Pleco for Android Beta 2 Bug Report Thread

[sfrrr]

Mike--I don't have a zillion files on my sd card. I Have 2 zillion. And I had forgotten about the boot-up search. I'm sure that's it. As for the memory leak, how would I know if pd is running if it's not listed? As usual, something funky is going on with my (now) streak. I'm still trying to figure that out as well as the memory leak. So far, have only a faint glimmer of the source (s) of the problem. (said problem is that the screen frequently stops responding, although the hard buttons still work.) I'm about to freeze or uninstall a whole bunch of stuff until the problem stops, then add the apps back one ast a time. Tedious in the extreme.

 

[haiku575]

Hey Mike, I'm pretty sure it's the OCR module causing the battery drain. I'll do some experiments and get back to you when I have a sure-fire way to reproduce.

 

[haiku575]

Here's what I did. I rebooted the phone and charged it to full battery overnight. First thing, I opened Pleco and opened every module except OCR. I exited to the home screen and turned off the screen. After an hour, I turned on the phone and the battery was still at full. Next I opened Pleco and went to the OCR module - I didn't touch any OCR interface options, but spent about 30 seconds pointing the phone at Chinese characters (awesome and fast recognition on this phone, by the way). I exited Pleco from the OCR module by hitting the home key on the phone and turned off the screen. Now (about 90 minutes later) the back of the phone is warm to the touch and battery has dropped to 70%. Hope this helps.

 

[ipsi]

Search for a term in a dictionary; Run through each available dictionary, until you're back at the first one; clear the search box; switch to the next dictionary in the list; scroll up or down a ways (DO NOT SELECT AN ENTRY); Leave Pleco by hitting the back button; Open Pleco. Regardless of where you scrolled to, Pleco will re-open at what would be the first entry in the results for the last search you performed in that dictionary. What I would expect is that Pleco remembers your position in the list.

Alternative way to recreate: Scroll up or down in a dictionary; select an entry; leave the entry by hitting the back button; scroll up or down some more; leave Pleco by hitting the back button; open Pleco; Pleco will re-open at the position of the last viewed entry in the dictionary, instead of where you stopped scrolling.

 

[haiku575]

More evidence that exiting pleco from the OCR page does not release the camera. To reproduce on this HTC Incredible S, open pleco. Go to the OCR page and exit Pleco (home button). Try to open the phone's camera app - app doesn't open. Return to Pleco. Go to any page other than OCR and exit Pleco. Try to open the camera app - app opens.

 

[markmark1]

OCR does not recognize characters while in landscape orientation. I downgraded to Beta 1 and it also had the same problem.

Might be a wonky camera driver that's flipping the image / not reporting the orientation correctly - if you turn the text you're looking at upside down, does it read it correctly then? If not, what about a single character turned sideways?

You might be right, turning the text upside down makes a difference. Not 100% but much better. So it's something at my end then....

 

[markmark1]

More evidence that exiting pleco from the OCR page does not release the camera. To reproduce on this HTC Incredible S, open pleco. Go to the OCR page and exit Pleco (home button). Try to open the phone's camera app - app doesn't open. Return to Pleco. Go to any page other than OCR and exit Pleco. Try to open the camera app - app opens.

Yeah, I used the OCR and then put the device to sleep, a little later, it was warm with a lot of battery lost...

 

[Daan]

The same happens on my phone when I exit Pleco by hitting the Home button when in the OCR screen: the battery's empty within a few hours and the phone gets quite hot. By the way, it doesn't matter whether I've paused the OCR functionality or not before exiting Pleco - so it seems something's going on even when I don't leave Pleco in active OCR mode.

 

[Pelleas]

The same happens on my phone when I exit Pleco by hitting the Home button when in the OCR screen: the battery's empty within a few hours and the phone gets quite hot. By the way, it doesn't matter whether I've paused the OCR functionality or not before exiting Pleco - so it seems something's going on even when I don't leave Pleco in active OCR mode.

