2.0.3 Bug Report Thread

[daniel123]

I have a new Acer neoTouch S200 runs WM 6.5 and I noticed two problems. One is with IA. I guess it has to do with WM 6.5 because I saw a similar problem on the HD2.

When I want to use IA via icon and "start" it just opens Pleco itself but no IA window. If I use IA from taskbar it works (in most of the time, but this taskbar icon leads sometimes to some other problems). Maybe I make any mistake but I have no idea. AFAIK I use it the same way as with my old iPaq 114. On iPaq IA via "start" and IA icon works without any problem.

I think on the HD2 IA does not work even via taskbar icon but I am not absolutely sure if I remember corrrectly.

I saw another strange little thing after installation of the sound modules. I installed the male voice (the file name is pc200-xaudio.exe is this the newest one?) and I installed the female voice manually. Afterwards I saw that the female voice has the same corresponding files but it has one file more: p2audio-female.basic.pdb. There was no p2audio-man.basic.pdb after installation. I guess this is a mistake.

I fixed it by copying the p2audio-man.basic.pdb from my old device manually.

 

[mikelove]

The IA taskbar situation is getting trickier and trickier in every new Windows Mobile update, so I'm not sure what we can do for it in 6.5 - we could try just directly adding a tappable child window to the bar at the top of the screen, I guess, a few other apps have done that, though it's very iffy in terms of backwards / forwards compatibility.

The sound module issue relates to a change we made a few months ago in how our installers are organized - "Basic" and "Extended" are now both included in the separate extended audio installer, with only single-syllable audio in the main installer, while "Basic" used to be included in that installer too. So download the latest male audio installer and it'll include the "Basic" file too.

 

[daniel123]

The IA taskbar situation is getting trickier and trickier in every new Windows Mobile update, so I'm not sure what we can do for it in 6.5 - we could try just directly adding a tappable child window to the bar at the top of the screen, I guess, a few other apps have done that, though it's very iffy in terms of backwards / forwards compatibility.

The sound module issue relates to a change we made a few months ago in how our installers are organized - "Basic" and "Extended" are now both included in the separate extended audio installer, with only single-syllable audio in the main installer, while "Basic" used to be included in that installer too. So download the latest male audio installer and it'll include the "Basic" file too.

I use an English dictionary (Lingosoft) that use something like IA called resident module or similar. Like Pleco it uses a taskbar and this works pretty good and stable. I like using a taskbar for IA but sometimes the taskbar of Pleco changes its appearance to an information box. When I click on this information box it opens a second taskbar line where I find the original IA Pleco taskbar icon. It is a little strange.

But genrally using IA via taskbar would be ok for me. But I remember that you said this feature is kind of depricated, isn't it?

Hope you can find a solution. IA is really a great feature. I would be glad if I could use it.


THX for the information about the new audio installer. I will download it and try again.

 

[mikelove]

It's kind of deprecated, but that doesn't mean we can't keep trying to get it sort-of working; we've just largely given up on making it reliably usable on every single WM device, there are simply too many variations / manufacturer-specific shells getting in the way.

 

[daniel123]

In the meantime I have some deeper impression of Pleco on the Acer S200. Most of the things work really great. But there are some things that would be great if you could fix it.

I) Like on the HTC HD2 I have the same problem when trying to select category checkboxes. So probably a WM 6.5 thing (I have to say sorry to the HD2). But the behaviour on the Acer using a stylus can minimze the problem. So I found a workaround that makes it possible to work nearly like before (but with a little more work) while the effect on the HD2 was IMHO more dramatically. Back to the problem: I tried to explain it before: In all dialogs where I can select category boxes many selections will be lost when doing the next action. While _action_ can mean: to select or deselect another category or to finish the selection dialog (this is "ok" in "Edit Cats" or to move from "Categories" to "Test Setup" in "New Flashcard Session"). It is difficult to explain. Maybe I can specify an example with my flashcard database if you cannot reproduce it.

II) Instant Access / Pleco Launch seems to has some impact on other software (Navigon Navigator, SPB Mobile Shell, Opera 10 Beta, ...). Sometimes I cannot start software if IA is started or I was not able to start "Open Flashcards" when some of this software is already open. This effect seems normally just appears if I switch between different software.

