After almost a month-and-a-half we now have what we hope will be our last beta of 2.4 for Android - really want to get this out there so we can start getting it tested more widely, both because it's been a long time since our last official update (in July) and because many of these changes will apply to our updated iPhone app too.
There are some pretty big / dramatic low-level changes in here, so if you encounter any crashes or other unexpected behavior please let us know right away - ultimately the app should be a lot more stable but it's quite possible that all of these modifications have made it less so in some specific area.
Download link is at:
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-121126p.apk
Two important notes for people upgrading from earlier betas:
New Features:
Bug fixes:
There are some pretty big / dramatic low-level changes in here, so if you encounter any crashes or other unexpected behavior please let us know right away - ultimately the app should be a lot more stable but it's quite possible that all of these modifications have made it less so in some specific area.
Download link is at:
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-121126p.apk
Two important notes for people upgrading from earlier betas:
- If you've created any shortcuts with our new launcher shortcut feature, please delete and re-create them.
- If you've purchased our text-to-speech module, please go into Settings / Manage Registration / Check for new purchases, then go into "Add-ons" and delete and re-download the text-to-speech add-on.
New Features:
- Added experimental, display-only support for Cantonese to the PLC dictionary; you can turn this on in Settings / General. Searching is not supported yet (you can use a free Cantonese IME for that), nor is there an option to display in any system other than Jyutping, nor is there any Cantonese audio or any support for Cantonese in flashcards / user dictionary entries, nor is there a dedicated dictionary of Cantonese-specific vocabulary; all of these problems are in the process of being addressed, but this was the first Cantonese feature to be in a release-able state and we figured it would be better than nothing at least.
- Totally restructured the way we handle different "sections" of Pleco in a way that more closely resembles the iPhone version: each of the 6 major sections of the app (dictionary, OCR, document reader, flashcards, add-ons, settings) is now an independent "task" with its own state, and the menu in *every single screen* will let you switch between them. (onscreen menu on Android 3.x/4.x, menu button on 2.x) Each section will also show up independently in your "recent tasks" list, so if you're more accustomed to using that to switch between tasks, or would like to jump back to a particular recently-used section of Pleco from where you were before, that should now be possible too. Please let us know what you think of all of this, and let us know if you encounter any weird section-switching behavior / any commands switching you to a different section than they're supposed to / any menus that include an option to switch to the section you're already in / etc.
- In conjunction with this, added a title bar to a lot of settings screens that didn't have one before, both to keep the menu button location consistent and to help you figure out where you are in the many levels of Settings / Organize Cards / etc.
- Switched to a totally different text-to-speech engine which should be more reliable and give you higher-quality output. (if you've bought the old one, the above instructions will switch you to the new one) We may still bring the other one back as an option at some point, but we think this one will probably provide better results for now. Please let us know how it compares, and let us know also if you experience any weird behavior like audio refusing to play correctly.
- Heavily redesigned the OCR interface to make many more functions available, and all of them from a single button tap when the recognizer is paused; you're now two taps away from Google Translate (via the Share command), one tap away from searching for / bringing up the document reader on / copying-to-the-clipboard / playing audio for the current text (tap-hold on the audio button to hear the entire thing via text-to-speech), and one tap away from enabling / disabling our new "crosshairs mode," our old-but-improved continuous autofocus mode, and the "scroll rec area" still image option (where the recognition area is stuck on / scrolls with the image instead of floating above it).
- Added all of these OCR commands in "Pulse Mode" too, which previously lacked even the flashcard / view entry buttons.
- Retooled dictionary switching behavior a bit to make it more logical: among other things, the dictionary fallback order when cycling between dictionaries with a button press now differs slightly from that when entering a new search term (with a new search term it just starts from the beginning if it can't find a match in the current dictionary, since it seems unlikely that anyone would want to search the dictionary right after the one they happen to be in rather than the first one), the system will no longer skip over a multi-part regular Chinese search in favor of a fulltext one, and there's now an additional checkbox in Manage Dict Groups to specify that a full-text search group should only be used in a full-text (#-prefixed) search (so that now those "full-text, Eng dicts" type groups are accessible in those searches at least and not just after choosing them from the menu). We've also now changed the "use in search" option into a general "use in dictionary" option - if it's disabled then the cycle / menu options don't apply.
- Added day / night modes to a few screens that didn't have them before.
- Improved flashcard sketch box and handwriting: the former now has an Undo button, the latter is now a good bit more reliable at showing you whatever's behind it and may be a bit smoother too.
- Added an option to select whether the flashcard sketch box should cover the session control buttons or not.
- Greatly improved the speed of radical list scrolling on Android 4.x devices.
- Somewhat improved the speed of list scrolling for long entries (e.g. 21C ones).
- Slightly improved the speed with which handwriting returns results after each stroke.
- Made full-text English search results attempt to clip the definition in the results list to the section containing the searched-for term.
- Added a menu option for "Organize Cards" to the flashcard testing screen.
- Cleaned up the Pleco OCR continuous autofocus code a bit to be more reliable / hit the autofocus less often than before.
- Added an OCR settings option to use our continuous autofocus system instead of the one built into Android, since we've found the performance of that to be lacking on some devices.
- Greatly streamlined the code for taking a picture / loading a picture from within an OCR session, so that it'll switch screens a lot faster, load the new image more reliably when it's done, and not throw you back to the main dictionary search screen if you cancel.
- Added the ability for the Text File Reader to view "share"d online text files and Gmail attachments.
- Greatly improved the interruptibility of audio playback, so in general the audio you're currently playing should stop almost immediately once new audio starts playing.
