The third test release for Pleco 2.0.1 is available here:
http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd201b3.zip (2.5 MB) (application files for all platforms)
http://www.pleco.com/beta/pc201b3.exe (3 MB) (automated installer for Windows Mobile)
We're completely done with adding new features / design changes now, or at least we think we are, and we've fixed (or think we've fixed) pretty much every bug reported so far, so this should hopefully be little more than a final bug-check before we officially release 2.0.1.
Please back up your flashcards and user dictionaries before trying out this beta - it seems pretty stable but we don't want anyone losing their data. See backup instructions here for Windows Mobile or here for Palm OS.
To update on Palm, just install the updated application file to your handheld and it'll replace the regular 2.0.0 one.
On Windows Mobile, exit Pleco completely with the Quit command in the Dict menu, then run the Automated installer above and it will update / replace your Pleco application file with the new version. If you can't / don't want to use the automated installer, download the all-platform archive above, then connect your handheld to your desktop, go into its memory through My Computer and copy the updated Pleco application file into your \\Program Files\Pleco folder (My Computer, Mobile Device, My Windows Mobile-Based Device, Program Files, Pleco on XP, or on Vista, My Computer, (your handheld's name), /, Program Files, Pleco), replacing the version that's already there.
Here's a list of all of the updates / fixes in the three betas so far:
BETA 3
FEATURES ADDED:
Added a check to flashcard category lists to ensure that the children of each checked category are also checked themselves; this prevents the situation where a category that was newly added to a parent might be un-checked in a category table but still have its cards show up in a session
updated the SQLite library on Windows Mobile yet again - this new version contains an optimization that may make certain database queries (e.g. flashcard sessions with a lot of category selections) significantly faster by optimizing the processing of OR clauses
improved the fullscreen mode option on WM so that it will now remember separately whether it was in fullscreen mode in portrait and landscape orientation and switch into/out of it depending on the current orientation, useful for devices with slide-out keyboards. (this also fixed several graphical bugs relating to orientation-switching)
added a "Menu" option to the "Sel Action" and "Tap Sel Action" settings in the Stylus Actions section of Preferences, making it more convenient to access a popup menu of text-manipulation options
added back the TouchFlo-disabling hack from 2.0.1b1 as a preferences option in the Input panel of Preferences on Windows Mobile
restored the option to set the "learned" threshold to 0 "in a row" and have it apply that way in Statistics
re-enabled opening Instant Access with no text selected on Palm when the "Edit box in IA" option is enabled
inverted the text in duplicate card alerts to make it easier to notice them
updated the input fields in the popup definition and Edit Card screens so that they'll behave more like standard dictionary fields in terms of language auto-detection / dictionary switching
added a "Keep Cats" option to the duplicate card prompt along with the create / don't create ones
BUGS FIXED:
changed the "scale initial increases by difficulty" automated scoring setting so that now it determines whether or not a card is increased for the first time by a separate database field (lastinctime) instead of by the card's score, ensuring that it'll be applied more accurately and consistently
reworked the settings saving / loading system for flashcard configuration dialogs on Palm to reduce the odds of settings being reset to zero or otherwise garbled
fixed a bug that caused the audio volume to be reset to 1 when playing it in flashcards with a hardware button
fixed a bug that caused crashes when tapping on links in popup entry definitions with an input field enabled in the popup definition screen
fixed a bug in the Edit Card screen on Palm that could sometimes cause text from the From Dict tab to appear under the Custom Tab when Input Field Compatibility mode is enabled
fixed a glitch in the button order in the main screen of flashcards on WM (so that scrolling through buttons with the direction pad now actually brings them up in the same order they appear on the screen)
fixed a bug that could cause some popup lists in the Manage Cards Advanced Settings screen to fail to display correctly on square-screen or landscape-oriented WM devices
fixed a bug that caused display issues when switching into / out of fullscreen flashcard sessions on Windows Mobile
fixed a bug in manual flashcard scoring that could occasionally cause a card to have its score both increase and decrease after a single answer
fixed a bug that caused crashes in the Popup Definition window on Palm OS with the "Edit box in IA" option enabled when switching to another application
moved the "GO TO" label in Preferences on Palm over a bit to avoid having it overlapped by the blue control highlight outline on newer Palms
fixed a bug in the flashcard session dictionary remapping code which could cause a mismatch between the Pinyin and definition in some cards
fixed a bug that could cause bits of garbled text to be left behind at the bottom of the screen when scrolling (particularly on Palm OS)
fixed a bug that could cause crashes when opening the Add/Edit entry form with no user dictionaries installed / created yet
fixed a bug that could sometimes cause English-Chinese searches to return a later matching word in cases where more than one entry exactly matched the search query - "go1/go2", "order1/order2", etc
fixed a bug which we think may have occasionally caused buttons on Windows Mobile to accidentally be triggered twice
fixed a bug that could sometimes prevent the popup entry screen from updating correctly on Palm when returning to it from the Input screen (with edit-box-in-IA enabled)
BETA 2
FEATURES ADDED:
added a "Prompt" option to the duplicate card handling setting in Preferences - with this option, when you try to create a duplicate card a message will come up asking whether you'd like to create it anyway or skip it
added shortcut character support in menus on Windows Mobile
made the New Session / Start Sesssion buttons the defaults in their respective flashcard dialogs
Changed default text encoding on Palm OS to GB
added support for hardware scrolling between enries in popup definition windows - this works just like in the main dictionary, it scrolls once you're at the end of the definition
tweaked the Windows Mobile automated installer's "Install Add-on" option to allow you to select a card to install the add-on to
added a failed-install end screen in the Windows Mobile automated installer when an install is unsuccessful
revived the idea of automated installation on Palm OS, with a new Palm OS Automated installer using the same system as in 1.0
