The second test release for Pleco 2.0.2 is available here:
http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd202b2.zip
Relatively small (by our standards) list of changes in this release, but a couple of big and oft-requested additions in the form of interruptable audio playback and faster (we think) user dictionary searches in the document reader.
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 2.0.1 one. On Windows Mobile, exit Pleco completely with the Quit command in the Dict menu, 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. Copy the file from the "wm2003" folder if your handheld is running Windows Mobile 2003, or the "wm5" folder if your handheld is running Windows Mobile 5 or 6.
We're mostly done adding new features for 2.0.2, but we're certainly still hoping to fix a few more bugs.
BETA 2
FEATURES ADDED
-- added support, both on Palm OS and on Windows Mobile, for interrupting audio in mid-playback; this means that if you hit the audio button (or advance to a new flashcard) while a word is in the process of playing, it'll be stopped and the new word will immediately begin playing
-- made a tweak to the user dictionary search algorithm that should greatly improve the speed and accuracy of user dictionary searches in the document reader
-- added a "Merge" button to the "Manage Categories" screen - this replaces "Split" when you select a category that has children, and instead of splitting a category into multiple children it combines all of those children into the parent category
-- added a "card time" option to the top fields settings in the Display panel of flashcard advanced settings, allowing you to see how long you've been looking at a particular card. The timer stops once the card has been fully revealed, so you can factor in how long you took to answer the card when scoring your answer from 1-6. (this may eventually be linked to an option to auto-advance / mark the card incorrect after a certain time, but for now it's just for your own informational purposes)
-- doubled the maximum number of categories a category can be split into, to 200 - if you want to go further than that we'd suggest splitting twice (i.e., split a category into 5 categories, then split each of those into 200)
-- restored the "1-char results for 1-char search" option to user dictionary searches, since it provides a considerable performance boost in them when enabled
-- enlarged the text in the System ID display field on Windows Mobile to make it easier to read, and added a button to copy the ID to the clipboard
-- added a preferences option (on the Results screen) to display results of *all* C-E searches in a list, even if there's only one result available
-- moved "match search length" to the Query screen of Preferences
-- full-text searches will now always display results in a list, even if there's only one result available
-- changed the default import definition source to "prefer file" instead of "prefer dicts", to match with the behavior in previous versions
-- made "instant" handwriting recognition the new default on Windows Mobile - performance-wise there's just no reason not to at this point
BUGS FIXED
-- fixed a bug that prevented user dictionaries from being switched to / selected when performing searches containing multi-character wildcards
-- updated the clipboard conversion code on Palm OS to use the same Pinyin cleanup code that the rest of Pleco does, so text copied-and-pasted out of Pleco should now have Pinyin tone numbers in the correct locations
-- applied the same Pinyin-sanitizing improvements to clipboard copies on Palm OS (which use different string-handling code than most of the other parts of Pleco) that we've made recently in other areas, so Pinyin copied to the cilpboard should convert to tone numbers more reliably now on Palm
-- fixed a bug that could cause crashes when importing data from a text file with Chinese characters and nothing else in the Pinyin field / column
-- fixed a bug that caused cards that had never been reviewed to not be included in "not within" reviewed time filters
-- added a check to prevent cards from being duplicated in the review of incorrect cards at the end of a session (though if that's set to loop, they'll still show up once on each loop until you get them correct, just as now)
-- fixed a bug on Windows Mobile that prevented main-screen handwriting recognition from working correctly with the Entry List set to fullscreen mode
-- fixed a bug that prevented flashcard category deletions from also deleting their grandchild (children's children) categories in some cases
-- fixed a bug that caused crashes on Windows Mobile when deleting categories with grandchildren (even if those grandkids were deleted correctly)
-- fixed a bug that caused the "Back" command to skip the most recently-viewed entry when invoked with a search error ("no matches found," etc) visible
-- fixed a bug that caused headword characters to be tone-colored in flashcards even if the pronunciation was invisible when the "head / pron from dicts" option was enabled
-- fixed a bug that could cause crashes (or just very large slowdowns) when searching for invalid strings of Zhuyin characters (syllables that don't exist or that Pleco doesn't recognize)
BETA 1
FEATURES ADDED
-- made a tiny tweak to the font rendering code on Palm OS which had a MASSIVE impact on performance - it's literally an order of magnitude faster for long entries, 21st Century entries that used to take 10 or 20 seconds to load can now load in under 2.
