2.0.1 Beta 1 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[weight]

Hi Mike,

1)
My bookmarks have gone missing after installing 2.0.1 - Is this normal?

2)
After setting the Score 1 - 6 hardware buttons in settings I click done, then go back in to look at the button assignments to find that the numbered scores I have just set have become "low" "middle" and "high" scores?

3)
Only in a "prompt for quality" "show all" session, clicking reveal and then the information button will change the card score instead of showing the information screen.

4)
Manage flashcard/advanced/headword/入/enter some characters/select "done" - nothing happens

On a side note (If this is too much work don't worry about it) - thanks for the "~" support in custom card; "|" support would also be very cool, or at least spaces or commas where they would normally be.

Very good work Mike. Please be sure you're charging us adequately for your time. Pleco is indescribably useful and you've put in a monumental level of dedication - I would hate to think that that's going unrewarded.

 

[Wan]

Hi there,

in handwriting input mode on the main screen (not after entering "入-mode"), the "undo" button visually removes all written strokes. The background (last searched query) will turn fully opaque again (no longer transparent). But: Rewriting a previously removed stroke of a character (assuming it is complete) then running the recognition tool, the software will recognize the character.
Example: You write "太", then undo the last stroke. The complete character will disappear, the background will flash back to full opacity. Now, you write the last stroke again. Only this stroke will be shown. Click the "字-button" and the full "太" will be correctly recognized.

Another small thing: When using the complete result screen as input screen, the input tends to be very slow. I have to write very slowly in order to have my writing displayed as strokes on the screen. This only occurs after a couple of queries. Whenever I have the software keyboard activated, effectively halving the input screen size, it doesn't occur at all.

I'm running the latest Pleco Beta release on an HTC Touch Diamond, WM6.1.

Wan

 

[Shadowdh]

So far so great...!!! had no problems with daily use and the new features are very WOW...!!!

 

[mikelove]

weight - your bookmarks disappearing is normal, I think - had to break format compatibility to fix a bug I believe. Not sure about this score 1-6 issue, they definitely have different internal IDs from the low/middle/high buttons... same goes for the prompt for quality issue, perhaps there's some sort of issue with button IDs. With the Manage search not happening, if you tap on the Search button does that get it to actually perform the search?

Glad the ~ helps - | I think might present some schema problems but I'll have to double-check on that. Most of the 2.0.1 changes fortunately are in the low-level engine code, so they'll apply to the iPhone and other versions in the future - unfortunately I don't think there's much room for us to raise our prices right now (though I kind of wish we'd raised them to where they are now more gradually - people would be less likely to complain about the pricing / availability of upgrades if they'd paid less by buying earlier).

Wan - interesting - this is with the instant-recognition option enabled, right? Slow input may have something to do with TouchFlo scrolling - does it happen even after the first stroke? By "complete result screen" do you mean a screen taken up entirely by the Entry List or are you still writing on top of the dictionary definition?

 

[marsch]

Hi, thanks for 2.0.1. I really like it.
Got a problem with "scale initial increase by difficulty". If I understand that correctly, it should only affect the first increase (i.e. from 100)? But it looks like it does that until it reaches the threshold. So in my case, with an aggressivity of 3, if I start with the minimum difficulty of 60, it would correctly jump to 240 (60/100*400), but then to 256 (64/100*400), 272 and so on, so I would have to enter it correctly 10 times before I get to 400 again (even worse on a higher aggressivity level).
I like the idea of scaling the initial increase, because while I like the general increase on level 3, the initial increase to 400 is too steep for me - you wouldn't believe how much I forget in four days

Oh, one more thing. When I first installed 2.0.1, the text box for "Score" in Flashcards / Advanced Settings / Controls was set to "1" instead of the "100" it used to have. This is on all the profiles. No big thing, though. Easy enough to change once, and then it's persistent.

 

[Wan]

Wan - interesting - this is with the instant-recognition option enabled, right?

I don't where to find the "instant-recognition" option, but it probably is enabled.
I'm referring to "Input palette location" set to "bottom", "Input Mode" set to "Handwriting" and the "Fullscreen handwriting palette" option checked. All of which are found in Preferences -> Layout

Slow input may have something to do with TouchFlo scrolling - does it happen even after the first stroke?

Yep, it does happen after the first stroke, but only after already having queried a couple of entries. This only happens occasionally, though, seems random to me. It may be caused by incoming calls / messages.

By "complete result screen" do you mean a screen taken up entirely by the Entry List or are you still writing on top of the dictionary definition?

I'll compensate my insufficient capability of writing in English, using my insufficient capability of drawing in paint 8)

 

[weight]

weight With the Manage search not happening, if you tap on the Search button does that get it to actually perform the search?

After clicking "done" no characters actually appear on the "headword" line. Doing a search afterwords as expected finds nothing. This is only a problem for advanced headword search. The headword search from the manage flashcards menu works fine.