I can confirm that.

Just used OCR and left pleco after that.
Pleco is still running in the background after i close it, but i think that is normal for Android apps.
They should not use power though.

History shows a drain of about 600 mA right after I closed it.
Now, 7 minutes later it is still 230 mA and decreasing slowly.

I am not exactly sure how this number is generated and how the monitoring itself influences it, but it is disturbingly high.

[Samsung Galaxy SII @ 2.3.3 - Lite'ning ROM 1.2 ]

 

[hejincong]

Still have the 30 second boot up, during which I see only an unresponsive black screen, but since I now expect it, I don't find it troubling.

You normally have a zillion files on your SD card, right? The bootup is probably a consequence of that - we made our startup file search very wide-ranging since we don't have an automated installer yet and don't know where people's files will land.

This is currently my only real quibble with beta 2, as I tend to multitask a lot, and flip in and out of Pleco. I have a 16 gig card, and while the load isn't long enough to go make a sandwich, I tend to stand around for a while waiting.

 

[sixstringedmatt]

I noticed today that my Registration ID went missing and I had to re-enter it. I have not modified or changed anything on the phone. However, I did have to take out my SIM card and I have not yet put it back in (I am in China and it had some issues, I am having a professor swap it out/have it looked at, I can't put it back in at the moment). Could this have triggered anything within the program? Not a major issue, but I figured I would post it anyway!

 

[mikelove]

No, it seems impossible to reproduce this. For example, when I just opened Pleco for the first time today, the strokes were invisible. Then I closed it again and reopened Pleco; HWR was working just fine. Then I selected a character, got the demo-version pop-up, closed Pleco, and reopened Pleco. HWR was still working just fine, and it seems whatever I do, I can't break it myself. It does only seem to be a problem when starting Pleco after not using it for a while - perhaps there's some caching issues going on?

Could be... also possible that it might be some sort of issue with the background thread that handles the handwriting drawing not starting / restarting correctly. Hopefully we'll manage to reproduce this soon...

I was just talking about this with my flatmate, who works as an Android developer too. He said I probably needed to download and install Google Voice Search from the Android Market in order for voice recognition to work in Pleco, if this was not packaged with the phone by default (it wasn't). I just installed Voice Search, and voice recognition is working smoothly now on my Wildfire, both in Pleco and in other apps. So if you're going to implement some kind of error message other than "you need an internet connection", maybe you could just suggest installing that app?

Quite right - we'll see if we can find a way to directly detect the presence of Voice Search and direct people to the download page for it if it's missing.

I have also had the problem with power consumption when the phone is off as reported by haiku575. It happens consistently when I leave Pleco in OCR/camera mode. I have tried this with both beta1 and beta2.

Yeah, seems to be widely-reported now - I think it's a driver-specific problem, on most devices the camera should be automatically shut off when we go into the background but apparently that isn't happening correctly on some of them so we'll have to start manually forcing it.

Mike--I don't have a zillion files on my sd card. I Have 2 zillion. And I had forgotten about the boot-up search. I'm sure that's it. As for the memory leak, how would I know if pd is running if it's not listed?

SpareParts might tell you - have you installed that yet?

Here's what I did. I rebooted the phone and charged it to full battery overnight. First thing, I opened Pleco and opened every module except OCR. I exited to the home screen and turned off the screen. After an hour, I turned on the phone and the battery was still at full. Next I opened Pleco and went to the OCR module - I didn't touch any OCR interface options, but spent about 30 seconds pointing the phone at Chinese characters (awesome and fast recognition on this phone, by the way). I exited Pleco from the OCR module by hitting the home key on the phone and turned off the screen. Now (about 90 minutes later) the back of the phone is warm to the touch and battery has dropped to 70%. Hope this helps.

Definitely sounds like the camera isn't getting shut down correctly in the background, yeah - should be easy enough for us to manually override the system and force it to shut down the camera when it's otherwise failing to do so.

