2.0.1 Beta 3 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[mikelove]

Mator - oops, yeah, looks like the underlying bug was actually there in 2.0.0 too but because of the changes we made in how flashcard settings data is saved / restored it didn't come out until 201b3. Easy to fix, anyway.

sthubbar - this is actually intentional, though the reason is a bit subtle - basically, in 2.0 we now keep showing you the results of your last search even after you've cleared the Input Field, rather than jumping back to showing you a list of all dictionary entries; it makes things a bit faster (since you don't have the momentary lag while the list updates) and lets you view those results while entering a new search. So it's not a matter of blocking you from scrolling up, it's a matter of showing you only entries that match your last search query. You can toggle back to the list of all ABC entries by tapping on the 典 button just above the Entry List, there's no need to switch dictionaries.

 

[sthubbar]

OK. Here is something else that may be by design.

There is a preference "Always search dictionaries in order." Maybe I am taking the "Always" too literally.

It appears that when copying highlighted text to the search field it ignores this "Always" feature and starts by searching the current dictionary.

I would prefer that it follows the "Always".

The reason is for example if I am searching the Guifan dictionary and there is something I don't understand and highlight then copy it to the input, I want it to look that up in the ABC dictionary since my Chinese is at a level that I usually want to see an English definition, that's usually the reason I am looking it up.

In addition, it is even more troublesome because right now it looks up in the Guifan so to look it up in ABC, I can either tap the dictionary ICON about 6 or 7 times (ABC is first, Guifan is second), or I can tap and hold and then select the ABC. If instead the search order was preserved, if I really wanted to search Guifan it would take one tap of the dictionary, or press the center button and would automatically switch to Guifan.

BTW, is there a toolbar button or way to switch to the previous dictionary instead of the next dictionary?

 

[ipsi]

sthubbar: The alternative would be to tap-and-hold on the character(s), and that should bring up a list of options, one of which would be pop-up definition, which will start on the last dictionary you left it on (well, in 2.0.0 it will. Haven't installed the beta yet). This is probably the best way to look up words you don't know in the Guifan dictionary.

If tap-and-hold doesn't work, check to make sure it's enabled by going to Preference -> Stylus Actions -> Tap-hold action. That should say Menu or Popup Dfn.

 

[anchan42]

Full-text search does not seem to work with single charecter.

Edit1: Just found it mention in another thread that it would not work. Maybe that info can be put in the ref. manual.

 

[sthubbar]

Great program. Still exploring more and more and finding things out that were available in 1.0 I just never knew Pleco was so advanced.

Couple of little things that I've noticed.

1) In the Manage Flashcards screen, it would be nice for there to be help. I find the interface confusing, especially the two green and red boxes at the bottom with + and - in them. How am I supposed to know what those do? The looking glass in the top right is also confusing. I think I understand the system now and I think have figured out the boxes, just not intuitive at all. Also the erase is not intuitive to delete and entry. In other screens it erases what has typed, so it seems in consistent. It would make more sense to me to have a "Delete" or "Del" button, like on other screens that offer delete function.

2) I think there is a bug with the "Remove category" button on the Manage flashcards screen. I have don't a search for a Category of cards. I highlight a card and click Red "-" with "All" showing in the drop-down to the right. A pop-up comes up asking if I want to remove all categories from the card. Oops, I don't want to do that, I then select "Cancel" or "No". Oh my gosh the card disappears. It's not at the bottom it is no where. Luckily doing another search and it comes back. It seems like since I am cancelling the action, nothing should happen to the card. It is disconcerting to see the card disappear.

3) Something is odd when I look at the card info for some of my imported cards. I have a card for "liu1liu1da1d1" that I imported. I may have had a custom entry before though now it is mapped to the "ABC" dictionary. Great. When I select "Edit Card", I see the "liuliudada" ABC entry for about 1/2 second and then the dictionary jumps to "liu4liu", The left and right arrows do not work to scroll through the entry, though I can tap on the up and down arrows on the search line. Something weird is going on here.

4) It looks like the "lookup entry in dictionary" feature on import is not quite complete. I imported several thousand entries and many of them had custom dictionary entries that are no longer necessary because of the much larger dictionary coverage. Many of them were not mapped to dictionary entries. By manually mapping them it worked just fine.

5) BTW, is there some method to compact the flashcards database? I have imported several thousand and them probably deleted about 1000 and my database is 1.2M and was wondering if I did some compact routine if it would get smaller.

Keep up the good work. I'll let you know if I notice anything else.

 

[sthubbar]

This is the second time in a row that Pleco 2.0.1b3 has reset on me and I think this happened before, I just didn't remember exactly what I did.

