3.0.0 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[Bendy-Ren]

Also, have to say, totally in love with 3.0. It's pretty much everything it could have been after such a long wait. Really nice work! I bought all the fonts and one of the new dictionaries too.

I do have a couple of interface suggestions...

1) Would it be possible to have customizable shortcuts on the sidebar? I'd love not to have to dig through the settings every time I want to, say, enable Night Mode or switch fonts or ... well, now that I think of it, those are the only ones I would want, but maybe other people have different needs or usage styles. Night Mode, specifically, is really cool but I almost never use it because it's such a hassle to enable/disable.

2) I miss having an easy way to simply browse through dictionary entries. I finally found that you can do this from Settings > Manage Dictionaries > Dictionary Name > Browse Dictionary Entries. However, even this screen doesn't have any way to scroll through the whole dictionary quickly, making it practically useless.

3) The addition of the new Chengyu dictionary gave me an idea. What if you made a flashcard mode that would randomly quiz you on dictionary entries within certain parameters? Say, choose X number of the 500 most common chengyu to test me on, and maybe add them to an automatic flashcard category after the test completes.

4) Speaking of which, the flashcard testing screen definitely needs to be updated to match the rest of the app. At the very least, lose the zodiac background and put in something cleaner.

 

[Judy]

Sorry for the confusion.

Which arrows are you referring to?

The history button is in the sidebar now - tap on the button at the top left corner of the screen and tap "History." (one more tap than before with the keyboard closed, but the same number of taps with the keyboard open, and you don't have to move your finger as far)

Are there any other buttons missing that you used to use?

Hi, Mike. I meant the up- down arrows. They were there before and they're in my iPad version. They weren't in the ℗ previous version of Plecosoft but they appeared in this one, there's been some discussions of them on this forum.

 

[alanmd]

I noticed some small bugs that I haven't seen reported (sorry if they have been):

1. Search for "cousin", select the "Kinship terms" link in the Oxford dict (OCD E-C), highlight some hanzi, click the 'search' button (magnifying glass). The text deselects and is searched for, but the 'Kinship Terms' page doesn't close, which is a bit confusing at first.
2. When the character popup is displayed, the right arrow button is a bit difficult to click- it is as if the right hand side of the button isn't active. I think the clipboard was up there before and had the same problem. I also think it would be better to have these arrow buttons at the bottom of the screen and move the copy, search etc. at the top, so my fingers aren't in the way of the popup when I am hitting "right arrow, right arrow" to read through a sequence of unknown characters.
3. Also when the character popup is displayed, if I select the ">" button (bottom left corner), sometimes Pleco freezes for a few seconds after displaying the new entry- it always seems to recover though.
4. The lyrics reader never works for me. I sync my music using iTunes Match - until a few months ago iTunes match didn't sync lyrics. Now it does sync them, and I can see them in the music player, but not in Pleco.
5. Another small one is that when managing dictionaries, it is possible to enter a 4-letter abbreviation (which is lost after the screen is closed) if the cursor position is in the middle of the abbreviation rather than at the end.

I saw (somewhere, can't find it now) that there was a bit of a discussion about characters being ordered by frequency, but not heteronyms (I think that's the word- same hanzi but different pinyin and meaning). It looks really weird to see the search results for 好 list the useless ABC entry 好 hao1 before 好 hao3. In ABC's case Pleco is able to display the 好 hao3 entry in the popup if I have chosen ABC as first in my list, shouldn't this information be used when sorting the results as well?

The discussion talked about some dictionaries not having pinyin for examples- I don't see why this matters - it should be possible to simply extract all example sentences that do have pinyin and build an offline heteronym frequency list. Any pronunciations with no example sentences would be relatively rare, and therefore the ordering among these wouldn't look too 'strange'. This code could surely be put together in minutes once the sentences are extracted (although I don't know how the results sorting code works so perhaps it's not that simple).

 

[alanmd]

2) I miss having an easy way to simply browse through dictionary entries. I finally found that you can do this from Settings > Manage Dictionaries > Dictionary Name > Browse Dictionary Entries. However, even this screen doesn't have any way to scroll through the whole dictionary quickly, making it practically useless.