-- enabled control resizing in the Input dialog on Windows Mobile, so the controls in there will now expand to fill the available space on portrait / landscape displays (as they already do on Palm)
-- also in the Windows Mobile input dialog, the "left-handed" setting now applies to the placement of the clear / backspace buttons next to the input field, so now those will appear on the left side in left-handed mode (making them easier to hit with a stylus)
-- on Windows Mobile, upgraded the handwriting "auto-enter" option to highlight the character it's just automatically entered, which means that the handwriting "instant" and auto-enter options can now be combined, allowing you to have the recognizer's best guess about a character appear in the Input Field after each stroke as you draw it. This only works in the Input dialog, however, not yet on the main screen.
-- added an optimization for single-character lookups in the document reader which uses the Unihan database (if installed) to choose the entry with the most common Pinyin if more than one entry is found (so no more 'd's for 'de', etc)
-- changed the default directory search paths on Palm to replace "/Program Files/Pleco" with just "/Pleco", to fit better with the directory layout for most Windows Mobile installations
-- made the definition scroll up / down button assignments in flashcards part of the default preferences set, both on Palm and WM
-- renamed the "Fwd/Return" button option in flashcard button actions to "Next/Return" - it actually already would advance you to the next card after answering the current one, but we hadn't labeled it to indicate that
-- added an experimental (let us know if it works / causes problems / puts your system in an infinite loop / etc) fix for the problem of fullscreen mode being disabled when turning a Windows Mobile PDA off and then on again with Pleco running in the foreground
-- relabeled "prompt for answer quality" as "show score buttons" in the scoring panel of flashcard advanced settings, and added a popup list to let you choose the button order - the former "show all" option has now been replaced by three new choices on that list (123456, 654321, and "alternating" for the 2.0.1 behavior of showing 654321 on correct answers and 123456 on incorrect ones)
-- added a "require filled" option to free-answer tests (Tests panel of advanced settings) (also applies in tone practice tests) - with this option enabled, free-answer tests will refuse to score your answer until all of the blanks on the current card are filled in, helpful if you find yourself accidentally tapping the answer button before you're done
-- added a new "head / pron from dictionary" checkbox to the Tests panel of advanced settings; this will cause self-scored (and review-only) cards to pull their headwords / pronunciations from the dictionary entry they link to, preserving (r)s and other bits which get stripped out when they're turned into flashscards
-- added a new "match search length" setting to the Results panel of Preferences - this lets you customize whether Pleco will prioritize search results which exactly match the length of the search query over longer results, e.g. with "进阶" matching a 4-character entry in ABC et al but a 2-character entry in CEDICT / HanDeDict. With this set to "Always", Pleco will always search all dictionaries for an exact length match before accepting a longer one; with "Never," it'll always accept a match in the current dictionary even if it's the longer than the search query; and with "Non-user only," it'll try to find an exact-length match in fixed / non-editable dictionaries, but will accept a longer match in user-created dictionaries (useful because user dictionaries often don't contain single-character entries for the first characters of multi-character words)
-- combined the "Always search in order" and "Search only in current dictionary" options into a single "Search Dictionaries" option - "From Current" is the default behavior, "From First" is equivalent to the old search-in-order and "Current Only" is the equivalent to search-only-in-current dictionary. The two options could never actually be combined (enabling always search in order would disable search only in current) so this just makes that clearer.
-- gave the language auto-detection setting its own menu, adding a new "Hanzi Only" option which automatically switches languages when you enter a search query with Chinese characters but doesn't do so otherwise.