III) Pleco affects other software even with IA deactivated

a) When Pleco is already started Opera 10 will not be started in general. No error message it just does not start. If Opera 10 is already started and I start Pleco after it I can switch back to Opera without a problem. Pleco is the only software on my device that has this kind of problem.

b) Pleco and SPB Mobile Shell does not work properly together. After some time many icons of SPB Mobile Shell disappear. Also other software often cannot be startet. Stopping Pleco or stopping SPB Mobile Shell fix this problem.

c) Sometimes other bigger software can not be started if Pleco is running. I get a very strange error message: (I translated it from German):
"The file <...name...> cannot be opened. It is either not signed with a security certificate nor can any of your components be found. If the problem still exists you can try to reinstall or recover it."
When SPB Mobile Shell is active this happens nearly immediately when starting another program. Whith SPB Mobile Shell stopped this also happens but not as often/fast.
Stopping and restarting Pleco solve this problem. This is definitely something that has todo with WM 6.5 or maybe the Acer itself. It also affects software I had before on my iPaq. Maybe this could be a kind of memory shortage problem but the Acer still has 60 to 90 MB memory free. This should be enough to start a program that needs 2 or 3 MB. So I cannot imagine that this is a memory problem with just a confusing error message.

All in all I have about 30 other different programs installed. Some of them need more memory than Pleco. But the problems (a), (b) and (c) just occurs in relation with Pleco. As long as Pleco is closed I never noticed such a problem.

I see that this is maybe difficult for you to analyse but maybe you have any idea or you can send me some binaries that can collect some debugging information for you that can put us nearer to its cause.


IV) More a kind of feature request: In "New Flashcard Session" -> "Categores" the distance between the lines is double than before to be more fingerfriendly. I guess this is WM 6.5 but it also could be changed by Acer. This is good for usage but it unfortunately means that I can see very few categories on the small range of prompt Pleco uses in this case (compared with before where the distance was its half). But looking at the space below: more than half of the display is empty because you probably saved the place for the keyboard. Normally category selection does not need keyboard action so I think you could use the whole screen instead of just a small part. This would fix it for me.

Even if those things sounds like many problems Pleco makes much fun on the Acer. But it would be great if we can improve those things. I guess most of them are WM 6.5 issues so they are maybe of general interest.

THX in advance

Daniel

 

[mfcb]

Daniel and mike,

i have some input on this, i think.

I initially i thought it has to do with the ROM i burnt into my Touch Pro, but now i read about Daniels problems i begin to think its really something with WinMo 6.5 (or the underlying framework). category selection for a flashcard session worked for me like that: i select the category, but i could not see the checkmark. if i trusted its selected and closed the session and opened it again i saw the checkmark. when i got confused and clicked the category again, i saw the checkmark, but when i closed and opened again it was not selected. so, basically, when selecting or deselecting categories the immediate result is WRONG, just when the widget is painted freshly it shows the right state...

II + III this seems to be related to the same problems reported earlier with the HTC album application. to me it seems, that its not a memory problem (even the error messages that sometimes pop up would indicate this), but some other resources (file handles?). even when reducing the number of dictionaries its not sure that the problem is fixed with a certain minimal set of dictionaries (see another one of my earlier error reports)...

IV i observed the same, the entries in all lists are much bigger... its WinMo 6.5 (or the framework)

unfortunately my Touch Pro is still broken (i miss it :'( ) so i cant make further tests on that right now, i'm stuck with my Dell Axim until i have my new display...

 

[mikelove]

daniel123 - I) seems to be a bug in Windows Mobile 6.5; we're seeing numerous reports of this in developer forums. We're trying to come up with a workaround but I can't make any promises about when we might have one... for now the best bet is probably just to select the box and then press your phone's action button to toggle / un-toggle it. Or try double-clicking, that seems to work fairly consistently.

II/III all seem to involve the too-many-files-open-at-once Windows Mobile bug; the fix for that would I guess be to open files we're about to read data from and close them immediately afterwards, but that could really sap performance; we may not have much choice if this causes so many conflicts, though. Probably worth at least trying it in one beta and seeing if it does improve matters.

