Fifth beta of this big-update-with-a-minor-version number, with a few more tweaks and bug fixes.
As before, feedback especially welcome on design annoyances like screens that look outdated / awkward, icons that don't match (size is way out of proportion to its neighbors or style is jarringly different), etc. Also please let us know if you notice any major performance downgrades.
If you previously signed up for beta testing through Google Play, this new beta should show up as an update within a few hours. Otherwise, you can get it:
a) Through Google Play. Sign up for our Android Beta Testing group at:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pleco-android-beta-testing
And then sign up for beta versions of Pleco at:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.pleco.chinesesystem
after which you should be able to get it right from them. (this isn't up yet but should be in a few hours)
b) Directly from our website; APK at:
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-141211.apk
List of changes:
Beta 5
Beta 4
Beta 3
Beta 2
Beta 1
As before, feedback especially welcome on design annoyances like screens that look outdated / awkward, icons that don't match (size is way out of proportion to its neighbors or style is jarringly different), etc. Also please let us know if you notice any major performance downgrades.
If you previously signed up for beta testing through Google Play, this new beta should show up as an update within a few hours. Otherwise, you can get it:
a) Through Google Play. Sign up for our Android Beta Testing group at:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pleco-android-beta-testing
And then sign up for beta versions of Pleco at:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.pleco.chinesesystem
after which you should be able to get it right from them. (this isn't up yet but should be in a few hours)
b) Directly from our website; APK at:
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-141211.apk
List of changes:
Beta 5
- Added long-press menus with numerous commands (flashcards, audio, copy to clipboard) to the CHARS and WORDS tabs of the definition screen.
- Added 'copy headword' commands to the long-press menus in History and Organize Cards.
- Fixed a bug that made popup definition lookups fail to work correctly in the DICT tab of the definition screen.
- Fixed a bug that could cause long-press menu commands in History to apply to entries in different tabs frome the one you're currently looking at.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the long-press menu in the File Manager Installed tab from working correctly.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the scroll buttons at the top right corner of Card Info from displaying their enabled / disabled state correctly.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent audio from playing correctly in dictionary entries with 'phonetic system' set to None.
Beta 4
- Made disabled tabs in History and the main search screen a bit more visible in Night Mode.
- Made the dividing lines between sections of the screen a bit subtler in Night Mode.
- Fixed a bug that caused the definition screen to jump to the DICT tab on tablets even if DICT is not configured to be the first tab.
- Improved the reliability of clipboard monitoring (especially when bringing up text in the document reader) + reduced its power consumption.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent search screen long-press menu items relating to flashcards / editing entries from matching up with the entry you were long-pressing (or from altering it correctly when selected).
- Fixed (again!) a bug that caused Clipboard Monitoring to sometimes kick in when selecting + copying text within Pleco.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the document reader to go blank when creating a bookmark with pagination enabled.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the document reader from preserving its current location on screen rotate on some older devices.
- Fixed a crash when tapping on characters in the header to select them while in the STROKE tab.
- Fixed a number of other rare crashes.
Beta 3
- Made the history, add-ons, bookmarks, and Card Info screen tabs all swipeable as well, since now that we're doing it in the definition screen we think people will assume it works everywhere and be confused when it doesn't.
- Made up / down scroll buttons for the embedded definition appear in portrait as well as landscape mode on decent-sized tablets (600 scaled pixels or higher in their smaller dimension, so 1920x1200 will probably work and 1280x800 probably won't); also made them optional (can disable them in Settings / Search Interface), and moved them and the + and edit buttons to the right instead of the left side of the top toolbar.
- Inset items in the CHARS/WORDS tabs in the definition screen so their margins will match those of the other tabs.
- Added a total file size to the "download all" buttons in Add-ons.
- Added an alert the first time you run a fill-in-the-blanks flashcard test to point out that it's only covering cards of 4 or fewer characters.
- Disabled continuous autofocus in OCR by default once again, since on some devices it tends to make the app focus excessively often (in ways we're not able to prevent).
- Updated a few more icons.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent the input method bar from appearing correctly after exiting and re-entering the search screen.
- Fixed a couple more bugs relating to the interface not updating correctly after a screen rotation.
- Fixed a bug that could cause erroneous "No words found" texts to flicker in the WORDS tab.
- Fixed a bug that could cause odd background colors in the results list after a screen rotate.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent the current search result from being preserved after a screen rotate.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the currently selected tab from highlighting correctly in Manage Dicts / Dict Groups.
- Fixed a bug that caused a 1-pixel-wide blank line to appear on the right side of the screen in two-ppanel mode.
Beta 2
- Made it possible to go between tabs in the definition screen by swiping.
- In service of this, made the stroke order tab now scroll vertically instead of horizontally.
- Made tabs in the definition screen reorderable - option for that is in Settings / Definition Screen at the top.
- Added an option for a floating button at the bottom right corner of the definition screen (also in Settings / Definition Screen) - this can be set to add a flashcard or play audio (Mandarin or Cantonese).
- Added an "Append headword to clipboard" command to the search results long-press menu - choose this and instead of replacing the current clipboard (as in a Copy) the headword will be added to it, similar to the text-appending option we already offer in OCR. (we also display the current clipboard contents in the notification)
- Stopped the clipboard monitor from popping up when copying text within Pleco.
- Made the clipboard monitor work with our "open in reader if length >" option.
- Improved startup time a bit by removing some redundant layout passes.
- Changed the list highlight color to not be exactly the same as the toolbar color in day mode (as that made things hard to see).
- Changed the day mode icon to look more like a sun and less like a gear.
