Second Update (2.0.6) Is Out

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Get it through the App Store "Updates" tab. See http://www.pleco.com/ipmanual/vershist.html for a list of changes - some nice and oft-requested improvements are included (E-C fulltext relevance sorting, bigger popup switch dict button, more reliable browser file downloads) along with a few things that we came up with ourselves (rare character rendering, built-in zip utility, restoring the previous search when reopening).
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It looks like Apple screwed up the update, it's showing up in iTunes as updated but when you actually download it you still get the old version. I double-checked and this definitely isn't our fault, so I've contacted them and hopefully this will be fixed soon.
 

pdclarry

Member
This is very common with the iTunes store. It will fix itself within a day; I think what happens is it is release to one server and then must propagate to all of the other servers in the server farm. Until this is complete you risk getting the previous version.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Oh, right, it does seem to be fixed now. (the propagation issue makes sense, we've seen a similar problem with our add-on data files in a few cases actually since like Apple we distribute them over a CDN) Thanks.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
No problem! We also darkened the 2nd-tone green, FWIW, though that only comes into play if you reset the color schemes to defaults.
 

gato

状元
You might consider moving the option for changing the download server to be on the same page as the add-ons. I forgot that you had to tap on the dictionaries to change it and waited for a long time before tapping it by accident and finding the option. The estimated time for downloading the 21st Century dictionary in China was 2.5 hours with the default US site, wheras it took only a couple of minutes with the HK site.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Good point, though I don't know if our little HK hosting account could take the bandwidth hit of that many people using it. I guess if that came to pass we could just add a couple more HK mirrors and randomly vary the sort order, though.

We've been trying for several weeks now to get things up and running with a different, more China-friendly content distribution network than the one we use as our default server now, but there've been a few technical issues - if we manage to get those resolved, though, that should provide really really fast transfers just about everywhere.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That could work, but I worry that people would be able to figure out how to set it the first time but not how to change it - we'd probably need to pair this with adding a "Change download source" button to the bottom of the D/Ls tab (replacing one of the two buttons that's already there, I guess).
 
I see. I must say from my experience though, when installing Pleco for iPhone beta for the first time, it was not intuitive to me to switch the server location by tapping on the actual download itself. So, I spent nearly 3 hrs downloading ABC from a U.S. server when I could have done it in minutes from the Hong Kong server. At the very least, maybe some slightly dimmed/grey text at the bottom of the screen could instruct users how to change the server location for your numerous users that are not in the U.S.. I imagine that most of your new customers don't read the full manual before downloading and installing Pleco for iPhone so they might not be aware of the procedure to select the nearest download server.
 

gato

状元
That could work, but I worry that people would be able to figure out how to set it the first time but not how to change it - we'd probably need to pair this with adding a "Change download source" button to the bottom of the D/Ls tab (replacing one of the two buttons that's already there, I guess).
Putting it next to the "Manual Upload" button in the other tabs might be even clearer.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
hairyleprechaun - downloads for most people should be a lot faster now than they were during the beta-test, thanks to our moving to a CDN for file distribution; that CDN includes a Hong Kong edge server, so in theory it should be about as fast as the separate HK mirror, though for a few people the mirror still seems to be better.

gato - "Manual Upload' is probably going to go away, actually; more than a month after release we haven't yet had a single person need to use it, and if one or two special cases come up we can always deal with those via the document reader or flashcard file uploader.

But we'd need a button in D/Ls too, which might mean moving Pause/Cancel somewhere else on the screen. (maybe the bottom of the download queue?)
 
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