Added the current profile name to the headers of flashcard Advanced Settings dialogs on Palm OS
*changed the formula for the new "scale decreases by difficulty" option so that more difficult cards will now see their scores go down by a *larger* percentage than easier cards when answered incorrectly
changed the sort order of toolbar button options in preferences to match that in the instruction manual / menu bar
flipped the order of the recognize / undo / clear buttons in the left-handed handwriting input interface in free-answer flashcards
BUGS FIXED
(* fix bugs introduced in 2.0.1b1)
updated the Windows Mobile automated installer to work better with very old versions (3.x) of Microsoft ActiveSync
Fixed a couple of bugs with opening Pleco-format documents in the document reader on both Palm and WM
*Fixed a screen redrawing issue when using the "Popup Word" button in the Compounds tab of Char Info on Palm OS on an extended-size display
*Fixed a bug with the "scale initial increase by difficulty" option which would cause cards with difficulty values lower than 100 to keep having their scores increase by small increments until they reached the normal/default increase
fully fixed (we think) the erroneous "some of the dictionaries or other components you purchased were not found" error message - it should now only come up when that's actually the case
*disabled the TouchFlo scrolling fix on WM, since it seemed to cause more problems than it fixed
*fixed a new bug which prevented the handwriting undo command from working correctly in fullscreen mode on WM
*fixed a window hierarchy bug on Windows Mobile that caused an "X" instead of an "ok" to display in the top right corner of the main flashcard screen with the "Allow edits" preference option enabled when resuming and then exiting a flashcard session
*flashcard statistics now defaults to a "learned" threshold of 3-in-a-row if the threshold set in the current flashcard profile is 0
*fixed a bug which prevented the Input buttons on the Manage Cards Search Settings screen from working correctly on Palm (fields were left blank)
*fixed a bug which prevented individual flashcard score values from being assigned to hardware buttons
*fixed a bug which caused flashcard command buttons to sometimes perform the wrong functions on Palm OS when the "prompt" and "show all" automated scoring options were enabled
*disabled the switch dictionary button in "Popup Word" results in the Compounds tab of Char Info, since that function isn't implemented yet
*fixed a bug that caused tone practice tests to be checked / scored as soon as you entered the first syllable (rather than waiting for you to fill in all syllables)
fixed a bug that caused the input field to lose focus on Palm with Input Field Compatibility mode enabled after turning the fullscreen handwriting recognizer OFF, which could cause the Palm's built-in fullscreen handwriting recognition system to fail to kick in in its stead
*fixed a bug which caused the flashcard score button setting to lose its value from 2.0.0
fixed a bug which caused the scrollbar in the document reader definition to take up much more space than it needed to on palm
fixed a bug which caused instability in saved sessions when testing with "score-based" or "alternating" subject selection and reviewing incorrect cards at the end of the session
*fixed a bug which caused the dictionary remapping function to fail when running a session with the "allow invalid cards" option enabled
*fixed a bug which caused links from flashcard definitions to reference the wrong dictionaries
fixed a bug on Palm OS that could cause some categories to be erroneously selected / deselected in the new session category selection screen
fixed a bug that could cause problems with some cards in frequency-adjusted sessions becoming inaccessible when those sessions were saved/restored
*updated the SQLite library on Windows Mobile again, fixing a potential file corruption bug in the version of the library we used in 2.0.1b1 (but not 2.0.0)
*fixed a bug which caused extra controls/labels to be visible when they weren't supposed to be on the Edit Entry screen on WM
*fixed a bug which caused text encodings to be remembered / recorded incorrectly in user dictionary exports/imports on WM
*fixed a bug which prevented the status (# of entries exported) from displaying correctly in dictionary exports on WM
BETA 1
FEATURES ADDED
(particularly big / interesting ones are **ed instead of --ed)
USER DICTIONARIES
** you can now import / export user dictionary entries to/from text files; the format is the same as in MakePlecoDict or a flashcard import, headword<tab>pinyin<tab>definition for Chinese or headword<tab>definition for English.
-- two new buttons added to Manage Dicts, Add New to create a new user dictionary and Configure to change its settings - from the Configure screen, you can edit the dictionary's name and import / export entries from it using the new user dictionary import/export screens
-- added a Lock function for user dictionaries (accessible through that Configure screen) - this not only prevents the dictionary from being edited, it also generates an extra sort index that allows you to scroll through entries significantly faster (particularly noticeable on Windows Mobile) in large dictionaries
-- altered the dictionary search result system so that it will no longer switch to a different C-E dictionary if all of the results in the current dictionary are longer than the search query - this means you can now search for multi-character entries in a user dictionary by their first character
-- added a popup list to the Edit Entry screen which allows you to select which user dictionary a new entry will be saved to
INPUT
** "Instant" handwriting recognition option added - select "Instant" from "HWR auto-rec after" in the Input panel of Preferences and the handwriting recognizer will run after every stroke, as on iPhone and in some desktop-based Chinese handwriting systems. (this works much better on WM than on Palm for performance reasons, but we're offering it as an option on both)
-- added French and German keyboard layout options (though only in the main Input screen so far)
-- reintroduced the option to disable handwriting recognizer smoothing on Palm OS (in the Input panel of Preferences)
-- handwriting auto-recognize options (including instant) now apply in flashcard free-answer sessions too
CHARACTER INFO / POPUP DEFINITIONS
** added an option in the External panel of Preferences to include an editable Input Field in the popup entry window (applies to both Instant Access and regular in-software popup entry searches), restoring that functionality from 1.0; Copy to Input and the separate Input screen are supported, except that you can't access the Input screen when in Instant Access mode on Palm due to technical limitations
-- "Popup word" button added in the Components tab of Character Info - use this to bring up the standard popup definition screen on the selected word. You can use the up / down arrow buttons in that screen to scroll through all of the words in the selected list without having to exit and pick a different one.