You can scroll through the dictionary (and any Pleco list or entry I think) using the great little fast scroll bar on the right. With the new Oxford Complete dictionary you can also Browse the Usage notes if you feel like some light bedtime reading.

I kind of wish that 'Manage Dictionaries' was still a top level item in the sidebar (under Settings), as it was in one of the betas. Your customisable shortcuts idea would allow for that. Failing that, it would be nice if the sidebar button didn't disappear when managing dictionaries and browsing dictionary entries (I have sidebar button everywhere set, this is obviously for some non-standard value of 'everywhere'!). If the sidebar button was still there I could leave a dictionary open and come back to it later.

 

[Bendy-Ren]

Another bug—when you go to change tone or interface colors on iPad, the UI covers the top part of the color spinner. This makes the spinner unusable if the spinner handle is at the top (pointed to red).

 

[Bendy-Ren]

You can scroll through the dictionary (and any Pleco list or entry I think) using the great little fast scroll bar on the right. With the new Oxford Complete dictionary you can also Browse the Usage notes if you feel like some light bedtime reading.

Thanks, I didn't catch that! Still wish the "browse dictionary" was easier to access though. Maybe as a menu item under the Dictionary header, between Search and History?

 

[Alexis]

After buying most of the dictionaries, it's sometimes a challenge to find the right words after a pinyin search. One suggestion would be to have some kind of dictionary voting system to order entries. ie. Entries with the most dictionary results would show up higher on the list, and possibly give higher weighting to dictionaries that are higher they are up on the user's dictionary order. I think this may help the most common entries to float up to the top.

 

[jekbradbury]

The new dictionary entry interface is really cool, but it can sometimes make changing a flashcard's assigned entry a lot more confusing than it used to be. For instance, I have a flashcard (created through OCR) for 爱好, and it defaults to àihǎo (is this choice based on frequency or just tone 3 coming before tone 4?). I want to change it to àihào, which is listed as one combined ABC entry (verb and noun) in the normal dictionary search, but I think it only lets me pick either the noun entry or the verb entry for a flashcard (ABC 1àihào and 2àihào, though I also thought ABC only used numbers to disambiguate words with the same pinyin and different hanzi)? Maybe it was this way in 2.x before; in any case the interface is confusing and I can't really tell what does and doesn't constitute an "entry" for the flashcard module's purposes.

Other minor things:
Sometimes, if I'm using the document reader in landscape mode (on iPhone 5), the popup dictionary entry will show the first ABC definition and have no visible sign that one can scroll down and see another.
Possible bug, though I'm not sure how to reproduce it: three or four times now I've reopened Pleco to see a "New Test" page that lists Profile as "?" and is buggy in a couple other ways I don't remember until I select an actual profile. I've never switched Profile away from SR, so I'm not sure why it would lose that choice.

I'd also love to see more ways to use the new fonts; maybe the Zoom screen could have its own configurable font, giving it the dual use of either showing someone a few characters or seeing (approximately) what they look like in handwriting?

 

[alanmd]

I'd also love to see more ways to use the new fonts; maybe the Zoom screen could have its own configurable font, giving it the dual use of either showing someone a few characters or seeing (approximately) what they look like in handwriting?

Or even have the zoom feature allow you to swipe left and right to see the character(s) rendered in all fonts that you have installed? There is literally no end to the potential features that we can think up...

 

[mikelove]

Bendy-Ren - thanks for the bug report; relates to our (perhaps ill-advised) migration from our system for multiple list item selection to Apple's, I think. (cleaner / smoother / easier to maintain in future iOS releases but not quite as scalable to large #s of cards as we'd like)

Re your suggestions: 1) is actually our best current solution to the problem of simplified/traditional switching being too hard to access; we were thinking of putting that and Night Mode in a "Quick Settings" bar and at least until we come up with some better tricks for multi-font integration it seems like font selection ought to go there too.

2) is actually much easier to get at than that - tap-hold on any result list item or on any dictionary abbreviation icon in the definition screen and you'll see a "Browse" command.

3) feels to me like something that would be better accomplished by better premade lists - easy enough to generate a couple of curated lists of 500 chengyu and that way we reduce the odds that you'll waste a lot of time on rare / awkward-sounding ones.

4) absolutely, part of our larger-scale flashcard system redesign for next year.

