plecoDict: very nice

[nubix]

After updating my palm with PlecoDict and upgrading to the NWP and ABC dictionaries I am very happy. I have more success on searching now and the context sensitive search is wonderful. The character recognition is much more friendly now: I like the progressive display with each stroke, the ability to load it in the main screen instead of a separate screen and that it remembers the last recognition set. Oh! and the pinyin... thank you, it's wonderful.

I wait with bated breath for the final product but don't get me wrong: I can wait until development and debugging is complete!

One issue I did find was that where I could double-tap the input line to invoke the CJKOS input keypad (with it word library) in my previous oxfordDict, in the plecoDict it does not work.

 

[Jianchuanbrit]

First impressions of PlecoDict

The synchronisation took for ever. Actually, despite what the manual said, after half an hour I gave up and cancelled. It seems that the problem was not the file size being so big: the error message said the file could not be copied to the card because there was no program on the Palm which could run it. However, it was copied fine.

Write anywhere works now. I don?t like the look of the font used for pinyin. For example the letter i shows up pushed over to the right; also some letters don?t seem to align properly in height. I also do not like the numbers in front of some pinyin words though I understand a later version will allow us to remove them.

Whereas the Oxford has characters first, then pinyin, PlecoDict shows pinyin first followed by characters. I prefer characters first.

Some problems with the T3 full screen. After using it for a while, the full screen ? small screen button is greyed out and only works again if you turn the PDA on and off again.

This may sound negative. In fact I am very pleased with it. It works very fast, the character recognition works great, the actual dictionary is of course way better than the Oxford, and it has not crashed my Palm!

 

[nubix]

hmmm synchronization failed for me (plus it took a lot of time) and I had to patch by hand. I was convinced, however, that it was a problem already existing in my Palm as I was having occassional synch errors.

Jianchuanbrit yeah I agree about the main dictionary font. The italics are hard to read, and the tone-marked italics look odd.

The lowering of the tone-marked characters in the bold-fonts certainly looks almost musical but apart from that is fine for me.

I did think that the small font "j" and "i" had too small a kerning value and tended to directly butt-up against either the preceeding character or the following character: they looked better if the larger font is used.

I tested the swap from portrait to landscape and got same problem as you ... once. Since then it has not happened (black magic)

With respect to my observation of the CJKOS keyboard unable to be shown by double-clicking the input line in plecoDict, it was possible to trigger it by tapping the "abc" in graffiti, however, the characters are not transferred to the plecoDict input line. Attempting to use the same feature in OxfordDict immediately after then causes a fatal crash on my Palm.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for all the positive comments. It's really wonderful to finally see people using this after working on it for so very very long...

HotSync Manager doesn't like sync'ing large files, especially not to flash memory cards... each chunk of each file has to go through several different conversions on its way to the card, and that takes a while and is somewhat error-prone. Sadly, there isn't much we can do about this unless everybody goes out and gets a Tungsten T3 and puts all of the dictionary data files in RAM. But SD card/Memory Stick readers are pretty cheap these days, and another alternative which I've heard works pretty well is a piece of software called Card Export II - basically it turns your Palm itself into a card reader, allowing for much faster transfers.

The current font is pretty bad, yeah - it's some sort of Helvetica I think, but as the missing characters attest it was thrown together rather hastily. The kerning is a problem too, our font converter software is rather dumb at the moment and reads out the raw bitmap data without factoring in any of the other glyph information like kerning values. Plus the font really doesn't look very good in some sizes anyway. We're working on something more attractive/clean for the finished version.

Pinyin is actually only first in the ABC Chinese-English dictionary, and only because it was that way in the original data file - we should probably change that, though, if for no other reason then for simple consistency with the Oxford.

And that crashing problem with CJKOS is even worse than you describe - if you run PlecoDict, you won't be able to run CJKOS again until you soft-reset, otherwise any time you bring up its keyboard it will crash. Luckily we've already got a fix - you can download an updated application file from http://www.pleco.com/pd811-kbdfix.zip (newer than the other update) that eliminates the crash. It'll be a little while until we get CJKOS input support working though - we have to enable text conversion first, right now the dictionary doesn't understand GB or Big5 and so has no way of knowing which characters you entered in CJKOS.

 

[Anonymous]

A question: in the old version (Oxford) you could switch dictionaries or at least tell which one you were looking at. Is that possible in PlecoDIct? I mean I thought I installed both ABC and the Oxford, but it seems only ABC shows up. Or is it to do with the fact that I am still running the Oxford program as well?

One more brief comment on the font problem: I noticed the word 'creche' shows up wierd, doubtless because of the accent.

By the way, synchronisation: I liked the fact that your install program tries to copy the big files to the card rather than the Palm. I had expected to copy to the Palm and then transfer them. So if I do this again, I will just synchronise program files and copy rest with a card reader to card, to save it from locking up again.

 

[Jianchuanbrit]

aargh, I thought I was set to automatically log in! That last post by guest was actually me again!

 

[mikelove]

You can't really tell which dictionary you're looking at right now - we're thinking about adding an option where you can have the name of the dictionary appended to the bottom of the entry text, though. And there'll definitely be a better indicator for whether you're in English-to-Chinese or Chinese-to-English mode.

And that card copying feature was just recently added to the installer software that we use - I think I heard somewhere that they also have a feature in the works to let users select themselves whether they want to install to card or RAM. (there are rumors of an upcoming Mac version too)

 

[Smoodo]

Kudos to Mike Love

Hi there!

I love where the software is going! It is equally awesome to get the opportunity to converse with the head developer. As a user, it's nice to know that my input matters. It is a real pleasure to support software like this. Thanks for all your hard work. I'll be waiting for future updates!

Brandon

 

[TerracottaSoldier]

I love the new dictionary too. Really looking forward to the flash cards working. I found the easiest way to install the dictionaries was to copy them directly to the card (launcher directory) with a flashcard reader or MsImport (for sony clie). The dictionary runs smooth even on my old Palm 4.

One thing I noticed is that I can't copy characters and then paste them into another application like I could on the Oxford dictionary. Is that likely to change in the future?

 

[TerracottaSoldier]

oh one other thing I though would be useful was the ability to jump back to previously looked up words. Perhaps that exists but I haven't figured it out yet?