-- added a field displaying the current character info character's Unicode character code at the bottom of the Char Info dialog (in details mode)
FLASHCARD SESSIONS
** added an "Allow edits" checkbox to the Flashcards panel of Preferences - this allows you to use the "Edit Card" command in Card Info during sessions, and allows you to access other parts of the flashcard system (Manage Cards, Manage Categories, etc) even while a saved session is present
-- heavily reorganized the flashcard Advanced Settings screen, putting Dicts in a separate screen (accessible by enabling dict remapping and clicking on a button in Display) instead of in its own tab and splitting the former Display and Modes options into Display, Controls, and Modes
-- moved the repeat-incorrect options to the main Test Setup screen, and the test subject selection option to the Display tab
-- added an "allow missing sections" option for self-scored tests (Tests tab of Advanced Settings) - with this enabled, even if a card is incomplete / invalid / missing it will still come up during a self-scored (or review-only) test, so you won't see any cards be skipped over or sessions end prematurely
-- moved the flashcard example sentence display preference to the Display section of Advanced Settings (so it can be set separately for each profile), and added the option to display references to other entries along with example sentences (though these will only be shown if the card is fully revealed)
-- reordered the recognize/undo/clear handwriting recognizer buttons in flash free-answer to put the recognize button nearest to the draw box
-- hyperlinks now work correctly (with a popup window) in flashcard sessions, though only if the entry is fully revealed
-- the current profile name is now shown in the title of new flashcard session dialog on Palm, though we're not able to put it there on Windows Mobile at the moment due to some bizarre technical limitations
-- made the "taller" flash self-scored sketch box just a few pixels shorter by default, to squeeze in an extra line of text - go into the Display tab of Advanced Settings and then exit the screen in order to apply the new height
-- added a check in free-answer pinyin tests to make sure that you've actually entered valid Pinyin in every box before the answer is automatically processed
FLASHCARD SCORING / CARD SELECTION
** added an option in Random / Self-scored / Rep-spaced sessions to limit the number of "unlearned" cards to study at any given time. The idea behind this is that you set a threshold at which a card is considered "learned" (also reflected in Statistics), then Pleco will try to keep the number of un-"learned" cards that you're studying at any given time below a certain number; this is handy if you want to add a lot of new flashcards to your study pool but not start working on them all at once. Once you've reviewed a card, even once, it'll be part of your pool of cards to study, so if you're already working on more than the specified number of "unlearned" cards it won't take any away, but it won't introduce any new ones until you've learned enough of them to drop the un-"learned" count below the level you set.
The "prioritize by" option lets you decide how you'd like Pleco to select new cards for you to study - "random" will choose them randomly from all eligible cards, "created" will choose them by the exact order in which they were created, and "approx created" does almost the same thing but will randomly choose between created within a day of each other; this is useful if you've imported a long vocabulary list that happens to be alphabetically ordered (so that cards later in the alphabet would have been "created" a few seconds after earlier cards) and don't want to actually study cards in that exact order (so you don't have to get through all the 'a's before you can start with the 'b's, and so on)
** added two new Automated scoring options, "scale initial increase by difficulty" and "scale decreases by difficulty". The first option will scale the initial interval (the jump from the default score of 100 to the first score after that) depending on the card's difficulty; if the normal initial interval for your current aggressiveness setting is 400, a card with a difficulty of 100 (the default) would jump to 400 after the first correct answer, but a card with a difficulty of 60 would only jump to 240 (60/100 * 400). The second option will cause scores to only decrease by the same amount they would normally increase when a card is answered incorrectly; normally, when you answer a card incorrectly its score drops all the way back to 100, but with this option enabled, a card that would normally have its score double when answered correctly would instead have its score cut in half
** added an option for Random sessions to set a specific "Unlearned card ratio" - with this option enabled, Pleco will configure the pool of cards to come up in each session so that that percentage of the available cards are unlearned and the remaining cards are learned. If there aren't enough cards of a particular type available to maintain the desired ratio, cards will be mixed at the beginning of the session in the correct ratio, then once it runs out of cards of one type it'll continue displaying only cards of the other type.
-- added an option in card selection "Fixed" sessions to sort by score in addition to creation date, and to sort in ascending or descending order
-- put score-based field selection options on a separate screen, allowing you to choose up to 8 of them instead of the previous 4
-- added a "show all" option to the "prompt for answer quality" option in the Scoring tab of Advanced Settings - with this selected, you'll see all 6 score choices regardless of whether you remembered a card correctly or incorrectly, and won't be prompted to choose correct or incorrect in Self-scored tests. There are also now separate Score 1 - 6 hardware button assignment options
FLASHCARD MANAGEMENT
-- made the Edit Card screen's dictionary search function behave more like a normal dictionary search interface, adding a clear button and updating it as soon as characters are entered / deleted rather than requiring you to tap on the search button
-- added a "modified" option to the card filter screen and the manage cards screen, and cards are now marked as modified when their category assignment *or* their text changes, so this will let you search for cards by how recently they've been added to / removed from a new category (though without letting you choose a specific one)
-- added a "duplicate" search option to the manage cards advanced search screen, though note that it's extremely slow at the moment (and won't work correctly if OR'ed together with another search, only if AND'ed)
-- manage cards will now only perform a search on open if it's very simple / fast (all cards, or a category other than uncategorized) - otherwise you have to tap the search button
-- search results in manage cards will now be cleared as soon as you change the search parameters, and a * will appear in the Search button to indicate that it needs to be tapped to search again; on Windows Mobile the button also blinks
-- added an option ("w/ cat" or "w/ cat name") in the Flashcards panel of Preferences to display the name of the category to which a newly-created card is added; this comes up *instead of* the "Card Added" message. If the card is a duplicate of an existing card, but it was nonetheless added to a new category (the "Keep Cats" option), an asterisk * will appear before the category name
-- added a cancel confirmation prompt in exports on WM
-- in flashcard imports that are configured to store imported definitions in the user dictionary, the software will choose which dictionary to store them in from the dictionary priority order for the import, or if it can't find any user dictionaries in there it'll use whichever dictionary is newest
DOCUMENT READER