Judy - those arrows only show up when there's a definition visible; not much point in showing them with just a list since there isn't a single entry 'selected' at a time. But they should show up at the top of the definition screen - are they not there?

alanmd - thanks for those. The button tapping issue in 2) is actually an iOS 7 bug that's proven stubbornly difficult to work around; the arrow buttons are on the bottom by default, though, any chance you might have turned on the option on Settings / Popup Definition to flip them? 4) could be an issue with library access for iTunes Match content, though enough other apps display song lyrics that I'm surprised it wouldn't be fixed by now if so.

Regarding heteronyms, my issue is more that this sorting would help in the relatively unimportant case of results for a single character (where in most cases you'll only have 2 or 3 anyway) but not in the more important case of results for a single syllable (where a common character's rare pronunciation might come up first) - in that latter case, a particular character might be included in examples more / less often than its actual frequency would indicate and could thus end up promoted / buried when it shouldn't be. That latter issue is what I'm more focused on at the moment, so I'd rather find a solution that helps for both.

Top-level Manage Dictionaries was something we dropped because the sidebar was getting kind of overwhelming - however, is it really that important to access if you can jump to Browse directly without it?

Bendy-Ren again - that one's a known bug, thanks.

Alexis - that actually suggests the frequency system isn't doing its job - are these single-syllable searches? (if so then this might relate to the issue I complained about 3 paragraphs ago)

jekbradbury - that is how it worked before, yes; honestly, the flashcard system is still designed around one-dictionary-at-a-time at the moment. Dictionary mapping should be addressed by the first of next year's 4 planned flashcard updates (in which we're revamping the database format, which is exactly where issues like this are dealt with) so after that it should be possible to have multiple 'entries' on the same card.

With the ? profile issue - are you sure it's happened multiple times? Resetting once is a known bug but it should have been sticky after that.

Definitely need to use the new fonts better, yes.

 

[alanmd]

tap-hold on any result list item or on any dictionary abbreviation icon in the definition screen and you'll see a "Browse" command.

[...] Top-level Manage Dictionaries was something we dropped because the sidebar was getting kind of overwhelming - however, is it really that important to access if you can jump to Browse directly without it?

The "Browse" and "View in Browser" shortcuts (neither of which I had found) are a much more useful way to browse dictionaries.

 

[Judy]

Bendy-Ren - thanks for the bug report; relates to our (perhaps ill-advised) migration from our system for multiple list item selection to Apple's, I think. (cleaner / smoother / easier to maintain in future iOS releases but not quite as scalable to large #s of cards as we'd like)

Re your suggestions: 1) is actually our best current solution to the problem of simplified/traditional switching being too hard to access; we were thinking of putting that and Night Mode in a "Quick Settings" bar and at least until we come up with some better tricks for multi-font integration it seems like font selection ought to go there too.

2) is actually much easier to get at than that - tap-hold on any result list item or on any dictionary abbreviation icon in the definition screen and you'll see a "Browse" command.

3) feels to me like something that would be better accomplished by better premade lists - easy enough to generate a couple of curated lists of 500 chengyu and that way we reduce the odds that you'll waste a lot of time on rare / awkward-sounding ones.

4) absolutely, part of our larger-scale flashcard system redesign for next year.

Judy - those arrows only show up when there's a definition visible; not much point in showing them with just a list since there isn't a single entry 'selected' at a time. But they should show up at the top of the definition screen - are they not there?

On my iPad there are arrows to the right of the C/E buttons, from the first screen on. But on my iPhone they've disappeared, on all screens. I've tried resetting all settings, doesn't help. But it's not really that big a deal, don't worry about it.

alanmd - thanks for those. The button tapping issue in 2) is actually an iOS 7 bug that's proven stubbornly difficult to work around; the arrow buttons are on the bottom by default, though, any chance you might have turned on the option on Settings / Popup Definition to flip them? 4) could be an issue with library access for iTunes Match content, though enough other apps display song lyrics that I'm surprised it wouldn't be fixed by now if so.