- Improved memory handling for formatted text to reduce garbage collection lag / speed up performance a bit on older devices.
- Added a menu option when viewing a dictionary definition to copy the current headword to the clipboard.
- Added a border to the non-fullscreen handwriting input box to make it contrast better with the search result list in Night Mode.
- Added an option to create a new user dictionary entry from a Chinese character search with incomplete results - this will only appear if you've already created a user dictionary in Settings / Manage Dicts.
- Changed the slightly-confusing "book" icons for the built-in merged search dictionary groups into more sensible boxed "C" and "E" ones.
- Made very wide dictionary abbreviation icons automatically shrink to fit the available area.
- Added a "Search History" option to the empty-result-list commands.
- Removed the "clipboard monitor" option, as the majority of Pleco users are now running an OS version that's not compatible with it (and that's unlikely to change with Android's generally stricter security policies).
- Enabled scrolling in the "View as dict entry" command in Organize Cards, though this can cause strange behavior with custom cards.
- Improved support for Unicode Extension B/C characters in the popup reader.
- Made the status / notification bar no longer hidden during flashcard tests.
- Tweaked the size of characters in the radical input box on smartphones with 768-pixel-wide displays (like the Nexus 4) so that it'll fill up the space more nicely.
- Changed the behavior of multi-part character search results to show you results for the first character instead of the last.
- Switched to combined ARMv5 + ARMv7 compilation so that we'll get high-performance OCR motion / boundary detection on newer devices while still working correctly on older ones. (in the future we may split the two versions and stop regularly updating the ARMv5 one, though)
- Flipped the Card Info and Organize Cards and Manage Dicts toolbars so they're not on the same side of the screen as the status bar.
- Updated SQLite to slightly improve performance of a few flashcard / user dictionary functions.
- Changed the document reader selection behavior on headwords to select the entire word rather than just the specific character you tapped on.
- Stopped paying attention to capitalization in user-entered Pinyin searches, since it wasn't really helpful and some manufacturers' keyboards (we're looking at you, HTC) can switch you into caps-lock mode unintentionally.
- Clarified settings text concerning visibility of the optional scroll / flashcard / audio buttons.
- Made "Reset All" reset dictionary groups as well as individual dictionary settings.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed a number of crashing bugs when various parts of Pleco were left in the background for a while - this was actually quite challenging since it involved coming up with a way to package up various data structures in a format that Android would be willing to hold on to for a longer time.
- Corrected the sort order of Pinyin results in some dictionaries - this was a rather complicated low-level change too so please let us know if you find any discrepancies.
- Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause OCR to fail to return results and fail to show a result even when tapped on.
- Fixed a bug that prevented plecoregister: links from working correctly.
- Fixed a bug that could cause erroneous ordering of some full-text English results.
- Fixed a bug that prevented full-width letters / numbers in headwords from being searched correctly (though implementing this requires some database updates).
- Fixed (in conjunction with the above section change) a number of bugs related to the new launcher shortcuts not launching the app correctly.
- Fixed a bug that allowed the creation of new user dictionaries with empty names.
- Fixed a bug that caused text-to-speech audio played during a flashcard test to crash.
- Fixed a bug that caused garbled recognition results with some rotated still images.
- Fixed a number of OCR crashing bugs related to buggy camera drivers.
- Fixed a bug that could garble text copied to the clipboard from the popup reader.
- Fixed a bug that could prevent full-text highlighted entries from correctly scrolling to the first matching section.
- Fixed a couple of rare crashes relating to search result list updates.
- Fixed a bug that could mix up the sort order of merged full-text English search results in English dictionaries.
- Fixed a bug that could make the search input field so small as to be useless.
- Fixed a bug that could screw up flashcard duplicate-checking for cards containing Unicode Extension B/C characters.
- Fixed a bug that could occasionally prevent the search result list from updating correctly on startup.
- Fixed a bug that kept the "can't connect to server" error from coming up repeatedly in "Add-ons."
- Fixed a bug that kept the "choices from" custom category option for multiple-choice tests from working correctly.
- Fixed a rare crashing bug when scrolling still image OCR.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the standalone letter 'V' to appear as an umlauted u in Pinyin transcriptions (which applied to a single CC entry, V沟).
- Fixed a bug that prevented 'r' syllables from rendering correctly in Zhuyin.
- Fixed a bug that could cause a long delay before playing a headword with text-to-speech.
- Fixed a bug that caused the [] and / display to be a bit odd in some traditional character variant cases.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the @-to-ignore-pronunciation override character from working consistently in user dictionaries.
- Fixed a crash when ending a flashcard session on a "skip card" or "delete card" command.
- Fixed a bug that could cause flashcards to be added to a nonexisting category after doing an "erase database."
- Fixed a bug that could prevent uppercase ABC hyperlinks from working correctly.
- Fixed a crashing bug when viewing full-text search results for certain rare words.
- Fixed a bug that could add extra spaces before headwords in some dictionaries.
- Fixed a bug that could cause a "storage location changed" error on startup in cases where there's actually just an optional file update.
- Fixed a bug that made the OCR launcher exit with no error message when the OCR database file was not installed.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the controls in the General screen in Settings from updating correctly after a "reset all."
- Fixed a bug that prevented the "(add new)" category option from working correctly in some screens with multi-level category selection enabled.
- Put up an error (instead of just crashing) when attempting to take a photo in OCR on a device with no SD card.
- Offered to re-download files in the case of the rare "no dictionaries found" error (which generally only happens on serious filesystem corruption), instead of simply putting up an error message.