-- moved the document reader hardware page scroll option to the "Reader Setup" screen, and added an option to hide the scroll arrow buttons
WINDOWS MOBILE
** experimental "Fullscreen" toolbar button option added on Windows Mobile; this hides the taskbar / menu bar in the main dictionary interface. This is currently only accessible through a toolbar button, since we don't yet want to deal with the possibility of people turning fullscreen mode on and not being able to turn it off again, but if you add it to your toolbar in Preferences it'll give you a lot more room on the main screen
-- dramatically improved the speed at which the main screen is rearranged / redrawn on some Windows Mobile devices - keyboard open/close should be almost instantaneous when before it could take a second or longer
-- add a check on Windows Mobile to reduce the number of unnecessary screen redraws (speeding up return from most dialogs)
-- preliminary support added for the number pad / Compact QWERTY input methods on newer HTC smartphones; you should now be able to use these to enter characters
-- improved SQLite support for reading files off of SD cards on Windows Mobile; we still STRONGLY discourage you from putting your flashcards or a user dictionary database you're actually editing on an SD card, since it's very very easy to lose data that way, but dictionaries created by other users (or dictionaries of your own that you're not editing very often) should now be OK to access from a card
-- improved Windows Mobile file access reliability in general; you should generally no longer find that all your dictionaries suddenly become inaccessible
-- updated to the latest version of SQLite on Windows Mobile, for possibly slightly better performance
-- improved the situation with TouchFlo (on newer HTC Touch series phones) getting in the way of fullscreen handwriting input when looking at a long entry with a scrollbar; now, after you enter that first stroke the scrollbar will be disabled, so subsequent strokes will be captured immediately (no tapping on the screen and waiting it for start drawing)
-- added a more user-friendly color picker (a simple window with a color grid) for dictionary icon and tone color selection on Windows Mobile
PALM OS
-- added an alert on startup on Palm handhelds running Palm OS versions earlier than 5.2 (which generally can't use Pleco's audio pronunciation feature without being hacked, and sometimes not even then)
-- recalibrated the audio volume scale on Palm so that the first few values are closer together and the later ones are more spread out - 1/2/3/4 are now lower than they were before while 10 is still as loud as ever
-- added a preferences option on Palm ("Hide insertion point in HWR screen" in the Input panel) to disable the insertion point in the text edit field on the handwriting input screen - this should trick PenPower (at least newer versions of it) into thinking that there's nowhere to input text and hence disabling itself when that screen's open, allowing you to use the built-in handwriting input instead
MISC
-- added alert explaining the "Choose Panel" control the first time you launch preferences; the "Choose Panel" label was also changed to "GO TO PANEL" to make it a bit more obvious, and a "GO TO" was added on the Palm version as well
-- updated the stroke order / audio demo messages so that they no longer claim the entire program is running in demo mode when only those particular features are
-- added an actual error message when the handwriting recognizer is not installed, so the software no longer simply ignores the "Recognize" command but actually tells you what's wrong.
-- added an "extended audio detected" note at the bottom of the Paid components list in Ordering if the extended audio files (for at least one speaker) are installed and unlocked
-- added a volume setting list to the audio play button (in all 3 screens where it appears) - tap-hold on it to select a playback volume
-- demo dictionaries can now be searched even if you've purchased / unlocked some paid dictionaries; if you select one of them specifically from the dictionary popup menu it should then allow you to search it.
BUGS FIXED
-- fixed crash on startup (which would sometimes look like the software wasn't starting at all) on Windows Mobile 2003 devices, particularly iPAQs - this was covered by the SD card patch version posted a few weeks ago
-- fixed the "No fonts found" startup error on Palm (couldn't detect any files if they were on an SD card) - also covered by the earlier SD card patch
-- fixed a crash on Palm in Manage Flashcards when dealing with extremely long (> 32,000 words) lists of flashcards
-- eliminated the erroneous "some components were missing" error messages on startup
-- hyperlinks to ABC entries now correctly factor in capitalization (so a capitalized link will go to the appropriate capitalized entry)
-- Windows Mobile fullscreen handwriting recognizer lines would sometimes turn gray along with the text
-- tildes will now copy-and-paste correctly out of definitions
-- the Copy command in the Edit menu now works correctly in the main dictionary screen on Windows Mobile
-- the reader bookmark "Replace" option now actually does what it's supposed to
-- fixed a memory leak affecting stroke order diagrams on Windows Mobile (potentially causing crashes in very long stroke order sessions)
-- definitions in the Entry List will now appear in traditional characters if you've chosen that option in the interface
-- self-scored sessions now show correct/incorrect buttons even with scoring set to "None" if you've enabled "repeat incorrect"
-- fixed a bug that caused the flashcard system on palm to exit to the flashcard central screen instead of the main dictionary screen if you save a session, reopen it, and then save it again
-- fixed a bug which prevented custom flashcard import/export dictionary selections / orders from being applied correctly on palm
-- fixed a bug which caused flashcard exports to be incorrectly encoded (appear as gibberish) on Palm, mainly when exporting free dictionary definitions
-- fixed scrollbar in manage cards not updating correctly when hardware scroll buttons used (on palm)
-- fixed a glitch which could cause portions of the screen to fail to update correctly on windows mobile (for example, when closing the start menu)
-- fixed a bug which prevented the entry scroll buttons in the document reader from updating correctly when the screen was resized (palm and wm)
-- fixed a bug which caused the character input screen to take longer to come up than necessary (both on Palm and on WM)
-- fixed a bug which caused cards specifically added to "uncategorized" (via a popup list) to still be added to the default category
-- fixed a bug which caused duplicated cards to be added to a category even if duplicate handling was set to "Skip" rather than "Keep Cats"
-- fixed the Clear button not working at all in the 1.0-style handwriting input screens on Windows Mobile
-- fixed a bug on Palm that caused bits of text to sometimes be left behind when clearing a text field if the insertion point was positioned in the middle of the text string
-- fixed a bug that could cause "AND" and "OR" boxes to come up in manage cards advanced searches even with only one field selected
-- fixed a bug which caused backspaces to not reset the delay-before-search timer if the "Don't auto-search on backspace" option was set; now, a backspace delays the search until you enter a new character
-- the handwriting auto-rec timer is now reset correctly if you undo a stroke on Palm (as it already was on WM)
http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd201b3.zip (2.5 MB) (application files for all platforms)
http://www.pleco.com/beta/pc201b3.exe (3 MB) (automated installer for Windows Mobile)
We're completely done with adding new features / design changes now, or at least we think we are, and we've fixed (or think we've fixed) pretty much every bug reported so far, so this should hopefully be little more than a final bug-check before we officially release 2.0.1.
