3.0.0 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

bglasow

举人
Similar to jgal.66, on both my iPhone 5 & iPad 2 (both running iOS 7.0.3) the first time I tried to compact the database after upgrading it caused Pleco to crash. Every attempt after that first one on each device has been successful.
 
By the way, is it possible to have the "search" results display characters/character compounds in alphabetical order and from the 1st tone and down to the 4th tone?

Hi goldyn chyld,
It seems to me that to have the "search" results display characters/character compounds in alphabetical order is the best way to find what you are looking for. But then again, to have those results displayed in frequency order can be very useful for choosing what you want to learn first.
 
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Judy

秀才
I don't know what I've done wrong, but buttons have completely disappeared. No arrows, no history, only a search bar with capital C beside it. Have tried changing settings, nothing works. Help!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry for the confusion.

Which arrows are you referring to?

The history button is in the sidebar now - tap on the button at the top left corner of the screen and tap "History." (one more tap than before with the keyboard closed, but the same number of taps with the keyboard open, and you don't have to move your finger as far)

Are there any other buttons missing that you used to use?
 
Hi goldyn chyld,
It seems to me that to have the "search" results display characters/character compounds in alphabetical order is the best way to find what you are looking for. But then again, to have those results displayed in frequency order can be very useful for choosing what you want to learn first.

Yeah, I agree. Personally I think I'd prefer the alphabetical order for the same reason you mentioned, so I think having an option to choose either option would be ideal.
 
Feature request: any chance you could make the "< Back" button function in the same way as the "三" button, so that if you held it for more than a second it would quickly bring you back to the search results?

For example, If I search for a word and tap on it to get a definition, and then tap on, say, "WORDS", and then tap on a word in that category etc, it'd be quite convenient if I could simply tap and hold the "< ..." button to get back to the initial search results right away, rather than having to go back page by page...
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Why not just enable the "sidebar button everywhere" option? That way you can get the 三 button (I like that - among UI designers it's called a "hamburger button" but this is much better for our purposes) right next to the back button on those screens, and get the added benefit of easy switching to other parts of Pleco too.
 

gato

状元
Another request for a easy way to go back and forth between last dictionary entry reviewed.

In dictionary view, I would prefer right swipe to always bring up the entry reviewed (a back button in effect) and a left swipe to act as a kind of forward. This would provide an easier move between items in history rather than click on the sidebar. I think the "sidebar" button should be sufficient UI item to bring up the sidebar. Right swipe can be used for something else. The sidebar is just a menu. It should be considered to minimize the need to access the sidebar.

There are many items when the search result pane on the right presents only one word (like if you search for 爱不释手). On the phone version, given the limited screen space, I would prefer the search result pane to not be display when there is only one word, and only the definition is shown.
 
Why not just enable the "sidebar button everywhere" option? That way you can get the 三 button (I like that - among UI designers it's called a "hamburger button" but this is much better for our purposes) right next to the back button on those screens, and get the added benefit of easy switching to other parts of Pleco too.

Ah, yes, totally forgot about that option. Seems like a reasonable solution, thanks. Btw, I noticed that with "sidebar button everywhere" ON, Pleco feels a tiny bit sluggish when opening the definition window (when you tap on the word), as opposed to that option being turned off. (i.e. the transition from the search results window to the definition window doesn't seem as smooth as with that option turned off)

P.S.:"hamburger button" - thanks, learned a new word. :)
 

gato

状元
By the way, what's holding you back from making the free antonym/synonym add-on (in features for those who haven't seen it) a part of the standard install? It works well as far as I can tell and is something most people would love. But right now because it's buried at the bottom features add-on, many people probably don't know it exists.

In the add-ons available screen, I would
- get rid of the "all items" and "support" heading. There are only choices list. Separating the four choices under two headings seem unnecessary and potentially more confusing. It makes look more cluttered.
- likewise, I think the all the headings such as "characters", "audio", "by category", etc, in the features and dictionaries list are unnecessary and add clutter. There is also repeated heading of "early access". Since add-ons are the core of your business, you'd want these screen to be easy to view, attractive, sufficiently informative for people to choose to download the add-ons. Some further information/screen shots on the fonts and dictionaries would help. I don't see why not as much info as you have on the website about them. So people wouldn't need to go to the website to get more info before purchasing.

And a repeat of a previous comment, how about adding the "+" add-to-flashcard button to the portrait mode on the phone. The search box can be shortened, without too much detriment.
 
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jlnr

进士
jlnr - that's a funny bug with card importing - any chance all of these cards are in Uncategorized? Interesting idea on flashcards, we certainly do want to exploit the new fonts for testing on some way.

Yep, all my cards are uncategorised.

Another one: The long-hamburger-tap does not work reliably for me... I only use the dictionary and flashcards on my phone, so it should always go from one to the other. But sometimes when I go from flashcards to dictionary and browse for a while, I can't use the button to go back to the flashcards - the long-tap will not do anything at all. I'm not sure what the exact steps are to reproduce this.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
gato - swipe gestures are now sufficiently baked into iOS navigation (as a back command from lower-level navigation screens - systemwide gesture on iOS 7) that I don't really think it makes sense to take them over for something else; the side swipe also offers a way to bring up the sidebar without going all the way to the top of the screen, otherwise annoying on an iPhone 5/5C/5S and possibly more annoying still on a putative future large-screened iPhone.