Search for a term in a dictionary; Run through each available dictionary, until you're back at the first one; clear the search box; switch to the next dictionary in the list; scroll up or down a ways (DO NOT SELECT AN ENTRY); Leave Pleco by hitting the back button; Open Pleco. Regardless of where you scrolled to, Pleco will re-open at what would be the first entry in the results for the last search you performed in that dictionary. What I would expect is that Pleco remembers your position i

That's normal but undesirable behavior - leftover from the Palm OS days when everything was tied to clicking on entries; should be fixed in the finished Android version but it's actually a significant under-the-hood change and we haven't made it on iOS yet either.

More evidence that exiting pleco from the OCR page does not release the camera. To reproduce on this HTC Incredible S, open pleco. Go to the OCR page and exit Pleco (home button). Try to open the phone's camera app - app doesn't open. Return to Pleco. Go to any page other than OCR and exit Pleco. Try to open the camera app - app opens.

Yep, definitely sounds like the camera is still open then.

You might be right, turning the text upside down makes a difference. Not 100% but much better. So it's something at my end then....

Still on our end, just need to find a way to detect for that condition and flip the image appropriately... shouldn't be too difficult, if we can't detect it from the camera APIs we can just check to see if you're using a Dell Streak and automatically flip it if you are. Thanks.

The same happens on my phone when I exit Pleco by hitting the Home button when in the OCR screen: the battery's empty within a few hours and the phone gets quite hot. By the way, it doesn't matter whether I've paused the OCR functionality or not before exiting Pleco - so it seems something's going on even when I don't leave Pleco in active OCR mode.

That further suggests that it's a camera problem rather than one with our OCR engine (which wouldn't really be using up any power when paused).

This is currently my only real quibble with beta 2, as I tend to multitask a lot, and flip in and out of Pleco. I have a 16 gig card, and while the load isn't long enough to go make a sandwich, I tend to stand around for a while waiting.

So maybe as a short-time option we could add something in Settings to limit the number of search directories... does anyone have a directory they'd like to put their Pleco files other than /sdcard/PlecoData or /sdcard/external/PlecoData?

I noticed today that my Registration ID went missing and I had to re-enter it. I have not modified or changed anything on the phone. However, I did have to take out my SIM card and I have not yet put it back in (I am in China and it had some issues, I am having a professor swap it out/have it looked at, I can't put it back in at the moment). Could this have triggered anything within the program? Not a major issue, but I figured I would post it anyway!

Might have changed the hardware ID used by the registration ID system... so you didn't hard reset your phone or anything like that, you just removed the SIM card? Did you have to remove the battery in order to get at / remove the SIM card?

 

[sixstringedmatt]

Might have changed the hardware ID used by the registration ID system... so you didn't hard reset your phone or anything like that, you just removed the SIM card? Did you have to remove the battery in order to get at / remove the SIM card?

I do have to remove the battery when removing my SIM card. If this is the case, where you lose your registration information when the battery is pulled, is there a tentative update that would correct this?

 

[mikelove]

I do have to remove the battery when removing my SIM card. If this is the case, where you lose your registration information when the battery is pulled, is there a tentative update that would correct this?

Battery removal wouldn't cause the problem, it's just that it might cause the system to change some other parameters when it reboots with a different SIM card... did the branding of your device change at all when you removed the SIM card? Do the system settings info screens still mention the old carrier or do they list the phone as a generic one now?

 

[Pelleas]

Seems like the power drain after OCR is quite obvious now.
Hope you guys can resolve that soon!

Were you able to reproduce to 'back' button issue I did report a few days ago?
I am a novice android user, but already used to 'back' and thus keep killing pleco!

 

[sixstringedmatt]

Battery removal wouldn't cause the problem, it's just that it might cause the system to change some other parameters when it reboots with a different SIM card... did the branding of your device change at all when you removed the SIM card? Do the system settings info screens still mention the old carrier or do they list the phone as a generic one now?