 

[mikelove]

marsch - yikes, yeah, that is screwed up; should be easy to fix, though. Thanks. With the score being reset to 1, I'm not sure what could be causing that - have you ever actually enabled / used that button before? Have you noticed any other settings changing from where they were before?

Wan - Instant recognition wouldn't be enabled unless you specifically enabled it. This does sound like a TouchFlo scrolling issue - is there any chance that the "random" triggering of the problem might be tied to whether or not there's a scroll bar visible in the dictionary definition? Are you using a hacked ROM or the shipping one? If you Google around you should be able to find a number of hacks / utilities that will disable TouchFlo scrolling altogether (it's just a tiny registry change, so not something that's likely to cause system instability), so you might want to try that and see if that clears this up.

weight - OK, I'm seeing this here too now - thanks!

 

[mfcb]

marsch Have you noticed any other settings changing from where they were before?

mike, i have, unfortunately i did not note down which option i suspected to be enabled, but was not enabled in 2.0.0 . i think it was somewhere in the advanced flashcard options, where a checkmark went from one option to another after the upgrade from 2.0.0 to 2.0.1b1 ... as i cant reproduce and i am not 100% sure, i thought not to mention it until somebody else also reports similar problems...

and also i have the feeling again, that when i change options for a flashcard profile, sometimes these changes go through to other profiles (at least partly), like for example the "show partial cards". whenever i try to test this behaviour of "global" advanced settings, i cant find an error, but i really cant remember that i enabled it for my "default" profile, yet it is on now...

 

[marsch]

... With the score being reset to 1, I'm not sure what could be causing that - have you ever actually enabled / used that button before? Have you noticed any other settings changing from where they were before?

Yes, I'm "always" using that button. It's not that the score is reset to 1 (actually, to 10 - for whatever reason), it's just the text in the textbox. Haven't looked for other settings, but everything else seems to run fine.

One question about "Scale decreases by difficulty", again on aggressivity 3: if I get a card wrong several times in a row, the difficulty drops to 60, so the decrease in score is 1/(60/50) = 0.83, so it only loses 17% of its score each time which is not really much. But even if just going back to a ("guesstimated") previous score based on difficulty (like current score * difficulty divisor / difficulty) that wouldn't help beyond the first decrease, as unfortunately difficulty drops a lot faster than it increases... Don't really have a good idea what I would like to see... Any idea how to ensure a bigger decrease?

 

[Wan]

WanThis does sound like a TouchFlo scrolling issue - is there any chance that the "random" triggering of the problem might be tied to whether or not there's a scroll bar visible in the dictionary definition?

There is - you've got it. The error only occurs when there is a scroll bar in the definition panel.

Are you using a hacked ROM or the shipping one?

I'm using a non HTC-cooked ROM. Bepe's Light Version. I believe, this only removes some additional software.

If you Google around you should be able to find a number of hacks / utilities that will disable TouchFlo scrolling altogether (it's just a tiny registry change, so not something that's likely to cause system instability), so you might want to try that and see if that clears this up.

Touch Flo is completely disabled now (A scroll option still was enabled before). There is no difference after disabling it.

 

[cming]

I can confirm the same problem mentioned by Wan - with the Undo button also occurs on my HTC Touch Pro.
However for me, it happens regardless if there is a scroll bar or not, and also regardless of HWR Instant Recognition being on or off.
I hadn't noticed this before, since I rarely use the undo button in the dictionary screen.
The main issue I could see is that after the screen turning opaque again, it can be a little hard to see what you have written.
NB. The speed of handwriting doesn't seem to be affected by this even after several entries.

 

[koreth]

Reproducible crash and a minor bug to go along with it (both also happen in 2.0):

Start a flashcard session.
Get at least two cards wrong.
End the session either by finishing all the cards or by aborting and choosing not to resume.
When the first card comes up in the end-of-session review, hit the Palm's Home button to forcibly leave PlecoDict. Or receive a phone call, etc.
Launch Pleco and resume the flashcard session.
Click reveal then the checkmark or X (doesn't matter).
Minor bug: Subsequent cards in the review don't test the correct items. That is, if you were being tested on the definition in the initial run, you might be tested on the headword + pronunciation in the review. That doesn't happen unless you resume a session while in review.
Review the rest of the cards.
Enjoy the Palm reboot when you click the checkmark or X on the last card in the review.

 

[stephanhodges]

I have a problem with my database (very similar to the copy you already have).

When preparing for a flashcard session, I can select ALL the subcategories under Grammar->Radicals, for example and it does not automatically select the "Radicals" Category word.

Also, the "All Off" button does not clear these, which of course is hard to find with a multi-screen, multi-level list!

Clicking the "Radical" group name does clear/set all the subentries.

By the way, I got a complete crash/reset shortly after finding this out and clearing things. I had also quit a flashcard session after about 30 cards out of 250, and then proceeded to do the review several loops before quitting that with 3 cards remaining... So, not yet sure of exact steps to reproduce... :shock:

 

[sinoreen]

hi mike!
thanx for the good work, the new features are great. It's a pity though that it's still not possible to access the Edit Card screen directly from a dict entry (this was actually planned for this beta, right? you suggested something like a button in the duplicate card alert).