- Tweaked the unselected tab colors a bit in Night Mode to be easier to see.
- Made the popup reader bubble avoid the shadow from the top toolbar.
- Made the Organize edit controls look slightly more Lollipop-like.
- Made the reader reload after paginate is toggled on / off (so you don't have to kill Pleco or open another document to get it to take effect).
- Made text items in the action bar correctly appear white in day mode on Android 4.4 and earlier.
- Worked around a bug in 64-bit versions of Android (which currently just means the Nexus 9) that could make it impossible to modify flashcard databases.
- Fixed a nasty bug that could cause blank / unusable screens on older versions of Android.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent various definition screen tabs from refreshing correctly on startup on a tablet.
- Fixed a bug that caused the drawing area in flashcard tests to cover up the buttons at the bottom of the screen, even when it was configured not to.
- Fixed a crashing bug when reopening Pleco with handwriting active.
- Fixed a bug that caused TTS in the document reader to stop playing at the end of a page.
- Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect line wrapping in the search results list on some older versions of Android with buggy Unicode support.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the audio button from showing up in user dictionary entries with "pron system" set to "none."
- Fixed a bug that could prevent example sentences from showing up in search result definition previews for full-text Chinese searches even when the word being searched for is in the example sentence.
- Fixed a bug that could cause flashcard audio to fall back on male TTS when audio was configured to be female-only.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the "change dictionary entry" command in Card Info to pull up entries with the wrong pronunciation if the current pronunciation was not included in whatever your first dictionary selected under Manage Dicts is.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the input method selector at the top of the dictionary search screen from displaying as tabs on tablets.
- Fixed a bug that kept the top toolbar from shrinking correctly in landscape orientation on phones.
Beta 1
- Reskinned our app around Android 5 and Material Design. (virtually all of the reskin applies on older versions of Android too)
- Added an option in Settings / Reader to make the document reader paginated (swipe pages like a book instead of continuously scrolling in a vertical box), and improved performance / reliability a bit while we were at it.
- Restored the "clipboard monitoring" option in Settings / Miscellaneous; we offered this for a few years after Pleco first came out on Android, but dropped it when it stopped working on Android 4 and nobody seemed to notice or care. Still very few requests for it, but we finally figured out why it stopped working, and since the code for it was still sitting there we figured we might as well add it back again. Anyway, turn this option on and whenever you copy a piece of Chinese text to the clipboard Pleco will automatically pop up with a definition; right now you have to go throgh Settings but if we get some interest we can easily add a more prominent toggle button and/or an option to automatically enable this at system startup rather than only having it work with Pleco running in the background.
- Started hiding example sentences in full-text search result list items when the text being searched for appears outside of an example sentence.
- Made the @ override prefix for flashcard pronunciations work for Cantonese along with Mandarin.
- Added flashcard options to display Mandarin along with Cantonese before the card is revealed and to display Cantonese as a secondary pronunciation to Mandarin (so the audio / fill-in-the-blanks / etc are for Mandarin but you still see Cantonese readings too).
- Added a command in Settings / Miscellaneous to clean up orphaned flashcard categories (to remedy some earlier bugs).
- Shrank our default fonts just a touch - we had ported our type design over from iOS without taking into account the fact that Android devices tend to have slightly lower pixel density at a particular resolution scale, so text was (we think) a bit larger than it needed to be.
- Added a more helpful alert for Xiaomi users when we can't access the device camera due to Xiaomi's wacky camera permission system.
- Added Android search manager support - this is a bit flaky but if you say "OK Google, search Pleco for dumpling" it might possibly bring up Pleco with a search for 'dumpling.' We have not yet found a way to get it to recognize Chinese here. Google's voice recognizer interprets 'pleco' as having a short 'e' (pleck-o) so pronounce it like that if you want it to (possibly) understand you.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent audio from playing in the definition screen when a custom entry was the first item.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the Card Info screen from returning you to Organize Cards after deleting the current card.
- Fixed a bug that caused stroke order diagrams to always be faded even with the option for that turned off.
- Fixed a bug that could interfere with edit fields working correctly in a few popup alerts on Android 5.
- Came up with a slighly less ugly workaround for the fast scrollbar not working correctly on Android 4.4/5, so it won't show up all the time as it did in Pleco 3.2.0/1/2.
- Fixed a bug that added erroneous audio play buttons before example sentences in Cantonese dictionaries. (though we're working on a Cantonese TTS option for those)
- Hid Cantonese in flashcard editing for users with the free version of our flashcard system, since you can't do Cantonese tests with the free version and we didn't want people to waste time making Cantonese cards tey can't use.
- Rearranged the Display section of flashcard test settings to make a couple of coherent groups out of Card Text instead of just having a long random list of options there.
- Renamed "Pinyin" in flashcard test field selection to the more neutral "Pronunciation" so as not to exclude Cantonese + Zhuyin users.
- Fixed a bug that prevented some punctuation marks (like ellipses) from appearing correctly in flashcard Pinyin pronunciations.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the floating DICT/STROKE/etc header to fail to appear after scrolling down in an entry via the popup reader.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the preview entry browser for in the Oxford Chinese Dictionary E-C half to show you entries from the C-E half.
- Fixed a bug that could cause imports to fail in certain rare cases where an extended Unicode character boundary happened to overlap with the border between two (arbitrary-sized) chunks of import data.
- Updated to a newer version of the SQLite database engine that should significantly improve performance in some cases.
- Fixed yet more crashing bugs.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent reader documents from saving their locations correctly on Android 5.