-- shifted the underline on large Palm OS high-resolution fonts up by 1 pixel, to make it easier to see the bottoms of underlined letters
-- split some of the "Display" preferences panel settings into a separate "Fonts" panel on Windows Mobile,
-- added a new option in that "Fonts" panel to not magnify headwords that are greater than a certain length
-- added a new option in the display panel to add a newline between the headword / pronunciation / definition sections of each entry
-- added a check to strip tab characters from flashcard / user dictionary text definition exports
-- added an extra "reset statistics" item to the flashcard session score-change button popup menu; this not only clears a card's statistics, it also removes it from the pool of cards to study if you're using the new limit-unlearned feature, so it's a convenient way to skip cards in that
-- added support for creating bookmarks in clipboard / Send to Reader reader documents, though they won't be saved on exit
-- moved the "store imported defns" option in the Import screen to the "Dict Order" screen, and added a brand new "Definition Source" option - this lets you prioritize whether you want the importer to draw definitions from the file (File Only), dictionaries (Dicts Only), or both (Prefer File to use file definitions when both are available, Prefer Dicts to use dict ones)
-- added a check to strip newlines out of text in XML imports (they screw up the database in all sorts of ways and until we work around that we're removing them)
-- added a check to prevent <scoreinfo> records in imports from importing if their score was blank / set to 0
-- added an error message to the Char Info screen when the Unihan database isn't installed
-- added two new options to the audio file set option in the Misc panel of Preferences, "alt (m 1st)" and "alt (f 1st)" - with one of these options selected, the audio will *start* on the selected gender (male or female) for each new vocabulary word or flaschard, but will then flip to the other gender if you play audio again on the same card / vocabulary word
-- added internal support for allowing users to toggle whether they want headwords in example sentences to be preserved or replaced by ~s, though since we haven't coded up our database files for this yet we won't be adding a preferences setting for it until we do
BUGS FIXED
-- fixed a bug that could cause the syllable 'nv' (with an umlaut) to be interpreted incorrectly if placed after another syllable that ended with a vowel but could end with an n (de/den, ma/man, etc)
-- fixed a bug that could cause pinyin where one syllable ended with 'n' and the next syllable began with 'g' to be converted incorrectly in copy-to-input and when importing from tone-marked (instead of numbered) pinyin text
-- fixed a bug that caused a crash on palm when attempting to open the reader with no document selected (or a blank list of documents)
-- fixed a bug that caused newly-imported cards to have their scores lowered when answered correctly with "scale first increase" selected in the scoring panel of advanced flashcard settings
-- fixed a bug which caused the statistics screen to double-count cards which appeared in multiple subcategories of given category when retrieving statistics for that category
-- fixed a bug with the highlight-calculating algorithm for full-text English searches which would sometimes cause it to highlight the start of another word beginning with the search term rather than highlighting the exact search term
-- fixed a bug that could cause "copy to input" to sometimes fail to look up an entry if that was the last entry you were viewing before backtracking to a previous entry
-- fixed a bug that made the popup definition screen on Palm always use a small font even when the main definition was set to display with a larger font - now both display with the same size, as on Windows Mobile
-- fixed a bug that on Palm that could cause text in edit fields to be duplicated after entering the Input screen with some characters already highlighted
-- fixed a small crashing bug when creating a custom flashcard with a traditional headword and no simplified one
-- fixed editing cards during sessions so that the cards' definitions will now be updated as soon as you return from the Edit Card screen (rather than waiting until the card is loading again)
http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd202b2.zip
Relatively small (by our standards) list of changes in this release, but a couple of big and oft-requested additions in the form of interruptable audio playback and faster (we think) user dictionary searches in the document reader.
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 2.0.1 one. On Windows Mobile, exit Pleco completely with the Quit command in the Dict menu, 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. Copy the file from the "wm2003" folder if your handheld is running Windows Mobile 2003, or the "wm5" folder if your handheld is running Windows Mobile 5 or 6.
We're mostly done adding new features for 2.0.2, but we're certainly still hoping to fix a few more bugs.
BETA 2
FEATURES ADDED
-- added support, both on Palm OS and on Windows Mobile, for interrupting audio in mid-playback; this means that if you hit the audio button (or advance to a new flashcard) while a word is in the process of playing, it'll be stopped and the new word will immediately begin playing
-- made a tweak to the user dictionary search algorithm that should greatly improve the speed and accuracy of user dictionary searches in the document reader
-- added a "Merge" button to the "Manage Categories" screen - this replaces "Split" when you select a category that has children, and instead of splitting a category into multiple children it combines all of those children into the parent category
-- added a "card time" option to the top fields settings in the Display panel of flashcard advanced settings, allowing you to see how long you've been looking at a particular card. The timer stops once the card has been fully revealed, so you can factor in how long you took to answer the card when scoring your answer from 1-6. (this may eventually be linked to an option to auto-advance / mark the card incorrect after a certain time, but for now it's just for your own informational purposes)
-- doubled the maximum number of categories a category can be split into, to 200 - if you want to go further than that we'd suggest splitting twice (i.e., split a category into 5 categories, then split each of those into 200)
-- restored the "1-char results for 1-char search" option to user dictionary searches, since it provides a considerable performance boost in them when enabled
-- enlarged the text in the System ID display field on Windows Mobile to make it easier to read, and added a button to copy the ID to the clipboard
-- added a preferences option (on the Results screen) to display results of *all* C-E searches in a list, even if there's only one result available
-- moved "match search length" to the Query screen of Preferences
