Pleco Legacy Beta expired

[alanshi]

i noticed I can’t launch the app today since it has expired. Can it pleased be refreshed?

(fwiw, I’m still really unable to use the new version regularly because of the issue I reported where the search bar size is just way too small for my purposes. Any updates on whether the old style screen-wide search bar could be supported in the future? Thanks)

 

[mikelove]

Sorry about that, we've been dealing with server issues at Apple all day and we finally got it working a little while ago so it should be fixed shortly.

As far as the wide search bar: to be honest we're probably not going to do much about that until the public release is out and we see how many more people need that feature. We experimented with it enough to conclude that it's going to be really annoying to maintain a separate version of that UI with the search bar crossing the whole screen, and while we're willing to do that if there's enough user demand, unfortunately the beta just isn't a big enough sample size to establish that.

 

[alanshi]

Thanks, just updated, works great!

re: search bar, totally understand. FWIW, having used the old version for so long, I’ve really come to like that UI. The new one I am finding less fluid for the things I often do. Outside of the search box (which is my biggest blocker), when looking at a word definition and clicking on an individual character to drill down, I also preferred the in place update rather than a dialog that feels smaller and cramped. Just my preferences, but fwiw, wanted to share that the old UI flows, at least for me, are smoother.

 

[mikelove]

when looking at a word definition and clicking on an individual character to drill down, I also preferred the in place update rather than a dialog that feels smaller and cramped. Just my preferences, but fwiw, wanted to share that the old UI flows, at least for me, are smoother.

This is from the definition screen? You can still drill down full screen from the characters tab. We felt like the reader bubble needed to behave consistently everywhere, which is why we made its version a popup, but the functionality is still there in the characters tab.

 

[alanshi]

Right, from the definitions screen. Thanks for the tip on the characters tab. That does give me the in-place UI without the pop up dialog, but requires an extra click where the old one did not. this means if I do several drill downs, it can turn into many more clicks, slowing down navigation. The alternative is to have the more cramped dialog (but that’s a similar issue I have with the search box). Thanks for taking the feedback, just my 2c.

 

[mikelove]

Right, from the definitions screen. Thanks for the tip on the characters tab. That does give me the in-place UI without the pop up dialog, but requires an extra click where the old one did not. this means if I do several drill downs, it can turn into many more clicks, slowing down navigation. The alternative is to have the more cramped dialog (but that’s a similar issue I have with the search box). Thanks for taking the feedback, just my 2c.

Sorry, how is it an extra tap? One tap to switch to the characters tab, one to tap on the character, but the reader also takes two, one to select the character and one to tap on the expand button. Also if you go from the characters tab you can scroll between characters with a single tap, which even in 3.0 was only an option there and not from the reader.

 

[alanshi]

Hmm, I guess you’re right, for the direct definition of a character it’s just different. I have to click on the chars tab first, rather than just the character itself (which I guess is less intuitive for me, but it is same number of clicks). But what if in the definition page that has a Chinese dictionary (so the definition itself has Chinese characters), clicking on those words only brings up the dialog right? is there a way to get the full page definition for those? The legacy UI allows me to get to the full definition for those on a full screen layout, the same way it does for characters in the word being viewed.

 

[mikelove]

Hmm, I guess you’re right, for the direct definition of a character it’s just different. I have to click on the chars tab first, rather than just the character itself (which I guess is less intuitive for me, but it is same number of clicks). But what if in the definition page that has a Chinese dictionary (so the definition itself has Chinese characters), clicking on those words only brings up the dialog right? is there a way to get the full page definition for those? The legacy UI allows me to get to the full definition for those on a full screen layout, the same way it does for characters in the word being viewed.

Yes - we view that as a different function, something similar to reading a document where for the most part you're tapping on words you don't know to get a quick definition. An important thing about the popup is that it preserves context - you *don't* have to go back a bunch of times to get back to what you were doing before, you dismiss it and you're still in the middle of whatever it is, so even when you're intrigued enough by a new word in a Chinese-Chinese definition to want to learn more about it, you're still able to get back to whatever it was you were doing originally.

Anyway I realize people won't 100% agree with all of these moves and that's why we're doing the whole Legacy Version thing - we're happy to let you keep using Pleco the way you're used to indefinitely, but we can't be bound forever to design decisions we made (or haphazardly stumbled into, in many cases) more than a decade ago.