Pleco for Android 3.2.3 Beta 1

[HW60]

In 3.2.3 the Test Interface for flashcards changed: Back Tab, Change Tab and Answer Tab get greyed out (actually blued out) when tapping them changes something, while tapping the bright blue tab has no effect (night mode). This is a little bit unusual, normally greyed out tabs cannot be used. If this should be due to Android 5 or material design, I would like to suggest to keep the night mode design as it was in 3.2.2. Of course Pleco users can be accoustumed to any design. But learning Chinese is difficult enough.

 

[mikelove]

@Yiliya - well I'm not sure; we have quite a lot of users who fall into the category of understanding just enough about technology to get themselves into trouble, and quite often we get emails where some perfectly innocuous thing (misspelling on our website, say) has somebody worried that they're being hacked. And with Android there's the added burden of approving permissions on install - I have no doubt that we lose quite a few downloads to that permissions box, and a not-perfectly-matching icon could lose us quite a few more; people who are already wary about the non-matching icon but click on the Download button anyway would then bail out after having to give us permission to access their SD card or camera or phone state or whatever.

This would be exactly the sort of thing to do an A/B test on if it was possible to A/B test app icons, but it isn't, and that being the case I have to go with gut instinct which tells me that we'd lose more users with a mismatched icon than we lose with an un-Android-like gradient.

@HW60 - faded-out alternate tabs are indeed the Android 5 standard, see the spec here. I agree it's sub-optimal (why would you want to make the *other* options harder to see?) but our old approach of only showing the highlight without changing anything else was problematic too - made it too hard to see which tab was active. Annoying adjustment for existing users, I know, but it's going to be the universal Android standard soon so I think in the long term it will be less of an adjustment than leaving things the way they were before.

@HW60 / @evgeny / @Taichi - these all seem to be related to the same sketchbox bug, thanks.

 

[Taichi]

this is probably not a new one, but the line breaking of the list item can be improved. In the attached example, it should be 认识\n[認識],or 认识[\n認識].

Another idea about landscape mode is to use vertical writing which is more traditional and can reduce blank spaces. it's also good for the reader. However it clearly doesn't work well with English texts.

 

[mikelove]

That one's on Android, actually - it doesn't treat our angled [] brackets as breaking characters. (we'll see if we can find an invisible or nearly invisible space character to surround them with to fix this)

Vertical writing support would be a *lot* of work so we'd really need to see much more demand for landscape mode optimization before we could consider it.

 

[HW60]

@HW60 - faded-out alternate tabs are indeed the Android 5 standard, see the spec here.

Is there an Android standard for night mode, which in my opinion mainly serves to make things readable, and if not could you therefore remove the most unreadable color settings in night mode? I had no problems in 3.2.2.

 

[HW60]

Organise Cards, Select Category, Tap-Hold flashcard, View as Dict Entry, Tap on WORDS, Pleco crashes (at least shows screen after which a black screen (night mode) follows).

 

[kun4]

If I look up quxiao in the dictionary, either using pinyin or handwriting, Pleco correctly finds 取消, 取消键 etc. in the ABC dictionary. But if I want to look at the ABC dictionary entry for 取消 I get a black screen, where the only element is a back arrow at the top left.

 

[mikelove]

@HW60 - Yes - if you scroll up on that specs page a bit you'll see a music player app with a black toolbar that nonetheless has its alternate tabs faded. Android ships with resources for both light and dark themes and we're using the values from those themes whenever we can.

Other bug seems like it's related to the Add-ons tab issue, thanks.

@kun4 - what version of Android are you using? Might also be this same bug.

 

[kun4]

@kun4 - what version of Android are you using? Might also be this same bug.

I'm on Android 4.2.2.

 

[many]

A few problems with the beta on Android 4.1.1 Asus Pad, although not necessarily repeatable. A few crashes (bug reports sent). Yesterday, during a flashcard session, clicking on the expand icon and then either CHAR or WORDS gave an empty screen, clicking back returned to the test session but the test character was missing; however, after clicking on Continue Test everything was fine. However, I can't repeat any of this with today's flashcard session, it's fine! Also, when I try to add a new category for a flashcard, Pleco seems to freeze, certainly nothing happens for a long time; if I then press the back button, the screen goes empty (empty blue banner at the top, empty white screen elsewhere). Have tried with a different flashcards and categories.

 

[many]

And I can't get Live (screen full of noise) nor Still>Take Picture ("Camera Error. Can't connect to camera") OCR to work on this beta. No problems on my Android 5 phone: Pleco looks and works great.

 

[many]

Oops, forget my previous post... it's my camera that's the problem, failing with the standard app!

 

[mikelove]

@kun4 - almost certainly that bug, then, yes. Fix coming soon in Beta 2.

@many - I think these all relate to that same bug too, actually; basically a certain type of adjustment we make to the top toolbar seems to bring out a bug in Android 4.0-4.3 that can prevent some screens from loading correctly / leave them blank. So we're changing things in Beta 2 to no longer make that sort of adjustment.

 

[kiraven]

The sun icon for the night mode reminds me more of a cogwheel - my first impulse was "why did they put a shortcut to the settings here". I think I actually had to click on it to realize that it still is the old night mode button. Not sure if the icon is new Android standard or Pleco specific?

 

[mikelove]

There isn't a standard 'day' icon per se, this is one of a couple of sun icons. We can investigate if any of the others look more sun-like though.

 

[Yiliya]

FWIW, I also thought that was a cogwheel for the settings.

 

[Taichi]

Occasionally, when pleco captures clipboard update, pleco popups with search box filled with the updated clipboard and list pane updated accordingly, but the result pane not updated.

Another case is pleco doesn't pop up. If I manually launch pleco, I see the search box filled with new clipboard text, but list pane and result pane both blank.