Pleco for Android 3.1 Beta 1

[ohlordamen]

More bugs:
1) While in a flashcard test, after the answer has been reveled, I click on a word and get the pop up. I then click the arrow to go to the full definition, then hit the back button. Everything is fine so far, but if I click on a word again, I wont get the pop up. Seems to work fine from the dictionary.

2) set up: Pleco & flashcard launcher shortcuts on desktop. In the old version if I was in a flashcard test, hit the home button then decided to go to Pleco, I click the Pleco icon and I'm in the dictionary search. With the new version I'm taken back to the test. I then have to go to the menu, scroll up and select the dictionary. Too many steps. Like with the back button to do something in the old version, say I was in settings, I just hit the back button and I'm back to search or flashcard (wherever I was before I went into strings). With the new version I need to go to the menu, scroll up and select the dictionary. Again more clicks then are necessary, where just a single back button click would suffice.
I do like then menu having quicker access to other areas of Pleco.

3) Like Jay Kruers. I was able to reproduce it while having the phone in landscape. Turn the phone back to portrait while turn the phone off. When you turn it back on that's what you get. I got a similar error while in a flashcard test.

4) just noticed that with Zhuyin the first word it's larger and bolder then rest of the Zhuyin.

 

[Jay Kruer]

@mikelove I'm assuming the crash was directly related to the overlapping issue. I'm wondering if perhaps it had something to due with some left over data left in Pleco's cache from the old version, as I'm fairly sure I hadn't rebooted my phone since installing the new version. So that may be something to look into.

 

[Shun]

@afritzse - not sure about that one - if you send a crash log we can take a look, but it may be beyond what we can feasibly fix if it relates to buggy code in a third-party library (since x86 support isn't something that all of our partners are obligated to provide).

Wonderful. I couldn't E-mail the crash log to myself from within the VM, so I include the most relevant part of it as a screenshot.

It seems that Pleco wants to access /storage/sdcard1/Android/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files/, but on my VM it's located at /storage/sdcard0/Android/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files/. (sdcard1 is not writeable)

There seem to be other Android x86/ARM OSes that could be run on a Mac/PC, so I might have to opt for another one. (ideally with Copy and Paste support) Thanks!

 

[HW60]

To prevent problems testing with a maybe buggy version, I installed Pleco 2.4.18 from Google Play to a Sony Xperia T and updated to 3.1 Beta 1. I did no flashcard upgrade, but imported the flashcard.pqb from my HTC One X to do some testing.

The biggest "problem" for me so far is the behaviour of the back arrow: sometimes it does what it always did - going back one step. But very often Pleco is terminated with the back arrow, and I never know in advance what is going to happen - if that will be the normal case in the future, it will take some time to get accustomed to it. Fortunately a new start leads to the screen where I should not have tapped the back arrow.

"New Test" terminates Pleco without notice.

"Clip Reader" terminates Pleco with "Leider wurde Pleco beendet."

Is it possible to create a user dictionary? In Manage Dictionaries I did not find a button for adding one.

In Settings it should be "Flashcards".

Where do the informations from "WORDS" and "SENTS" come frome? Is it from the thesaurus or from the actual dictionary?

The components of CHAR seem to be reduced compared to 2.4.18 (e.g. 学).

The new HWR seems to be better than the old one. You may remember the discussion about entering 日, which often resulted in 八 with the old HWR. Now there is no problem to write 日. My "favourite" character which always needed several tries and was never proposed in first place is 省 - very easy with the new HWR.

"Export Cards" (all cards, txt-file, UTF-8, simplified, card definitions, no dictionary definitions) terminates Pleco without notice.

"Import Cards" terminated Pleco when selecting the name of the file to import, but worked when I tried to import again (same file name). Pleco reported, that all my cards were successfully imported (Store in user dict), but as I cannot create a user dictionary (see above), I do not know where the imported cards are. The import itself was about ten times or more faster than importing a user dictionary with 2.4.18.

When I removed the mark from "Store in user dict", Pleco was terminated. It worked again (see above) when I tried to import again, this time in the flashcard db. With "Duplicate Cards: merge" nothing happened, with allow I duplicated all my flashcards - both as expected. And undoing worked as well.

I did not find "Search Cards", only "Organize Cards".

 

[neilperks]

The biggest "problem" for me so far is the behaviour of the back arrow: sometimes it does what it always did - going back one step. But very often Pleco is terminated with the back arrow, and I never know in advance what is going to happen

I also found confusing at first, but I tend to look at top left of screen and if it shows 3 bars I know I'm at root and hitting the back key will exit the app so I press menu key; showing anything else, like back arrow, will just back up one step as previous.

Not sure if it's always the case but I use as a general rule of thumb (although I can still go one step too far back if I'm not being careful) . Love the new interface so happy to adjust.