-- full-text searches will now always display results in a list, even if there's only one result available
-- changed the default import definition source to "prefer file" instead of "prefer dicts", to match with the behavior in previous versions
-- made "instant" handwriting recognition the new default on Windows Mobile - performance-wise there's just no reason not to at this point
BUGS FIXED
-- fixed a bug that prevented user dictionaries from being switched to / selected when performing searches containing multi-character wildcards
-- updated the clipboard conversion code on Palm OS to use the same Pinyin cleanup code that the rest of Pleco does, so text copied-and-pasted out of Pleco should now have Pinyin tone numbers in the correct locations
-- applied the same Pinyin-sanitizing improvements to clipboard copies on Palm OS (which use different string-handling code than most of the other parts of Pleco) that we've made recently in other areas, so Pinyin copied to the cilpboard should convert to tone numbers more reliably now on Palm
-- fixed a bug that could cause crashes when importing data from a text file with Chinese characters and nothing else in the Pinyin field / column
-- fixed a bug that caused cards that had never been reviewed to not be included in "not within" reviewed time filters
-- added a check to prevent cards from being duplicated in the review of incorrect cards at the end of a session (though if that's set to loop, they'll still show up once on each loop until you get them correct, just as now)
-- fixed a bug on Windows Mobile that prevented main-screen handwriting recognition from working correctly with the Entry List set to fullscreen mode
-- fixed a bug that prevented flashcard category deletions from also deleting their grandchild (children's children) categories in some cases
-- fixed a bug that caused crashes on Windows Mobile when deleting categories with grandchildren (even if those grandkids were deleted correctly)
-- fixed a bug that caused the "Back" command to skip the most recently-viewed entry when invoked with a search error ("no matches found," etc) visible
-- fixed a bug that caused headword characters to be tone-colored in flashcards even if the pronunciation was invisible when the "head / pron from dicts" option was enabled
-- fixed a bug that could cause crashes (or just very large slowdowns) when searching for invalid strings of Zhuyin characters (syllables that don't exist or that Pleco doesn't recognize)
BETA 1
FEATURES ADDED
-- made a tiny tweak to the font rendering code on Palm OS which had a MASSIVE impact on performance - it's literally an order of magnitude faster for long entries, 21st Century entries that used to take 10 or 20 seconds to load can now load in under 2.
-- enabled control resizing in the Input dialog on Windows Mobile, so the controls in there will now expand to fill the available space on portrait / landscape displays (as they already do on Palm)
-- also in the Windows Mobile input dialog, the "left-handed" setting now applies to the placement of the clear / backspace buttons next to the input field, so now those will appear on the left side in left-handed mode (making them easier to hit with a stylus)
-- on Windows Mobile, upgraded the handwriting "auto-enter" option to highlight the character it's just automatically entered, which means that the handwriting "instant" and auto-enter options can now be combined, allowing you to have the recognizer's best guess about a character appear in the Input Field after each stroke as you draw it. This only works in the Input dialog, however, not yet on the main screen.
-- added an optimization for single-character lookups in the document reader which uses the Unihan database (if installed) to choose the entry with the most common Pinyin if more than one entry is found (so no more 'd's for 'de', etc)
-- changed the default directory search paths on Palm to replace "/Program Files/Pleco" with just "/Pleco", to fit better with the directory layout for most Windows Mobile installations
-- made the definition scroll up / down button assignments in flashcards part of the default preferences set, both on Palm and WM
-- renamed the "Fwd/Return" button option in flashcard button actions to "Next/Return" - it actually already would advance you to the next card after answering the current one, but we hadn't labeled it to indicate that
-- added an experimental (let us know if it works / causes problems / puts your system in an infinite loop / etc) fix for the problem of fullscreen mode being disabled when turning a Windows Mobile PDA off and then on again with Pleco running in the foreground
-- relabeled "prompt for answer quality" as "show score buttons" in the scoring panel of flashcard advanced settings, and added a popup list to let you choose the button order - the former "show all" option has now been replaced by three new choices on that list (123456, 654321, and "alternating" for the 2.0.1 behavior of showing 654321 on correct answers and 123456 on incorrect ones)
-- added a "require filled" option to free-answer tests (Tests panel of advanced settings) (also applies in tone practice tests) - with this option enabled, free-answer tests will refuse to score your answer until all of the blanks on the current card are filled in, helpful if you find yourself accidentally tapping the answer button before you're done
-- added a new "head / pron from dictionary" checkbox to the Tests panel of advanced settings; this will cause self-scored (and review-only) cards to pull their headwords / pronunciations from the dictionary entry they link to, preserving (r)s and other bits which get stripped out when they're turned into flashscards
-- added a new "match search length" setting to the Results panel of Preferences - this lets you customize whether Pleco will prioritize search results which exactly match the length of the search query over longer results, e.g. with "进阶" matching a 4-character entry in ABC et al but a 2-character entry in CEDICT / HanDeDict. With this set to "Always", Pleco will always search all dictionaries for an exact length match before accepting a longer one; with "Never," it'll always accept a match in the current dictionary even if it's the longer than the search query; and with "Non-user only," it'll try to find an exact-length match in fixed / non-editable dictionaries, but will accept a longer match in user-created dictionaries (useful because user dictionaries often don't contain single-character entries for the first characters of multi-character words)
-- combined the "Always search in order" and "Search only in current dictionary" options into a single "Search Dictionaries" option - "From Current" is the default behavior, "From First" is equivalent to the old search-in-order and "Current Only" is the equivalent to search-only-in-current dictionary. The two options could never actually be combined (enabling always search in order would disable search only in current) so this just makes that clearer.