Crash Report: My Palm Tx consistently crashes when Char Info>Compounds>Popup Word and then click on the change dict button. Is it only possible to view the ABCs dict entrys in Popup Word Mode and if so why is there a switch dict button?

Minor bug report: This is really a minor thing, but everytime I tap on the border of the entry list in order to change its size, one thin light grey bar appears horizontally to the left of the entry list and one vertically under the Input field. However, it does not in any way influence any functions, it's just a "looks"-thing. The bars are gone when I leave pleco and open it again.

 

[daniel123]

Noticed two bugs on WM:

1) After some time of using flashcards with auto audio the female voice loses more and more words. This means those words will not be pronounced by the female voice any more. For example bu4, dang1, de, chi1 and so on will be left out. It affects words and sentences as well. Inside the sentence just those words won't be pronounced. Other words of the sentence are not affected. The problem affects normal dictionary usage as well as flashcard usage.
It needs to quit and start Pleco.
The male voice is not affected.

2) Don't know how it happened but at the moment when I stop and save my flashcard session I cannot leave the flashcard module to return to the main part. In the right upper part of the window normally is an ok button to return to main program part. But now there is always just an "x" to exit (but not to quit) the whole programm. Opening Pleco returns back to flashcard module (still containing the x button). No direct way to return to main menu and therefore even no possibility to quit. Now I need for example first to open "Manage Flashcard" dialogue and after exiting it the x changed into ok button again.

Hope you can reproduce it.

Daniel

 

[stephanhodges]

If I send a dictionary entry to the reader, then click on a "see also" type link from that word's definition to another, it always comes up with a strange entry, where neither the pinyin nor the hanzi match the originating link's pinyin. Dictionaries sometimes do not match either.

 

[mikelove]

mfcb - OK, we'll check through the relevant code and see if we can find an explanation for those settings leaking into other profiles.

marsch - good point on "scale decreases" - actually I suppose we have that kind of backwards, a card with a lower difficulty value (= more difficult) should really see its score decrease more quickly than an easier card. So maybe for b2 we should flip it around; multiply the divisor by 3, divide the difficulty by that, and if the resulting value is greater than, say, .8, lower it to that. So in your case it'd be 60 / 150 = 40% of the previous score, a more reasonable reduction for a card you've gotten wrong a few times.

Wan - must be a bug in our code for working around TouchFlo scrolling, then - might be best if we just turn that off until we can test it more thoroughly for a future release, doesn't seem to work that well anyway.

cming - strange about that, definitely sounds like there's something wrong with that TouchFlo workaround.

koreth - not seeing this here - you're still on a Treo 650, right? How exactly have you got the session configured?

stephanhodges - not selecting the parent category is normal, actually, since it's possible for cards to belong to that category but not any of its children - if we automatically selected that parent, there'd be no way to exclude cards that were only in it but include cards in any of the children. In hindsight we probably should have separated categories and "folders" but that's fixable in 2.1 anyway. Not sure why "All Off" isn't working, though. Still haven't turned up any specific bugs in saved sessions but we'll keep looking - are you storing your flashcards as a PDB or have you moved them to your Zodiac's internal VFS drive / an SD card?

sinoreen - accessing Edit Card from a dictionary entry proved really tricky, unfortunately, thanks to the way the software's architecture is designed - we'd have to jump back and forth between the low-level platform-neutral engine code and the higher-level platform-specific UI code like three or four times, and getting that to work well is just way too much work for a minor release. (didn't even manage to get a "Prompt" screen for duplicate flashcards working reliably, though we still might pull that off)

The Switch Dict button is probably just going to be disabled in that Popup Word screen for now - eventually we'll probably add one to the entire Compounds screen but I don't think there's time to do that for 2.0.1.

daniel123 - #1 might have something to do with the lower-quality audio encoding, particularly with short syllables like those - not sure how it would carry over between individual audio plays, though. So even once the female audio has started acting up the male audio continues working fine?

On #2, have you enabled the preferences option to allow editing in flashcard sessions? Might have something to do with that.

stephanhodges - those links actually aren't supposed to work at all in the main reader text area, only in the dictionary definition - not sure what's going on there.

 

[daniel123]

daniel123 - #1 might have something to do with the lower-quality audio encoding, particularly with short syllables like those - not sure how it would carry over between individual audio plays, though. So even once the female audio has started acting up the male audio continues working fine?

On #2, have you enabled the preferences option to allow editing in flashcard sessions? Might have something to do with that.

#1 Yes the male voice has no problems at the same time.

#2 Yes, that's also true.

 

[Wan]

Hi,

another small bug, it probably has been mentioned before.
After successfully finishing a flashcard session, there are two possible events: after a 5-card session, PD returns to the flashcard screen. After a 10-card (or more) session, PD automatically leaves the flashcard screen and returns to the dictionary section.

Wan