Cheers

Neil

 

[neilperks]

Hi Mike,

Attached is a video of the sidebar stutter with Pleco 3 on the HTC One M8 as I previously mentioned.

The video is appalling quality as I had to use lowest setting to keep the file size down, but it shows what I mean. Normally opening and closing the sidebar is ok, but changing the function to whatever always has this hesitation. No big deal just looks not good when I show my friends

Hope it helps

Cheers

Neil

 

[HW60]

I also found confusing at first, but I tend to look at top left of screen and if it shows 3 bars I know I'm at root and hitting the back key will exit the app so I press menu key; showing anything else, like back arrow, will just back up one step as previous.

Thanks - that is really easy if you know it!

 

[Yiliya]

This new version lags quite noticeably on Nexus 7 (2013).

 

[mikelove]

@ohlordamen - Thanks. On #2, did you see @neilperks' later comment? The best way to know what the back button is going to to do is to look in that top left corner. However, there does seem to be some flexibility in this design pattern - in Gmail, pressing the back button anywhere other than Inbox will take you back to the inbox before it exits the app, so we might consider doing the same with the main Dictionary section. (taking you back to any previous section seems more problematic, since you won't necessarily remember which section this is)

@afritzse - this one looks like a bug in this particular Android implementation's support for Android 4.4's new file management features; I'd recommend a different port, or an earlier version of this one based on Android 4.3.

@HW60 - thanks. New user dictionaries are created through the "Add User" button in Manage Dictionaries. (requires the flashcard add-on though)

WORDS/SENTS data is from the actual dictionaries, yes. CHAR breakdowns are from a new database we've adapted ourselves from some open-source data - trying to decouple it from the stroke order add-on - but the problem is that we don't have any way to display intermediate characters (like the top half of 学) if they aren't officially supported by our font files, so we're still working to add our own glyphs for those. We're probably going to add an option to use the old character data for now for people who've bought our stroke order add-on. (on iOS too - few complaints there as well)

Search Cards is supposed to be linked from Organize Cards now but that link seems to be broken - thanks.

@neilperks - thanks; actually this isn't much worse than the lag here, just hadn't spent enough time looking at it because most of the time we're running in debug mode and everything is laggy then anyway. I think we'll be able to fix this simply by making sure the sidebar close animation starts before the new screen is loaded rather than after - that way the load time will be covered up nicely by that.

@Yiliya - any particular areas it seems to lag?

 

[HW60]

I installed 3.1 now on my own device HTC One X.

The existing flashcard database Pleco Flashcards.pqb is not realized. A small new file Pleco Flashcard Database.pqb is installed, and the existing db has to be restored.

In Dictionary mode, tapping on the top right dictionary icon has no effect. To change the dictionary, tap and hold and select is necessary.

Export files from Organize/Edit/Batch/all cards/Export cards/ terminates Pleco without notice after choosing the file to export to.

In Dictionary mode (user dictionary)/info screen, DICT and STROKE and CHARS and SENTS show examples, tapping on WORDS terminates Pleco with "Leider wurde Pleco beendet", if a japanese word is shown (no pinyin, but "@" + hiragana/katakana in pronunciation field); no problem with chinese words.

The source of the information in WORDS is still not clear to me (see my last post above): in my user dictionary selecting 学 and tapping on WORDS, I get the antonym 教 from my user dictionary with japanese pronunciation. Words Beginning come from many dictionaries like ABC or Guifan or HDD or my user dictionary. If pinyin is separated by spaces (xuebu vs. xue bu), then these words appear twice (but from different dictionaries), the latter very late after lots of unseparated pinyin. It seems, as if all words from all dictionaries would be shown with WORDS.

I do not feel too uncomfortable with Pleco 2.4.18, therefore my question: is there a way back to 2.4.18 after using 3.x for a while? This should be easy for the program and the program files, but what about the flashcard db which has a different name in 3.1?

 

[HW60]

One more: in flashcard testing, fill in the blanks, test reading+test writing, there is no keyboard to enter pinyin when characters are shown. Instead the left most part of a keyboard can be guessed (see screenshot).

 

[Yiliya]

any particular areas it seems to lag?

Mostly when pressing the dict/stroke/chars/words buttons, it seems. It would take several seconds to load the content whereas the old version did it instantly on this device.

 

[ohlordamen]

I have the same error as @HW60. Works fine in landscape though.

@mikelove as neilperks said, I've been doing since day one, but that doesn't resolve my issue. The way it worked, at least for me, was the dictionary and flashcards seemed to ack as two, using this versions terms, "split tasks", but still showed up as one app when you bring up the task manager. Using the split tasks option I now have 4 Pleco tasks running. Just seems to be more clutter and more clicks then are necessary.

When we are in Organize Cards, is there a way to increase the font size of the text when viewing the card. On my device the font is tiny.