-- gave the language auto-detection setting its own menu, adding a new "Hanzi Only" option which automatically switches languages when you enter a search query with Chinese characters but doesn't do so otherwise.
-- shifted the underline on large Palm OS high-resolution fonts up by 1 pixel, to make it easier to see the bottoms of underlined letters
-- split some of the "Display" preferences panel settings into a separate "Fonts" panel on Windows Mobile,
-- added a new option in that "Fonts" panel to not magnify headwords that are greater than a certain length
-- added a new option in the display panel to add a newline between the headword / pronunciation / definition sections of each entry
-- added a check to strip tab characters from flashcard / user dictionary text definition exports
-- added an extra "reset statistics" item to the flashcard session score-change button popup menu; this not only clears a card's statistics, it also removes it from the pool of cards to study if you're using the new limit-unlearned feature, so it's a convenient way to skip cards in that
-- added support for creating bookmarks in clipboard / Send to Reader reader documents, though they won't be saved on exit
-- moved the "store imported defns" option in the Import screen to the "Dict Order" screen, and added a brand new "Definition Source" option - this lets you prioritize whether you want the importer to draw definitions from the file (File Only), dictionaries (Dicts Only), or both (Prefer File to use file definitions when both are available, Prefer Dicts to use dict ones)
-- added a check to strip newlines out of text in XML imports (they screw up the database in all sorts of ways and until we work around that we're removing them)
-- added a check to prevent <scoreinfo> records in imports from importing if their score was blank / set to 0
-- added an error message to the Char Info screen when the Unihan database isn't installed
-- added two new options to the audio file set option in the Misc panel of Preferences, "alt (m 1st)" and "alt (f 1st)" - with one of these options selected, the audio will *start* on the selected gender (male or female) for each new vocabulary word or flaschard, but will then flip to the other gender if you play audio again on the same card / vocabulary word
-- added internal support for allowing users to toggle whether they want headwords in example sentences to be preserved or replaced by ~s, though since we haven't coded up our database files for this yet we won't be adding a preferences setting for it until we do
BUGS FIXED
-- fixed a bug that could cause the syllable 'nv' (with an umlaut) to be interpreted incorrectly if placed after another syllable that ended with a vowel but could end with an n (de/den, ma/man, etc)
-- fixed a bug that could cause pinyin where one syllable ended with 'n' and the next syllable began with 'g' to be converted incorrectly in copy-to-input and when importing from tone-marked (instead of numbered) pinyin text
-- fixed a bug that caused a crash on palm when attempting to open the reader with no document selected (or a blank list of documents)
-- fixed a bug that caused newly-imported cards to have their scores lowered when answered correctly with "scale first increase" selected in the scoring panel of advanced flashcard settings
-- fixed a bug which caused the statistics screen to double-count cards which appeared in multiple subcategories of given category when retrieving statistics for that category
-- fixed a bug with the highlight-calculating algorithm for full-text English searches which would sometimes cause it to highlight the start of another word beginning with the search term rather than highlighting the exact search term
-- fixed a bug that could cause "copy to input" to sometimes fail to look up an entry if that was the last entry you were viewing before backtracking to a previous entry
-- fixed a bug that made the popup definition screen on Palm always use a small font even when the main definition was set to display with a larger font - now both display with the same size, as on Windows Mobile
-- fixed a bug that on Palm that could cause text in edit fields to be duplicated after entering the Input screen with some characters already highlighted
-- fixed a small crashing bug when creating a custom flashcard with a traditional headword and no simplified one
-- fixed editing cards during sessions so that the cards' definitions will now be updated as soon as you return from the Edit Card screen (rather than waiting until the card is loading again)