What happens is than I do a batch remove of a category from a long list of cards, I think 600+ and 768+. Then I go in and do a search and as soon as I drop down the list and select "dictionary" the Treo resets.

Like I said this is reproducible and happened twice in a row. Also after the first time it happened I was even more cautious. I remove the category from 768+ flashcards. I then exited Pleco and cleared my DBCache so I had at least 8MB of DBCache free. I went back into Pleco and went right to the Manage flashcards screen and as soon as I pressed "dictionary" the Treo rebooted.

FYI, I just went into the Manage flashcards screen after the reboot. Selected "dictionary" and it rebooted again. Let me try and reset the system by doing a different search and then a dictionary search. Yup, that worked fine, as long as I do some category search first, it resets something and now I can do a dictionary search.

 

[sthubbar]

Cosmetic bug in the "Manage Categories" screen. I had the next to last category highlighted and I deleted it. I would expect the highlight to either go away or normally it would move up and highlight the new last entry. Instead the highlight stayed where it was and was highlighting nothing.

 

[mikelove]

sthubbar - the "always search in order" option is indeed intended to work that way, since "Copy to Input" is really more intended more for things like following links or looking up related words than for looking up words you don't know in dictionary definitions - outside of Guifan / 21cn those words are pretty much always translated for you right in the definition anyway.

So ipsi's suggestion about looking words up in a popup window would be the best bet - if you don't want to go to the trouble of tap-holding to get the popup menu, configure "Menu" or "Popup Defn" as your "sel action" or "tap sel action" in preferences and you can get at it more quickly that way. There's no way to go backwards in the cycle dictionary list right now, though I suppose we could consider adding a button action for it, or perhaps just an option to make the Cycle Dictionary button pop up a menu as soon as you tap on it instead of having to wait a second for the tap-hold to kick in.

anchan42 - you're right, we should mention that in the manual. It would actually be relatively easy to add single-character full-text searches in a future release (though to save database space we might skip them for very common characters where there'd be too many results to get anything useful out of them anyway), but there are technical issues with doing so on Palm (relating to very large memory allocations) so it'll have to wait until we drop Palm support.

sthubbar again - a couple of people have complained about the delete button in Manage Flashcards, actually - really we should probably just roll out a whole new / better-looking icon set. We're experimenting with a somewhat different interface for that screen on iPhone and if that proves successful it'll probably end up in future WM releases too - I agree it's not particularly intuitive now.

The "Remove category" alert is indeed a bug, the screen shouldn't refresh / force a new search when you cancel it. The 溜溜达达 problem looks like it might have something to do with the //s in that entry - those should actually be getting stripped out. The import issue might have to do with the list of dictionaries not being set correctly for that - if you go into the Import screen and tap on the Dicts button, are all of your dictionaries included in the import? You can compact the flashcard database with the "Compact flash / user databases" button in the Misc panel of Preferences. Not seeing this issue with the "dictionary" menu here but a few other people have reported similar problems so we'll take another look at it.

 

[sthubbar]

Me, again! :shock:

It appears there is a bug when displaying flashcards that sometimes the pinyin is displayed on the same line as the characters. I'm not positive when it occurs. My entries are all sentences so they range from 5 - ~20 characters long. It has something to do with if the pinyin is short enough to fit on one line after the characters, it does, instead of a forced carriage return and being on their own line. Maybe if the characters run two lines and the second line only has one or two characters and then the pinyin is short enough to fit on the remainder of the line it does, though I'm pretty sure I see the problem other places.

 

[sthubbar]

Still actively using the program and finding things,

1) Comma forcing break in pinyin. It looks like the parser to display the pinyin in flashcards will break a line at a comma if the next "word" is too long to fit on the rest of the line. IMHO, this is bad because a) It doesn't do that with characters b) since we are dealing with chinese, it is common to have long strings of pinyin and tones with no spaces so it makes no sense to be breaking the line. I would recommend/prefer that the pinyin and characters follow the same rule and don't break lines because of punctuation marks.

2) Copy to input field searches don't work after using "Back". If I am looking at an entry and highlight a character or two and copy to input field, a search is performed for that new character(s). Now if I choose "Back" it goes to the previous entry. Now if I highlight the same character(s) and copy to the input field no search is performed. I realize that I could find "Forward" in the menus and go to the character, but what if I forgot that this is the character(s) that was just searched for. I would prefer that the behavior is consistent and every time something is copied to the input field that a search is performed.

3) Edit custom cards during session. I don't know if this is a feature request or a bug. It would be nice to be able to edit custom cards during a session. It is not uncommon that during a session I will notice something I'd like to change about a custom card, maybe the pinyin is wrong, or a character is wrong. In 1.0.3 it was possible to edit entries during the session and the updates are displayed automatically. It appears that in 2.0.1b3 that ability has been lost.