IV) I think would be very tricky to fix without developing our own custom version of the built-in tree view control (which would take a lot of work) - I guess we could at least look into stretching out the category selection box to take up the whole screen height, though.

 

[daniel123]

daniel123 - I) seems to be a bug in Windows Mobile 6.5; we're seeing numerous reports of this in developer forums. We're trying to come up with a workaround but I can't make any promises about when we might have one... for now the best bet is probably just to select the box and then press your phone's action button to toggle / un-toggle it. Or try double-clicking, that seems to work fairly consistently.

II/III all seem to involve the too-many-files-open-at-once Windows Mobile bug; the fix for that would I guess be to open files we're about to read data from and close them immediately afterwards, but that could really sap performance; we may not have much choice if this causes so many conflicts, though. Probably worth at least trying it in one beta and seeing if it does improve matters.

IV) I think would be very tricky to fix without developing our own custom version of the built-in tree view control (which would take a lot of work) - I guess we could at least look into stretching out the category selection box to take up the whole screen height, though.

(I) I see, I think while using the stylus double clicking is no problem. Not a serious problem for me but maybe for capacitive display users.

(II/III) Would be great if you could fix it. This is really a problem for me. Maybe not always close the file after reading but from time to time. Maybe After a number of files are opened or so with a configurable value by the user. A good idea to look at the performance issuse in the next beta.

IV) The double distance between the lines is well because it is more fingerfriendly. I like it. No need to change this. To stretch the category selection box to take up the whole screen height is what I meant. This would fix it for me. Sorry, maybe I made it not clear because of my bad English. Maybe you can do the same with "Manage Categories" (in this case with flexible screen height because the keyboard is sometimes needed)

THX

Daniel

 

[mikelove]

Hopefully Microsoft will fix I) in the upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5.3 release. (which I imagine will show up in ROM updates for a lot of devices)

II/III we've got a preliminary fix for now, doesn't even seem to sap performance much so we'll try it out in the first beta of 2.0.(8?) - thanks for the reminder on that.

We'll see if we can get IV) done for that first beta as well.

 

[mfcb]

i "merged" some categories (sub-categories of "HSK Level 2"， i created these to block them for adding to my flashcard sessions in a controlled way) and after that i experienced that a lot of cards got selected for the next repetition spaced session (maybe all cards, definitely more than just the HSK2 cards). after closing the session and opening it again, everything was normal. happened twice (some days before i merged "HSK Level 1", but at that time i did not think it might be a bug)...

 

[mikelove]

Might have been a mixup with category IDs, perhaps some deleted / moved categories were still stored in your profile settings somewhere; I'll double-check to see if there's any execution path that would prevent the category list from being rebuilt / rechecked when starting a new session.

 

[mfcb]

and yesterday i tried to split hsk3 in smaller sub-categories, and i got nervous when the device went nearly unresponsive after i pressed "done", without a busy cursor... i remembered last time i also had that feeling, so i just waited and after some time the category was split...

but for my nerves it really would be better, if some visible response is there, that its working on something...

 

[mikelove]

A status update for category splits would be nice, though those callback updates can be kind of tricky to implement - hopefully we can manage something anyway.

 

[mfcb]

not necessary to make a "live" response, just a popup with "please wait" or like that would do... not even the "done" button got selected (did not turn black), it just stopped to respond to anything...

 

[HW60]

Is it possible to use the user dict in compounds?

 

[mikelove]

mfcb - that should be doable at least.

HW60 - User dicts should be accessible in compounds even now, but they're very slow - they should become much faster / more usable in the next update, though, with its vastly improved (though slower-to-insert-entries) user dictionary indexing system.

 

[HW60]

But the only way to choose a dictionary in compounds is to hit the dictionary button, and if the USR dictionary does not appear after circling through the dictionaries: what to do then?

 

[mikelove]

Hmm... go into "Manage Dicts," select your user dictionary and check the "Use in reader" box - does that help?

 

[HW60]

No - I checked all 4 boxes for the user dict before.

 

[mikelove]

Hmm... might be a bug then. Has anyone else managed to include user dictionary results in compounds successfully before?