Regarding heteronyms, my issue is more that this sorting would help in the relatively unimportant case of results for a single character (where in most cases you'll only have 2 or 3 anyway) but not in the more important case of results for a single syllable (where a common character's rare pronunciation might come up first) - in that latter case, a particular character might be included in examples more / less often than its actual frequency would indicate and could thus end up promoted / buried when it shouldn't be. That latter issue is what I'm more focused on at the moment, so I'd rather find a solution that helps for both.

Top-level Manage Dictionaries was something we dropped because the sidebar was getting kind of overwhelming - however, is it really that important to access if you can jump to Browse directly without it?

Bendy-Ren again - that one's a known bug, thanks.

Alexis - that actually suggests the frequency system isn't doing its job - are these single-syllable searches? (if so then this might relate to the issue I complained about 3 paragraphs ago)

jekbradbury - that is how it worked before, yes; honestly, the flashcard system is still designed around one-dictionary-at-a-time at the moment. Dictionary mapping should be addressed by the first of next year's 4 planned flashcard updates (in which we're revamping the database format, which is exactly where issues like this are dealt with) so after that it should be possible to have multiple 'entries' on the same card.

With the ? profile issue - are you sure it's happened multiple times? Resetting once is a known bug but it should have been sticky after that.

Definitely need to use the new fonts better, yes.

Bendy-Ren - thanks for the bug report; relates to our (perhaps ill-advised) migration from our system for multiple list item selection to Apple's, I think. (cleaner / smoother / easier to maintain in future iOS releases but not quite as scalable to large #s of cards as we'd like)

Re your suggestions: 1) is actually our best current solution to the problem of simplified/traditional switching being too hard to access; we were thinking of putting that and Night Mode in a "Quick Settings" bar and at least until we come up with some better tricks for multi-font integration it seems like font selection ought to go there too.

2) is actually much easier to get at than that - tap-hold on any result list item or on any dictionary abbreviation icon in the definition screen and you'll see a "Browse" command.

3) feels to me like something that would be better accomplished by better premade lists - easy enough to generate a couple of curated lists of 500 chengyu and that way we reduce the odds that you'll waste a lot of time on rare / awkward-sounding ones.

4) absolutely, part of our larger-scale flashcard system redesign for next year.

Judy - those arrows only show up when there's a definition visible; not much point in showing them with just a list since there isn't a single entry 'selected' at a time. But they should show up at the top of the definition screen - are they not there?

On my iPad there are arrows to the right of the C/E buttons, from the first screen on. But on my iPhone they've disappeared, on all screens. I've tried resetting all settings, doesn't help. But it's not really that big a deal, don't worry about it.

alanmd - thanks for those. The button tapping issue in 2) is actually an iOS 7 bug that's proven stubbornly difficult to work around; the arrow buttons are on the bottom by default, though, any chance you might have turned on the option on Settings / Popup Definition to flip them? 4) could be an issue with library access for iTunes Match content, though enough other apps display song lyrics that I'm surprised it wouldn't be fixed by now if so.

Regarding heteronyms, my issue is more that this sorting would help in the relatively unimportant case of results for a single character (where in most cases you'll only have 2 or 3 anyway) but not in the more important case of results for a single syllable (where a common character's rare pronunciation might come up first) - in that latter case, a particular character might be included in examples more / less often than its actual frequency would indicate and could thus end up promoted / buried when it shouldn't be. That latter issue is what I'm more focused on at the moment, so I'd rather find a solution that helps for both.

Top-level Manage Dictionaries was something we dropped because the sidebar was getting kind of overwhelming - however, is it really that important to access if you can jump to Browse directly without it?

Bendy-Ren again - that one's a known bug, thanks.

Alexis - that actually suggests the frequency system isn't doing its job - are these single-syllable searches? (if so then this might relate to the issue I complained about 3 paragraphs ago)

jekbradbury - that is how it worked before, yes; honestly, the flashcard system is still designed around one-dictionary-at-a-time at the moment. Dictionary mapping should be addressed by the first of next year's 4 planned flashcard updates (in which we're revamping the database format, which is exactly where issues like this are dealt with) so after that it should be possible to have multiple 'entries' on the same card.

With the ? profile issue - are you sure it's happened multiple times? Resetting once is a known bug but it should have been sticky after that.

Definitely need to use the new fonts better, yes.