Where exactly should I look: unless I am looking in the wrong place, everything looks to be the same in the system settings, it just now indicates No SIM | No Service on my Notification and Lock screens, where it said China Mobile before.

 

[mikelove]

Seems like the power drain after OCR is quite obvious now.
Hope you guys can resolve that soon!

Next Android beta could be a few weeks, we're knee-deep in iOS stuff at the moment, but this should be pretty easy to fix once it's out.

Were you able to reproduce to 'back' button issue I did report a few days ago?
I am a novice android user, but already used to 'back' and thus keep killing pleco!

I'm still not quite sure if it's an issue or not... is the screen in combined list + entry mode (so you tap on an entry and it shows up on the same screen)? And you'd like the back button in that screen to take you back to the previous entry rather than to the application launcher?

Where exactly should I look: unless I am looking in the wrong place, everything looks to be the same in the system settings, it just now indicates No SIM | No Service on my Notification and Lock screens, where it said China Mobile before.

Not sure if there is a good user-accessible place to get at it, actually... we'll try to reproduce it here and if we don't manage to do so I'll send you a note. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

 

[Pelleas]

Seems like the power drain after OCR is quite obvious now.
Hope you guys can resolve that soon!

Next Android beta could be a few weeks, we're knee-deep in iOS stuff at the moment, but this should be pretty easy to fix once it's out.

Looking forward to some bug fixes for the Galaxy SII. 2.3.3 apparently has some issues with dual cores - 2.3.4 should be an improvement in that sense.
Might or might not be related to the OCR drain problem.

Were you able to reproduce to 'back' button issue I did report a few days ago?
I am a novice android user, but already used to 'back' and thus keep killing pleco!

I'm still not quite sure if it's an issue or not... is the screen in combined list + entry mode (so you tap on an entry and it shows up on the same screen)? And you'd like the back button in that screen to take you back to the previous entry rather than to the application launcher?

When I open pleco it presents me with a text box and a list - this list is based on the last entry used it looks like.
From there 'back' should exit pleco.

Entering 'Test' as an example and hitting enter -> split screen with scroll box left and entry right. Looks like 'combined+entry' mode to me.
Expanded version of the first screen I guess.
When hitting chinese characters a popup is shown with buttons to walk through the text.
Using 'back' there leaves pleco, it does not just remove the popup.

I discovered that the popup disappears when hitting somewhere outside it.
Was expecting that 'back' would do the same thing.

 

[mikelove]

Looking forward to some bug fixes for the Galaxy SII. 2.3.3 apparently has some issues with dual cores - 2.3.4 should be an improvement in that sense.
Might or might not be related to the OCR drain problem.

Probably not, though in general I would like to see better power consumption in 2.3.4. (and in Android in general, but that may be a stretch...)

Entering 'Test' as an example and hitting enter -> split screen with scroll box left and entry right. Looks like 'combined+entry' mode to me.
Expanded version of the first screen I guess.
When hitting chinese characters a popup is shown with buttons to walk through the text.
Using 'back' there leaves pleco, it does not just remove the popup.

I discovered that the popup disappears when hitting somewhere outside it.
Was expecting that 'back' would do the same thing.

Ah, so your main issue is with that particular use of the back button - exiting to the main screen rather than closing the popup bubble; is there any area where back is taking you back to the main screen when it shouldn't, or is that the only one?

 

[Pelleas]

Ah, so your main issue is with that particular use of the back button - exiting to the main screen rather than closing the popup bubble; is there any area where back is taking you back to the main screen when it shouldn't, or is that the only one?

Was a little confused by the "Search" screen with opens by default and the two-pane view.
Apparently they are the same screen effectively. Now I bypass the screen in the settings and it does feel less strange.

Now I have worked it through, I think the popup problem is the only one.
I know now what's going on, so it's now fine by me.
Just realize that the final audience may be less willing to put up with quirks like this.
Do with it as you will!

I will stay on board for the next beta. Thanks for your time.