 

[mikelove]

sthubbar - The Pinyin wrapping is not really so much as a debatable design decision - we leave the Pinyin on the first line when we can to save extra room for the definition below. (particularly important in the often very cramped flashcard definitions) We might add an option to always put it on a separate line at some point - certainly wouldn't be hard - but we're getting stingier and stingier about new preferences checkboxes, as the screens are already incredibly overcrowded, so unless a ton of people write us about it it won't happen until the next big preferences reorganization in 2.1 or 2.2.

Treating Pinyin differently from regular English text would be very difficult - we'd have to rewrite large portions of the text rendering engine, and on some platforms (like iPhone) it'd be even more work than that - so while treating it more like characters for word-wrapping purposes might make a certain amount of sense it's just not practical right now.

Good point about Copy to Input and the Back button (it's failing because the software thinks the search term hasn't changed), but it's too late to change that for 2.0.1 so it'll have to wait for 2.0.2. You can already edit cards during a session if you enable the checkbox for that in the Flashcards panel of Preferences - we disable it by default since it can potentially cause some weird behavior during sessions (as it routinely did in 1.0), multiple-choice choices coming up with the wrong number of characters / syllables and so forth.

 

[sthubbar]

I have checked the "Allow edits during session" box and still when I look at the card properties during a session there is no "Edit Card" box in the lower left of the screen.

 

[mikelove]

It only shows up after the card is answered or revealed - otherwise you could accidentally cheat by seeing the whole card there when parts of it were still hidden in the test.

 

[sthubbar]

OK, I see, you are right. Thanks.

 

[sthubbar]

Now that you have helped me figure out how to edit cards while during a session, it looks like there is some odd behavior going on.

1) If I go into a card and modify it during a session, after the edit and I return to the test screen, the new changes are not reflected.

2) If I then go back into the card to make another edit to the same card, the changes I made previously are lost and I am returned to the pre-changes card.

I don't know if this was intentional. The odd thing is that the changes do seem to being made in the background somewhere because I was playing with this along with playing sounds at the same time. Any changes to the pinyin I made, though not reflected on the test screen, would be spoken correctly by the speech engine. But, like I said above, if I went back in to edit the card, all of the changes that were just spoken by the system were lost going back into the same card.

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, that sounds about like what I'd expect to happen - as I said, it can cause some weird behavior. There's some tricky business with database record caching that would make the flashcard system run noticeably less well in other areas if we tweaked it to make editing cards work more smoothly, so it's unlikely we'll be able to do much about this until after another major redesign of the flashcard system internals.

 

[sthubbar]

OK, thanks for another patient explanation to another one of my various inputs about this essential and wonderful piece of software.

 

[mikelove]

Heh, no problem! This sort of discussion and the design changes it motivates are a huge part of what makes our software great

 

[sthubbar]

Got another one for you that is easily reproducible.

SUMMARY

Using program button keys to "Scroll Entry" causes the dictionary to jump back to the first entry.

DETAILS

Program the Left/Right keys to "Scroll Entry"
Program the Up/Down keys to "Scroll Both"

Example problem #1 - Jump back after dictionary switch

This example requires an automatic dictionary switch after doing a pinyin search. The simplest way to replicate it is to first select your second in order dictionary and have the "Always search dictionaries in order" Preference selected. This way, we know for sure a dictionary switch will occur if we search for something simple like "li". Now that the second in order dict is selected, type in "li" in the search box. The program should have switched to the first dict and now is displaying entry for "li". Now press the Right arrow key. Notice the dictionary will display the next dictionary entry and then quickly switch back to the first li entry. A second press of the Right arrow will select the second entry and stick there. The problem also happens if pressing the "Down" key. The odd thing is that this does NOT happen by tapping the "Next Entry" toobar icon.

Example problem #2 - Can't go to next entry when doing full text search

I'm pretty sure this is the same problem, and this one has annoyed me, and I'm just now putting it together that it is the same bug as above. For this one, simply perform a full text search of anything "#whatever". Now try pressing the Right key to go to next entry and it will always jump back to the first search result. Press the center key button to switch dictionaries, and then press the Right key and it will switch back to the first dictionary and first entry. Again by using the toolbar, this behavior is not seen and the entries are paged through as expected.

I think that should be enough info for you all to track this one down.

 

[mikelove]

Yep, definitely seeing these. But since the 2.0.1 files are already packed and uploading and this isn't a showstopper bug it's going to have to wait for 2.0.2 to get fixed. Very odd, though... looks like yet another search-delay-related item, for some reason the software's deciding it needs to perform a new search after you scroll down (and reset the results as a consequence of that).