Beta 3 Tentatively Coming on December 22nd

Subject says it all. This should be pretty much feature-complete, with the massively-overhauled flashcard configuration interface in place, the reader considerably less unusable and the search interface / preferences / input in something close to a final state.

Flashcard configuration has gone through several more permutations but I'm really liking the way it looks now - there's no separate Advanced interface, but we've just moved a lot of the options (scoring, display, etc) into a separate "Profile Settings" screen so that now when you start a new session you only have three tabs - one for the big test settings (# of cards, test type, reading/writing/listening), one for the categories, and one called "card filter" that's basically just the old "Cards" tab but without the # of cards or card selection options (and with two new options to require/exclude specific categories, replacing the horrifically confusing "Lock On" / "Lock Off" option from Betas 1/2). So it should be much much more approachable than the current system. Oh, and the category list is now cached in memory so it's nice and fast (should make ipsi very happy).

And there's actually still a chance the document reader may support hierarchical documents; bilingual split-screen view isn't going to happen, but you'd be able to get almost the same effect simply by pairing up the English and Chinese versions of each line/verse/etc in the same text file.

After this there'll likely be one more beta sometime in January which will be mainly focused on bug-fixing, and then once we've fixed all of the bugs from that beta we'll start doing release candidates and hopefully have something finished not too too long after that.

That sounds good. Caching of Categories will be a nice improvement! A slightly less confusing array of options for flashcards is probably a good thing.

I also hope that the document reader might now support loading from the SD Card? That would be nice... It would also be nice if it assumed a specific location for Documents and searched for them there (e.g. /pleco/documents/). There are a number of other programs that search the SD Card (Documents to Go, E-Reader), so it's definitely possible.

I'm guessing a final release looks like late February/ early-mid March then?

Dec 22 or thereabouts is so far away!

Can't wait to bother you about every little thing, the way I did with PD1.

Really looking forward to a functional, useful Reader. And the new dictionaries. Fast categories would also be nice.

Sandra

Happy Chanukah to all who celebrate!

ipsi - I don't even want to mention a specific month for a finished release here since then people might try to hold me to it, but that's not a bad guess. And yes, the document reader should finally work with SD cards.

sfrrr - Beta 3 still quite won't be at the let-us-know-about-every-bug point, that's more of a Beta 4 thing - there'll be a pretty long list of known issues in Beta 3 too. But should be considerably more usable at least and fill in a lot of things.

BTW, the flashcard schema has in fact changed in Beta 3 so your B1/2 cards won't work anymore; hopefully we'll only have to change it one more time before the finished version.

Well, we can try and hold you to it all we like, but provided you have thick skin, there's not much we can do (and being the public face of the company, you'd better have thick skin!). Though I do understand not wanting to create false hope .

Also: SD Card Documents! Wee! Am I still going to have to enter the path to the Document? Because that's really annoying and not a lot of fun if you plan to use the document reader a lot.

When you say "hopefully we'll only have to change it one more time before the finished version." Is beta 3 the hoped for one last time or is it beta 4 or perhaps final?

mikelove said:

ipsi - I don't even want to mention a specific month for a finished release here since then people might try to hold me to it, but that's not a bad guess. And yes, the document reader should finally work with SD cards.

sfrrr - Beta 3 still quite won't be at the let-us-know-about-every-bug point, that's more of a Beta 4 thing - there'll be a pretty long list of known issues in Beta 3 too. But should be considerably more usable at least and fill in a lot of things.

BTW, the flashcard schema has in fact changed in Beta 3 so your B1/2 cards won't work anymore; hopefully we'll only have to change it one more time before the finished version.

Click to expand...

Beta 4 should be basically the final *beta*, I think, and after that will come a couple (no idea how many Mike wants) Release Candidates, and then the finished product. . It's worth noting that the RC's should come quite quickly as they'll have no new features, only bug fixes.

Ah, just in time for Christmas . . .