Please back up your flashcards and user dictionaries before trying out this beta - it seems pretty stable but we don't want anyone losing their data. See backup instructions here for Windows Mobile or here for Palm OS.
To update on Palm, just install the updated application file to your handheld and it'll replace the regular 2.0.0 one.
On Windows Mobile, exit Pleco completely with the Quit command in the Dict menu, then run the Automated installer above and it will update / replace your Pleco application file with the new version. If you can't / don't want to use the automated installer, download the all-platform archive above, then connect your handheld to your desktop, go into its memory through My Computer and copy the updated Pleco application file into your \\Program Files\Pleco folder (My Computer, Mobile Device, My Windows Mobile-Based Device, Program Files, Pleco on XP, or on Vista, My Computer, (your handheld's name), /, Program Files, Pleco), replacing the version that's already there.
Here's a list of all of the updates / fixes in the three betas so far:
BETA 3
FEATURES ADDED:
Added a check to flashcard category lists to ensure that the children of each checked category are also checked themselves; this prevents the situation where a category that was newly added to a parent might be un-checked in a category table but still have its cards show up in a session
updated the SQLite library on Windows Mobile yet again - this new version contains an optimization that may make certain database queries (e.g. flashcard sessions with a lot of category selections) significantly faster by optimizing the processing of OR clauses
improved the fullscreen mode option on WM so that it will now remember separately whether it was in fullscreen mode in portrait and landscape orientation and switch into/out of it depending on the current orientation, useful for devices with slide-out keyboards. (this also fixed several graphical bugs relating to orientation-switching)
added a "Menu" option to the "Sel Action" and "Tap Sel Action" settings in the Stylus Actions section of Preferences, making it more convenient to access a popup menu of text-manipulation options
added back the TouchFlo-disabling hack from 2.0.1b1 as a preferences option in the Input panel of Preferences on Windows Mobile
restored the option to set the "learned" threshold to 0 "in a row" and have it apply that way in Statistics
re-enabled opening Instant Access with no text selected on Palm when the "Edit box in IA" option is enabled
inverted the text in duplicate card alerts to make it easier to notice them
updated the input fields in the popup definition and Edit Card screens so that they'll behave more like standard dictionary fields in terms of language auto-detection / dictionary switching
added a "Keep Cats" option to the duplicate card prompt along with the create / don't create ones
BUGS FIXED:
changed the "scale initial increases by difficulty" automated scoring setting so that now it determines whether or not a card is increased for the first time by a separate database field (lastinctime) instead of by the card's score, ensuring that it'll be applied more accurately and consistently
reworked the settings saving / loading system for flashcard configuration dialogs on Palm to reduce the odds of settings being reset to zero or otherwise garbled
fixed a bug that caused the audio volume to be reset to 1 when playing it in flashcards with a hardware button
fixed a bug that caused crashes when tapping on links in popup entry definitions with an input field enabled in the popup definition screen
fixed a bug in the Edit Card screen on Palm that could sometimes cause text from the From Dict tab to appear under the Custom Tab when Input Field Compatibility mode is enabled
fixed a glitch in the button order in the main screen of flashcards on WM (so that scrolling through buttons with the direction pad now actually brings them up in the same order they appear on the screen)
fixed a bug that could cause some popup lists in the Manage Cards Advanced Settings screen to fail to display correctly on square-screen or landscape-oriented WM devices
fixed a bug that caused display issues when switching into / out of fullscreen flashcard sessions on Windows Mobile
fixed a bug in manual flashcard scoring that could occasionally cause a card to have its score both increase and decrease after a single answer
fixed a bug that caused crashes in the Popup Definition window on Palm OS with the "Edit box in IA" option enabled when switching to another application
moved the "GO TO" label in Preferences on Palm over a bit to avoid having it overlapped by the blue control highlight outline on newer Palms
fixed a bug in the flashcard session dictionary remapping code which could cause a mismatch between the Pinyin and definition in some cards
fixed a bug that could cause bits of garbled text to be left behind at the bottom of the screen when scrolling (particularly on Palm OS)
fixed a bug that could cause crashes when opening the Add/Edit entry form with no user dictionaries installed / created yet
fixed a bug that could sometimes cause English-Chinese searches to return a later matching word in cases where more than one entry exactly matched the search query - "go1/go2", "order1/order2", etc
fixed a bug which we think may have occasionally caused buttons on Windows Mobile to accidentally be triggered twice
fixed a bug that could sometimes prevent the popup entry screen from updating correctly on Palm when returning to it from the Input screen (with edit-box-in-IA enabled)
BETA 2
FEATURES ADDED:
added a "Prompt" option to the duplicate card handling setting in Preferences - with this option, when you try to create a duplicate card a message will come up asking whether you'd like to create it anyway or skip it
added shortcut character support in menus on Windows Mobile
made the New Session / Start Sesssion buttons the defaults in their respective flashcard dialogs
Changed default text encoding on Palm OS to GB
added support for hardware scrolling between enries in popup definition windows - this works just like in the main dictionary, it scrolls once you're at the end of the definition
tweaked the Windows Mobile automated installer's "Install Add-on" option to allow you to select a card to install the add-on to
added a failed-install end screen in the Windows Mobile automated installer when an install is unsuccessful
revived the idea of automated installation on Palm OS, with a new Palm OS Automated installer using the same system as in 1.0
Added the current profile name to the headers of flashcard Advanced Settings dialogs on Palm OS
*changed the formula for the new "scale decreases by difficulty" option so that more difficult cards will now see their scores go down by a *larger* percentage than easier cards when answered incorrectly
