sensitivity. Which is probably why the fish icon is provided, but then this icon is at the top, which is the hardest to reach point of the screen. The menu button was fine, I don't know why this was changed.

The menu won't pop-out when sliding the your fingers left-to-right when the keyboard is open, by the way, another thing that would be easily solved by using the dedicated hardware menu button.

If the menu button is not going to be used for pulling out the menu, then we need to find a use for it, such as pronouncing the headword. When learning Chinese with Pleco for Palm OS I had this function mapped to a hardware button and it was a great help in learning to pronounce correctly, as I could press the hardware key repeatedly (and more importantly, consistently) while holding the device to my ear. Pleco v2 for Android made this slightly harder with a dedicated on-screen button, but in v3 the tiny speaker icon whose location depends on the length of headword is very hard to hit owing to its size, and impossible to hit consistently without looking at the screen, which makes it very difficult to play the headword several times in a row. Lucky I don't have chunky fingers.

 

[Scoox]

Question: How do you customize wildcard characters in this version of Pleco? Also, I notice full-text searches now can be configured to happen by default (which I quite like), but I wonder if there's a way to add a "full-text search" button like before or a text prefix e.g. '@' to force full-text search. I can't find the options now.

 

[Scoox]

Noticed a small issue with the input bar, initially it appears at the top, and stays there even after closing the keyboard, but goes to the bottom of the screen when I pull out the slide-out menu.

 

[Scoox]

Text selection arrows could be changed to something like this:

The fact that they are not symmetrical keeps confusing me as to what they are for.

In addition, wouldn't these buttons and the other text selection controls be better at the bottom of the screen? When the hand reaches for the top edge, it obstructs the view of the screen. This forces users to contort their wrists into all kinds of unnatural positions.