Indeed. Mike, will beta 3 finally include fixed width chinese punctuation? Or is that being pushed back to Beta 4/later?

And while I'm here, with regards to the German stuff, I believe Palm includes Overlays (or something with a similar name) which are intended to make multilingual support easier. Will this work with Pleco? Or do your custom controls (and supporting of PPC) prevent this?

ipsi - no idea about punctuation yet, that's mostly a question of whether or not we'll have finished adding those new characters to the fonts. Which is painfully tedious work to say the least. And unfortunately you will still have to enter the SD card path, except with "PlecoDoc" documents which are found automatically along with dictionary databases and the like; of course since there's not going to be a public converter for those available with Beta 3 that won't do you much good yet. Overlays are a Palm-specific thing though there's a similar system on Pocket PC (and in fact pretty much every modern OS) - there'd be a lot of work needed for multilingual localization, though, since a significant amount of text is generated by the low-level non-platform-specific engine code, so that's not likely to happen for quite a while.

weight - Beta 4 should be the last beta but the flashcard format probably won't be finalized until the RCs start coming out, just in case some horrible format-related bug/issue comes out in Beta 4. We probably won't officially commit to forward compatibility until 2.0 is finished, actually, since even with the RCs there's a faint chance something could come up that required a format change.

Woohoo! I'm SO excited to hear hierarchical documents are back in the mix (potentially)...If that works, it will make the document reader SO much more useful. Thanks!

I'd like to join in the testing when it reaches "beta" in the old sense, basically ready to go but looking for bugs. I thought that would be beta3, now it looks like beta4 but I think I'll go for beta3 anyway

So I haven't yet downloaded the software nor followed these huge discussion threads.

At beta3 would it be possible to put together a note for latecomers like me, summarising all that we need to know from prior discussions when we commence naively with beta3? I'm thinking of everything from how to get it to what are the known limitations that you don't need to hear about, and what requires a good workout to check for you, also maybe a summary of the new feature types so we don't miss discovering any of the fun.

There'll be some sort of an updated "known issues" thread, but I don't want to post too detailed instructions since I'd really still rather discourage anyone not computer-savvy from installing it at this point. (and anyway the quirks/configuration steps will be significantly different in beta 3 than in 1/2)

For testing we're still mostly going to be looking for feedback on the interface / design / missing features rather than bug reports, since there'll still be a very long list of bugs that we know about and we'd like to get those fixed and the fixes released in Beta 4 before we waste all of your time reporting new ones.

Small update on one specific item: hierarchical document support is now in and working, the only downside is that creating hierarchical documents requires a converter utility which we won't be releasing with Beta 3. (but we will release a test document or two at least) The converter utility actually takes input in XHTML format, though it only supports a small number of tags (few formatting ones plus in-document links); the hierarchy comes from h1/h2/h3. So once we do release the utility it should be easy enough to work with.

Yay, documents! When you publish the documentation for the formatting I'll go through and modify the stuff I've already posted to work with that.

Alright Mike! And thanks ipsi!

Man, I CAN'T WAIT for this. I have been holding off installing any beta release, but I think come Dec 22nd I'll be right on this forum downloading and installing. I am really pleased with all the new features that are going into pleco 2.0, and think the developers should be congratulated for listening so closely to their users and making a product that we'll all enjoy using.

Bring on Dec 22!!

Hi!

Hey - guys ... don't forget that 22nd is 2 days before christmas. You should remember that there is this "buying christmas gifts" thing that will get you back to the ground ...

Also looking forward to it ... even though in Europe it will probably be 23 early morning ...

regards
Daniel

mike, will some of the speed issues be addressed - particularly writing input?
thanks,
steve

daniu - actually thanks to my own holiday weekend plans there's a chance this may be out on the 21st US time, so you'd get it on the 22nd in Europe.

ssaito - the text rendering speed issue should be fixed, handwriting I'm less certain about since the rewritten code for that will probably only be in Beta 3 if we've also gotten fullscreen input working by then.