changed the sort order of toolbar button options in preferences to match that in the instruction manual / menu bar
flipped the order of the recognize / undo / clear buttons in the left-handed handwriting input interface in free-answer flashcards
BUGS FIXED
(* fix bugs introduced in 2.0.1b1)
updated the Windows Mobile automated installer to work better with very old versions (3.x) of Microsoft ActiveSync
Fixed a couple of bugs with opening Pleco-format documents in the document reader on both Palm and WM
*Fixed a screen redrawing issue when using the "Popup Word" button in the Compounds tab of Char Info on Palm OS on an extended-size display
*Fixed a bug with the "scale initial increase by difficulty" option which would cause cards with difficulty values lower than 100 to keep having their scores increase by small increments until they reached the normal/default increase
fully fixed (we think) the erroneous "some of the dictionaries or other components you purchased were not found" error message - it should now only come up when that's actually the case
*disabled the TouchFlo scrolling fix on WM, since it seemed to cause more problems than it fixed
*fixed a new bug which prevented the handwriting undo command from working correctly in fullscreen mode on WM
*fixed a window hierarchy bug on Windows Mobile that caused an "X" instead of an "ok" to display in the top right corner of the main flashcard screen with the "Allow edits" preference option enabled when resuming and then exiting a flashcard session
*flashcard statistics now defaults to a "learned" threshold of 3-in-a-row if the threshold set in the current flashcard profile is 0
*fixed a bug which prevented the Input buttons on the Manage Cards Search Settings screen from working correctly on Palm (fields were left blank)
*fixed a bug which prevented individual flashcard score values from being assigned to hardware buttons
*fixed a bug which caused flashcard command buttons to sometimes perform the wrong functions on Palm OS when the "prompt" and "show all" automated scoring options were enabled
*disabled the switch dictionary button in "Popup Word" results in the Compounds tab of Char Info, since that function isn't implemented yet
*fixed a bug that caused tone practice tests to be checked / scored as soon as you entered the first syllable (rather than waiting for you to fill in all syllables)
fixed a bug that caused the input field to lose focus on Palm with Input Field Compatibility mode enabled after turning the fullscreen handwriting recognizer OFF, which could cause the Palm's built-in fullscreen handwriting recognition system to fail to kick in in its stead
*fixed a bug which caused the flashcard score button setting to lose its value from 2.0.0
fixed a bug which caused the scrollbar in the document reader definition to take up much more space than it needed to on palm
fixed a bug which caused instability in saved sessions when testing with "score-based" or "alternating" subject selection and reviewing incorrect cards at the end of the session
*fixed a bug which caused the dictionary remapping function to fail when running a session with the "allow invalid cards" option enabled
*fixed a bug which caused links from flashcard definitions to reference the wrong dictionaries
fixed a bug on Palm OS that could cause some categories to be erroneously selected / deselected in the new session category selection screen
fixed a bug that could cause problems with some cards in frequency-adjusted sessions becoming inaccessible when those sessions were saved/restored
*updated the SQLite library on Windows Mobile again, fixing a potential file corruption bug in the version of the library we used in 2.0.1b1 (but not 2.0.0)
*fixed a bug which caused extra controls/labels to be visible when they weren't supposed to be on the Edit Entry screen on WM
*fixed a bug which caused text encodings to be remembered / recorded incorrectly in user dictionary exports/imports on WM
*fixed a bug which prevented the status (# of entries exported) from displaying correctly in dictionary exports on WM
BETA 1
FEATURES ADDED
(particularly big / interesting ones are **ed instead of --ed)
USER DICTIONARIES
** you can now import / export user dictionary entries to/from text files; the format is the same as in MakePlecoDict or a flashcard import, headword<tab>pinyin<tab>definition for Chinese or headword<tab>definition for English.
-- two new buttons added to Manage Dicts, Add New to create a new user dictionary and Configure to change its settings - from the Configure screen, you can edit the dictionary's name and import / export entries from it using the new user dictionary import/export screens
-- added a Lock function for user dictionaries (accessible through that Configure screen) - this not only prevents the dictionary from being edited, it also generates an extra sort index that allows you to scroll through entries significantly faster (particularly noticeable on Windows Mobile) in large dictionaries
-- altered the dictionary search result system so that it will no longer switch to a different C-E dictionary if all of the results in the current dictionary are longer than the search query - this means you can now search for multi-character entries in a user dictionary by their first character
-- added a popup list to the Edit Entry screen which allows you to select which user dictionary a new entry will be saved to
INPUT
** "Instant" handwriting recognition option added - select "Instant" from "HWR auto-rec after" in the Input panel of Preferences and the handwriting recognizer will run after every stroke, as on iPhone and in some desktop-based Chinese handwriting systems. (this works much better on WM than on Palm for performance reasons, but we're offering it as an option on both)
-- added French and German keyboard layout options (though only in the main Input screen so far)
-- reintroduced the option to disable handwriting recognizer smoothing on Palm OS (in the Input panel of Preferences)
-- handwriting auto-recognize options (including instant) now apply in flashcard free-answer sessions too
CHARACTER INFO / POPUP DEFINITIONS
** added an option in the External panel of Preferences to include an editable Input Field in the popup entry window (applies to both Instant Access and regular in-software popup entry searches), restoring that functionality from 1.0; Copy to Input and the separate Input screen are supported, except that you can't access the Input screen when in Instant Access mode on Palm due to technical limitations
-- "Popup word" button added in the Components tab of Character Info - use this to bring up the standard popup definition screen on the selected word. You can use the up / down arrow buttons in that screen to scroll through all of the words in the selected list without having to exit and pick a different one.