Bug and question.
Bug: when in CHARS if you long press one of the section titles like radical it will crash.
Q: is there a way to change the order of that section, have it start with parts collapsed already and or hide parts altogetherm Like "Opposite Character Set" I don't need to see first if I'm looking at that then I'm looking at the components. Also with the breakdowns, with the option to use the old character data, will it be both the old and new or just one or the other? What are all the X'ed boxes?

The section "characters (opposite set)" seems to be a redundant section, since all it does is switch from traditional to simplified or vice versa keeping the same exact definition.

Organize Cards bug:
set up /AV Chinese/B02/L08
Moving cards to /AV Chinese/B02/temp
Chick edit, select cards, click move, select destination.
(Bug 1?) in the old version after you have moved the cards you are still in Edit mode. This version you are not.
(Bug 2) after the cards have been moved you are unable to Edit and or select/view any cards until you go up one directory and then back. So from L08 up to B02 then back to L08.

 

[Shun]

@afritzse - this one looks like a bug in this particular Android implementation's support for Android 4.4's new file management features; I'd recommend a different port, or an earlier version of this one based on Android 4.3.

Thanks for the tip.

 

[kiraven]

I tried to update Pleco to the 3.1 beta. On the first start, Pleco updates it's data files, but afterwards immediately crashes. If I start it anew, it crashes before the standard screen has loaded. if i use one of the launchers Flashcards and Reader start without any problems, but as soon as I press dictionary in the side menu pleco crashes again.
I am running Cyanogenmod 11 M5 on a Nexus S.
I send log and bug report via mail, but thought I post it here too as others might have the same problem.

 

[mikelove]

@HW60 - hmm, actually it's been named "Pleco Flashcard Database.pqb" for quite a while so I'm surprised it's still "Pleco Flashcards" for you - anyway we'll add a check to rename any old "Pleco Flashcards" file in the absence of a "Pleco Flashcard Database" one. The name change didn't affect the actual format at all so you can certainly go back to 2.4.18 without losing your database, just make sure to back it up first since reverting to an older version of the app will probably cause Android to delete all of Pleco's data files.

That button now changes between "dictionary groups" only, by default - hence it'll stay on [C] for a Chinese character search (since that won't return any results for [E]) but for a string of letters that might be Pinyin or English it'll cycle between languages.

Your WORDS issues seem like they might relate to your Japanese user dictionary databases - we do a lot of reprocessing / filtering there to ensure that the WORDS match the current Pinyin (while also ensuring that entries that don't match the Pinyin of any single character entry still get shown somewhere). Could you email me a current backup of your user dictionary?

@Yiliya - does this happen for all of them? Would be quite baffling for STROKE - for WORDS and to a lesser extent CHARS the fact that we're applying more filtering to results does slow things down a bit; there's supposed to be an option in Manage Dicts to remove specific dictionaries from WORDS searches (so that it'll merge results from fewer dictionaries and consequently do it more quickly) but we seem to have forgotten to add that option on Android so we'll fix that in the next beta.

@ohlordamen - actually, multiple tasks were how our app used to work too, unless you enabled the little-used option to consolidate them to one. So you basically want that behavior but with a single task?

Organize font text should be the same size as definition so that sounds like a bug.

"Opposite character set" is useful for looking up components for the other character set version and also for changes in definition in cases like 几/幾. Sections that you hide should stay hidden until you open them again - let me know if that's not the case - but we don't currently offer a way to reorder or totally disable sections anywhere except DICTS. X'ed boxes are characters that can't be rendered - we'll be adding an optional extra font download shortly to help with those. Character breakdown database would likely be one or the other, not both. (this isn't a feature we want to promote / develop, we just want to provide an option to use the old data until everybody's happy with the new data but we'll drop it permanently once we achieve that)

@kiraven - thanks! Does this happen also if you delete and reinstall?

 

[HW60]

@HW60 - hmm, actually it's been named "Pleco Flashcard Database.pqb" for quite a while so I'm surprised it's still "Pleco Flashcards" for you

All my backups are Pleco Flashcards.pqb - I have no idea how that could have been changed in the past. I installed 2.4.18 again yesterday from Google Play, and again my flashcard db has the old name because it is the name of my backup file.

That button now changes between "dictionary groups" only, by default

Can that be changed in Settings? I like to have my user dictionary, consisting of all my flashcards, on top of all dictionaries.
[QUOTE="mikelove, post: 33325, member: 1"][USER=1062]Your WORDS issues seem like they might relate to your Japanese user dictionary databases. Could you email me a current backup of your user dictionary?[/QUOTE]Done.[/USER]

 

[mikelove]

Yes, turn off "skip with button" in any dictionary's individual Manage Dictionaries screen and that dictionary will then be switched to with that button along with groups.

 

[stephanhodges]

Perhaps you could change the color of the back arrow when it's going to result in an "exit from the program"?

 

[mikelove]

Apps aren't able to manipulate that bar, actually.