To be honest, I'm not wild about inconsistent behavior from searches that return different #s of results either - liable to confuse users and it introduces an additional cognitive load (having to think about whether or not you need to tap on a listed result) that wouldn't be there if every search worked the same way. We could consider a new approach to combining definition/results on the same screen that would have the latter show up in a popup with the keyboard open and disappear otherwise (as used in some other apps), but if we did that I think we'd have to do it regardless of the # of results returned.

I would like to do something for easier history access, but I'm not sure what yet - we could copy the approach of a few other apps and show your recent entry history whenever the input field is empty, but that feels annoyingly jumpy to me compared to continuing to show results until you enter a new search, plus it doesn't feel like that ought to be in two different places and we already have a separate history screen. So maybe just an option to add a history button to the toolbar (with the tradeoff that you now have an extremely crowded toolbar)?

golden chyld - we'll look into that performance problem - might be loading the icon inefficiently or something. The synonym dictionary still feels unrefined to me at least - missing a lot of words - so I'd rather keep it experimental until we're a little more confident in it; also frankly the UI is kind of annoying right now (too much scrolling to get to Words Containing) so that needs to get better first too.

Thanks for the Add-ons feedback. There are actually more choices than that if you haven't bought anything - "featured items" on top - though it might make sense to at least make the headers a little more distinct from the items under them. The details screens are terrible at the moment - there's code to let us do much nicer ones but we've been so swamped with the manual / support email / etc that we haven't gotten around to that yet. (not a tradeoff I like having to make, but we can't very well leave people unable to access their purchases / confused about how to get around the new version / etc)

You can add any list item to flashcards by tap-holding on it and choosing "Flash" from the menu that pops up.

jlnr - ah, that probably explains the bug then - have to check not only if you have any categories but if you have more than a likely-random number of uncategorized cards. (we still put up that message intentionally if you've got a couple of uncategorized cards, since people occasionally hit the + button by accident)

The long-tap actually stops acting as a return function as soon as you leave the main search screen and go to a definition - our thinking on that was that people would rather it bring them back to the search screen from a definition too. However, we could look at having it remember your last non-Search-tab screen even after that and return you to that instead if you tap-hold it from the main search screen.
 

gato

状元
The tap hold/long tap functions are probably non-intuitive enough that it makes sense to provide a list of them in something like "Pleco 3.0 quick tips".
 

jlnr

进士
Two things I noticed while importing a custom dictionary- first, it would be nice if I could just have tapped the greyed-out file in the file manager (which is the first place I tried). Second, the "add user" button could really be "Add user dictionary from file" or something like that on the iPad.
 
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dapangjiaozi - Pleco wouldn't know about that text encoding selection unless you saved the file in Pleco; does the prompt go away after you open the file for the first time? If you save with a UTF-8 or UTF-16 BOM header (check your text editor's save screen) then Pleco will auto-detect that and open in that format the first time without a prompt. Collapsible headers in both Words and Chars should be forthcoming.

Yes, the prompt goes away. I did save with UTF-8 and it didn't auto detect. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong. Perhaps there is a file that works somewhere I can hex edit view? Not a big deal though, sure you have much bigger fish to fry.

In the definitions view, would it be possible to add an option to set the English text font size? It would be great to have a large Chinese font and small English font so you can see more in one eyeful.

Since the update, I bought a font, audio pronunciation and the Chinese Text-to Speech. I have to say, the TTS is so worth it and the kai font, especially for me as I'm learning Chinese.
 
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laobaigou

举人
Two comments on Open Document/Open File edit feature: 1) when you click on the pen, you are sent to the bottom of the file; your current location is lost; it also changes your font size. When you click 'Done' you are then sent to the top of the page. Be nice if it maintained your location. 2) The 'confirm' button has gone away; you seem to be 'stuck' with your edits; no way to undo/dismiss. Sorry if this was covered; if so I missed it.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
gato - already written a few versions of that, but at some point we ought to build something like it right into the app, yeah.

jlnr - different text in the iPad/iPhone versions is generally a bad idea, both for support / instruction manual clarity (if you're using an iPhone, tap on the "blah blah" button, or if you're using an iPad, tap on the "blah blah blah" button) and because it makes it harder for people to find functions they're familiar with in one version on the other.

Alexis - yes, better font previews definitely coming.

dapangjiaozi - it would only detect a UTF-8 file that had that BOM header on it, otherwise it would prompt you for the correct encoding. It's 3 bytes - 0xEF,0xBB,0xBF; put those at the start of the file and most text editing apps should be able to tell that it's UTF-8.

Variable font sizes for English/Chinese are something we've had a few requests for but they're a nightmare coding / testing wise so we haven't managed to do anything with them yet.

Thanks for your business!

laobaigou - 1) This is currently unavoidable due to some bugs in Apple's text editing UI control; at some point we plan to replace it with an editing-capable version of our own text viewing system, but until we do we're stuck with Apple's. 2) That was actually a popular feature request - people didn't want the extra confirmation box for what were generally minor edits to short files. However since it is the standard iOS text edit control you can always undo a change by shaking your phone.
 

Bendy-Ren

举人
Don't know if posted yet, but I found some bugs:

In the Organize Flashcards screen, if you're going through and check-marking a selection of cards, rotating the device between portrait and landscape orientation causes the selection to be lost.

In the same screen, sometimes making a selection of a large number of cards and then hitting Delete will (after successfully deleting the cards) cause the screen to go into a glitched state in between the Edit and Done modes. The circles appear, but they can't be check marked, and the Edit/Done button does nothing. Going back to the categories screen fixes the problem.
 
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