-- added a field displaying the current character info character's Unicode character code at the bottom of the Char Info dialog (in details mode)
FLASHCARD SESSIONS
** added an "Allow edits" checkbox to the Flashcards panel of Preferences - this allows you to use the "Edit Card" command in Card Info during sessions, and allows you to access other parts of the flashcard system (Manage Cards, Manage Categories, etc) even while a saved session is present
-- heavily reorganized the flashcard Advanced Settings screen, putting Dicts in a separate screen (accessible by enabling dict remapping and clicking on a button in Display) instead of in its own tab and splitting the former Display and Modes options into Display, Controls, and Modes
-- moved the repeat-incorrect options to the main Test Setup screen, and the test subject selection option to the Display tab
-- added an "allow missing sections" option for self-scored tests (Tests tab of Advanced Settings) - with this enabled, even if a card is incomplete / invalid / missing it will still come up during a self-scored (or review-only) test, so you won't see any cards be skipped over or sessions end prematurely
-- moved the flashcard example sentence display preference to the Display section of Advanced Settings (so it can be set separately for each profile), and added the option to display references to other entries along with example sentences (though these will only be shown if the card is fully revealed)
-- reordered the recognize/undo/clear handwriting recognizer buttons in flash free-answer to put the recognize button nearest to the draw box
-- hyperlinks now work correctly (with a popup window) in flashcard sessions, though only if the entry is fully revealed
-- the current profile name is now shown in the title of new flashcard session dialog on Palm, though we're not able to put it there on Windows Mobile at the moment due to some bizarre technical limitations
-- made the "taller" flash self-scored sketch box just a few pixels shorter by default, to squeeze in an extra line of text - go into the Display tab of Advanced Settings and then exit the screen in order to apply the new height
-- added a check in free-answer pinyin tests to make sure that you've actually entered valid Pinyin in every box before the answer is automatically processed
FLASHCARD SCORING / CARD SELECTION
** added an option in Random / Self-scored / Rep-spaced sessions to limit the number of "unlearned" cards to study at any given time. The idea behind this is that you set a threshold at which a card is considered "learned" (also reflected in Statistics), then Pleco will try to keep the number of un-"learned" cards that you're studying at any given time below a certain number; this is handy if you want to add a lot of new flashcards to your study pool but not start working on them all at once. Once you've reviewed a card, even once, it'll be part of your pool of cards to study, so if you're already working on more than the specified number of "unlearned" cards it won't take any away, but it won't introduce any new ones until you've learned enough of them to drop the un-"learned" count below the level you set.
The "prioritize by" option lets you decide how you'd like Pleco to select new cards for you to study - "random" will choose them randomly from all eligible cards, "created" will choose them by the exact order in which they were created, and "approx created" does almost the same thing but will randomly choose between created within a day of each other; this is useful if you've imported a long vocabulary list that happens to be alphabetically ordered (so that cards later in the alphabet would have been "created" a few seconds after earlier cards) and don't want to actually study cards in that exact order (so you don't have to get through all the 'a's before you can start with the 'b's, and so on)
** added two new Automated scoring options, "scale initial increase by difficulty" and "scale decreases by difficulty". The first option will scale the initial interval (the jump from the default score of 100 to the first score after that) depending on the card's difficulty; if the normal initial interval for your current aggressiveness setting is 400, a card with a difficulty of 100 (the default) would jump to 400 after the first correct answer, but a card with a difficulty of 60 would only jump to 240 (60/100 * 400). The second option will cause scores to only decrease by the same amount they would normally increase when a card is answered incorrectly; normally, when you answer a card incorrectly its score drops all the way back to 100, but with this option enabled, a card that would normally have its score double when answered correctly would instead have its score cut in half
** added an option for Random sessions to set a specific "Unlearned card ratio" - with this option enabled, Pleco will configure the pool of cards to come up in each session so that that percentage of the available cards are unlearned and the remaining cards are learned. If there aren't enough cards of a particular type available to maintain the desired ratio, cards will be mixed at the beginning of the session in the correct ratio, then once it runs out of cards of one type it'll continue displaying only cards of the other type.
-- added an option in card selection "Fixed" sessions to sort by score in addition to creation date, and to sort in ascending or descending order
-- put score-based field selection options on a separate screen, allowing you to choose up to 8 of them instead of the previous 4
-- added a "show all" option to the "prompt for answer quality" option in the Scoring tab of Advanced Settings - with this selected, you'll see all 6 score choices regardless of whether you remembered a card correctly or incorrectly, and won't be prompted to choose correct or incorrect in Self-scored tests. There are also now separate Score 1 - 6 hardware button assignment options
FLASHCARD MANAGEMENT
-- made the Edit Card screen's dictionary search function behave more like a normal dictionary search interface, adding a clear button and updating it as soon as characters are entered / deleted rather than requiring you to tap on the search button
-- added a "modified" option to the card filter screen and the manage cards screen, and cards are now marked as modified when their category assignment *or* their text changes, so this will let you search for cards by how recently they've been added to / removed from a new category (though without letting you choose a specific one)
-- added a "duplicate" search option to the manage cards advanced search screen, though note that it's extremely slow at the moment (and won't work correctly if OR'ed together with another search, only if AND'ed)
-- manage cards will now only perform a search on open if it's very simple / fast (all cards, or a category other than uncategorized) - otherwise you have to tap the search button
-- search results in manage cards will now be cleared as soon as you change the search parameters, and a * will appear in the Search button to indicate that it needs to be tapped to search again; on Windows Mobile the button also blinks
-- added an option ("w/ cat" or "w/ cat name") in the Flashcards panel of Preferences to display the name of the category to which a newly-created card is added; this comes up *instead of* the "Card Added" message. If the card is a duplicate of an existing card, but it was nonetheless added to a new category (the "Keep Cats" option), an asterisk * will appear before the category name
-- added a cancel confirmation prompt in exports on WM