 

[Judy]

Judy - those arrows only show up when there's a definition visible; not much point in showing them with just a list since there isn't a single entry 'selected' at a time. But they should show up at the top of the definition screen - are they not there?

On my iPad, there are two up and down arrows to the right of the C/E button. They are there on all screens, including the blank Search screen that is there when I first open Pleco. They were there on my iPhone too, but now they've disappeared. The only thing on the top bar, besides the search window, is the C/E button to the right and the "hamburger" button to the left. But don't worry about it, it's no big deal. When the manual for 3.0 comes out, presumably there will be screenshots that will show what should be there and if I'm still missing them I can ask you then.

 

[John W]

Hi Mike,

The new release looks fabulous. Congratulations!

One thing that's doing my head in though is in the prompt for quality input in flashcard testing. Whereas it used to say (and still does on my Android phone) "remembered perfectly", "remembered", "barely remembered" etc, it now just gives a time interval (often the same number) for each option. Not very user friendly. Is there an option to change the accompanying text to the old style descriptions? If there is, I can't find it!

Many thanks

John

 

[mikelove]

alanmd - glad to hear that helped.

Judy - yes, there will be - please let me know if it still looks like there's a problem then and we'll investigate further.

John W - Thanks!

There's no option for that, I'm afraid; if we get a lot of complaints we could add one, but in general we think this is better as it makes the actual consequences of your selection more transparent. (fitting in with our philosophy for future updates of focusing much more on intervals instead of this "score" business)

 

[John W]

There's no option for that, I'm afraid; if we get a lot of complaints we could add one, but in general we think this is better as it makes the actual consequences of your selection more transparent. (fitting in with our philosophy for future updates of focusing much more on intervals instead of this "score" business)

Thanks for the quick response Mike. My take is that your change has actually put more focus on the score. In the past I took no notice of the score and just gave the quality response on how well I remembered it, ie perfectly, ok, or badly. Now I'm likely to game the system, for good or bad. A very techie approach, but is it the best for all?

Also, if you haven't used the system for a while then the time interval on all will be the same, eg 60 days, 60 days, 60 days. So the only point of differentiation is the 6, 5, 4, etc score.

Surely the best approach is what you've got on Android - fixed text with the option of displaying intervals?

 

[Alexis]

Regarding heteronyms, my issue is more that this sorting would help in the relatively unimportant case of results for a single character (where in most cases you'll only have 2 or 3 anyway) but not in the more important case of results for a single syllable (where a common character's rare pronunciation might come up first) - in that latter case, a particular character might be included in examples more / less often than its actual frequency would indicate and could thus end up promoted / buried when it shouldn't be. That latter issue is what I'm more focused on at the moment, so I'd rather find a solution that helps for both.

Alexis - that actually suggests the frequency system isn't doing its job - are these single-syllable searches? (if so then this might relate to the issue I complained about 3 paragraphs ago)

Yes, mostly noticeable with single syllable pinyin searches. For example, a search for "gou" results in the first 3 listed characters not having any definitions in Tuttle, ABC, or PLC. My C-E dictionaries are, in order: KEY, Tuttle, ABC, Pleco, Oxford, OCD, DGNCYCD, Guifan, LMACD, HYDCD, CM Terms, CC-CEDICT, Adso, UnihanExt.

 

[Clive]

Clive - thanks! Browse is now a separate screen - tap-hold on any search result or on the dictionary icon above a particular definition and you'll see an option for it. Certainly a useful function but we felt it was confusing to put it on the same screen as dictionary searching.

Yeah, I can see the need to distinguish the two functions. However, if Browse is to be implemented separately, is it possible that it might inherit the dual pane interface of the search screen, and expand to fill the screen when accessed from Settings/Manage Dictionaries?

Clive

 

[Shun]

One minor issue: Is there a way to disable the left-to-right swipe-in of the sidebar in Flashcards? Unless I tap very lightly, the sidebar often starts to slide in. Thanks!

 

[goldyn chyld]

Bug: simplified form not shown in headwords if LMA is the first dict on the list.
For example: 继统 is only in LMA, MoE, and HDC. If I look it up, and LMA is the first of the three, the headword is only shown in traditional characters. However, if I put MoE as the first of the three dictionaries, then the headword is displayed in both simp. and trad. characters.