-- in flashcard imports that are configured to store imported definitions in the user dictionary, the software will choose which dictionary to store them in from the dictionary priority order for the import, or if it can't find any user dictionaries in there it'll use whichever dictionary is newest
DOCUMENT READER
-- moved the document reader hardware page scroll option to the "Reader Setup" screen, and added an option to hide the scroll arrow buttons
WINDOWS MOBILE
** experimental "Fullscreen" toolbar button option added on Windows Mobile; this hides the taskbar / menu bar in the main dictionary interface. This is currently only accessible through a toolbar button, since we don't yet want to deal with the possibility of people turning fullscreen mode on and not being able to turn it off again, but if you add it to your toolbar in Preferences it'll give you a lot more room on the main screen
-- dramatically improved the speed at which the main screen is rearranged / redrawn on some Windows Mobile devices - keyboard open/close should be almost instantaneous when before it could take a second or longer
-- add a check on Windows Mobile to reduce the number of unnecessary screen redraws (speeding up return from most dialogs)
-- preliminary support added for the number pad / Compact QWERTY input methods on newer HTC smartphones; you should now be able to use these to enter characters
-- improved SQLite support for reading files off of SD cards on Windows Mobile; we still STRONGLY discourage you from putting your flashcards or a user dictionary database you're actually editing on an SD card, since it's very very easy to lose data that way, but dictionaries created by other users (or dictionaries of your own that you're not editing very often) should now be OK to access from a card
-- improved Windows Mobile file access reliability in general; you should generally no longer find that all your dictionaries suddenly become inaccessible
-- updated to the latest version of SQLite on Windows Mobile, for possibly slightly better performance
-- improved the situation with TouchFlo (on newer HTC Touch series phones) getting in the way of fullscreen handwriting input when looking at a long entry with a scrollbar; now, after you enter that first stroke the scrollbar will be disabled, so subsequent strokes will be captured immediately (no tapping on the screen and waiting it for start drawing)
-- added a more user-friendly color picker (a simple window with a color grid) for dictionary icon and tone color selection on Windows Mobile
PALM OS
-- added an alert on startup on Palm handhelds running Palm OS versions earlier than 5.2 (which generally can't use Pleco's audio pronunciation feature without being hacked, and sometimes not even then)
-- recalibrated the audio volume scale on Palm so that the first few values are closer together and the later ones are more spread out - 1/2/3/4 are now lower than they were before while 10 is still as loud as ever
-- added a preferences option on Palm ("Hide insertion point in HWR screen" in the Input panel) to disable the insertion point in the text edit field on the handwriting input screen - this should trick PenPower (at least newer versions of it) into thinking that there's nowhere to input text and hence disabling itself when that screen's open, allowing you to use the built-in handwriting input instead
MISC
-- added alert explaining the "Choose Panel" control the first time you launch preferences; the "Choose Panel" label was also changed to "GO TO PANEL" to make it a bit more obvious, and a "GO TO" was added on the Palm version as well
-- updated the stroke order / audio demo messages so that they no longer claim the entire program is running in demo mode when only those particular features are
-- added an actual error message when the handwriting recognizer is not installed, so the software no longer simply ignores the "Recognize" command but actually tells you what's wrong.
-- added an "extended audio detected" note at the bottom of the Paid components list in Ordering if the extended audio files (for at least one speaker) are installed and unlocked
-- added a volume setting list to the audio play button (in all 3 screens where it appears) - tap-hold on it to select a playback volume
-- demo dictionaries can now be searched even if you've purchased / unlocked some paid dictionaries; if you select one of them specifically from the dictionary popup menu it should then allow you to search it.
BUGS FIXED
-- fixed crash on startup (which would sometimes look like the software wasn't starting at all) on Windows Mobile 2003 devices, particularly iPAQs - this was covered by the SD card patch version posted a few weeks ago
-- fixed the "No fonts found" startup error on Palm (couldn't detect any files if they were on an SD card) - also covered by the earlier SD card patch
-- fixed a crash on Palm in Manage Flashcards when dealing with extremely long (> 32,000 words) lists of flashcards
-- eliminated the erroneous "some components were missing" error messages on startup
-- hyperlinks to ABC entries now correctly factor in capitalization (so a capitalized link will go to the appropriate capitalized entry)
-- Windows Mobile fullscreen handwriting recognizer lines would sometimes turn gray along with the text
-- tildes will now copy-and-paste correctly out of definitions
-- the Copy command in the Edit menu now works correctly in the main dictionary screen on Windows Mobile
-- the reader bookmark "Replace" option now actually does what it's supposed to
-- fixed a memory leak affecting stroke order diagrams on Windows Mobile (potentially causing crashes in very long stroke order sessions)
-- definitions in the Entry List will now appear in traditional characters if you've chosen that option in the interface
-- self-scored sessions now show correct/incorrect buttons even with scoring set to "None" if you've enabled "repeat incorrect"
-- fixed a bug that caused the flashcard system on palm to exit to the flashcard central screen instead of the main dictionary screen if you save a session, reopen it, and then save it again
-- fixed a bug which prevented custom flashcard import/export dictionary selections / orders from being applied correctly on palm
-- fixed a bug which caused flashcard exports to be incorrectly encoded (appear as gibberish) on Palm, mainly when exporting free dictionary definitions
-- fixed scrollbar in manage cards not updating correctly when hardware scroll buttons used (on palm)
-- fixed a glitch which could cause portions of the screen to fail to update correctly on windows mobile (for example, when closing the start menu)
-- fixed a bug which prevented the entry scroll buttons in the document reader from updating correctly when the screen was resized (palm and wm)
-- fixed a bug which caused the character input screen to take longer to come up than necessary (both on Palm and on WM)
-- fixed a bug which caused cards specifically added to "uncategorized" (via a popup list) to still be added to the default category
-- fixed a bug which caused duplicated cards to be added to a category even if duplicate handling was set to "Skip" rather than "Keep Cats"
-- fixed the Clear button not working at all in the 1.0-style handwriting input screens on Windows Mobile
-- fixed a bug on Palm that caused bits of text to sometimes be left behind when clearing a text field if the insertion point was positioned in the middle of the text string
-- fixed a bug that could cause "AND" and "OR" boxes to come up in manage cards advanced searches even with only one field selected
-- fixed a bug which caused backspaces to not reset the delay-before-search timer if the "Don't auto-search on backspace" option was set; now, a backspace delays the search until you enter a new character
-- the handwriting auto-rec timer is now reset correctly if you undo a stroke on Palm (as it already was on WM)