Here's a list of major known issues / missing features in the 2.0 beta. This will be updated frequently, so make sure to check here (and preferably also other bug report threads) before reporting a problem.
General:
- Performance on Palm OS is slower than we'd like it to be; we're working to get some more of our core database/font code ported over to ARM, which should make it a lot faster, but for right now it will feel noticeably slower than 1.0.
- Many of the Preferences options don't work yet, so if you try out an option and it doesn't seem to make any difference that's probably why.
- Hardware button support is not implemented yet, so you're stuck with stylus navigation only for now.
- Screen resizing (particularly on landscape-oriented displays) is rather finicky and might leave you with some confusing layouts, so it's probably best to stick with a square or portrait orientation and not change it while running Pleco.
- There are still quite a few memory leaks we haven't tracked down, so you should exit / reopen frequently (ideally with a soft reset in between) to ensure that you don't run into out-of-memory errors.
- There are crashes aplenty, of course... not much else to say on that, but try not get too mad, we're doing our best
- The Palm OS font files are mostly unchanged from the previous version, so there's still no full-width pronunciation support; we have, however, finally made the difference between first-tone 'i' and toneless 'i' clear, so that's something to celebrate at least.
- Tap-hold text cut/copy/paste doesn't yet work on Pocket PC, and Pocket PC text fields will sometimes display a bit oddly (e.g. with narrow vertical lines between characters when highlighted) Also, we just added VGA support 2 days before the release of Beta 1 so there may still be a few more graphical glitches on that than on regular 240x240/240x320-screen models.
- Pocket PC font rendering tends to be on the slow side, too, especially on VGA, though this should improve considerably after another beta or two.
- Audio playback on Palm currently only plays the first syllable for multi-character words that it doesn't have audio for; on Pocket PC it should correctly break the word down and play each of its component syllables.
Dictionary:
- The 21st Century dictionary conversion is still very rough, so you'll likely find lots of glitches and may also occasionally run into trouble searching for words.
- The Standard Dictionary has a lot of rare characters (indicated by N???? codes) which we haven't gotten around to finding/coding in yet.
- The interface to access full-text search is rather fussy, basically you have to switch into the language mode for the search you want to do rather than the dictionary you want to do it in. Also, particularly with Chinese full-text searches some matches may be missing / not found.
- It's currently not possible to add/edit user dictionary entries on Pocket PC, and they don't work very well on Palm OS either. Though the user dictionaries will still (annoyingly) come up when cycling through dictionaries on a non-matching search.
- There's no support for reshuffling the dictionary search order yet.
- ZhuYin support should work in headwords everywhere, but the only dictionary that currently supports it in example sentences is the ABC.
- Pop-up definitions don't work on Pocket PC yet, and magnifying a character just gets you the Character Info screen.
- The embedded document reader palette in View Mode doesn't really do much at the moment, so it's probably best to just stay in Search Mode all the time for now.
- The Recent Queries list doesn't work yet, the functionality's actually in there but the UI doesn't know how to show you the previous entries' texts.
- The definition field doesn't update correctly in some cases, and on Pocket PC search inputs may occasionally fail to be processed too.
Flashcards:
- Audio flashcards don't work at all yet, nor does the flashcard statistics screen.
- English-Chinese flashcards don't work yet either, nor do tones-only multi-choice flashcards.
- Flashcard export is not suported yet, and import only works with text or PalmDoc files.
- As stated earlier, hardware button support is not implemented yet, so you have to tap on the onscreen buttons to navigate through flashcards.
- Some of the extra commands in Manage Flashcards don't work either, and a few of the search options (e.g. category search) are very flaky.
- There's no support yet for searching / filtering / etc based on sub- or sub-sub- categories.
- Multi-choice flashcards tend to misbehave when there's only a small set of possible choices, so make sure you're doing them with a lot of cards (several thousand or more would be ideal).
- Stroke order test flashcards will fill in in the direction it thinks your stylus was moving when you tapped on the stroke, so if you see a stroke going the wrong way that's probably why.
- Flashcard databases may still get lost on occasion on Pocket PC, though this time it's usually not due to data corruption but simply to files being marked as in use by the operating system; a soft reset and delete of the new file will restore your flashcards in most cases.
- On rare occasions, flashcard databases on Palm do become corrupted, in which case all we can suggest is that you restore from a backup or start a new flashcard set.
- FLASHCARD AND USER DICTIONARY DATA FORMATS WILL BE CHANGING IN THE FINISHED VERSION, so you will likely NOT be able to migrate flashcard/user dictionary data from the beta into that.
Reader:
- Resizing the definition palette in the full-screen document reader doesn't work yet, nor do the add to flash or audio controls.
- Document format support is rather limited, and it may not like documents with weird line breaks / encodings.
- Word lookups can be painfully slow in some cases.
- So just in general the document reader probably isn't something you want to make a lot of use of right now. (apologies to those of you who were really looking forward to it, but we completely rewrote it just a couple of weeks ago and it hasn't quite stabilized yet)
Character input:
- The ->chars modes don't work yet in the keyboard part of the input screen.
- The auto-recognize timer doesn't work in handwriting recognition.
- Full-screen handwriting input doesn't work yet on Pocket PC.
- The checkboxes for particular sets of radical characters don't work yet, though they do work in the handwriting recognizer part of the screen.
Character Info:
- Stroke order diagrams appear in a different style for traditional and simplified characters; this is simply the format of the data we're using and is not considered a bug (and isn't really something we can fix).
- The entries beginning / entries containing screen is very slow to come up, especially on Palm.
- This can't be activated from the menu or toolbar at the moment due to a late-breaking bug, so go to the Search Navigation section of Preferences and set it up as the action on definition tap (we really need to make these screens less confusing) and that will bring it up when you tap on a character.
General:
- Performance on Palm OS is slower than we'd like it to be; we're working to get some more of our core database/font code ported over to ARM, which should make it a lot faster, but for right now it will feel noticeably slower than 1.0.
- Many of the Preferences options don't work yet, so if you try out an option and it doesn't seem to make any difference that's probably why.
- Hardware button support is not implemented yet, so you're stuck with stylus navigation only for now.
- Screen resizing (particularly on landscape-oriented displays) is rather finicky and might leave you with some confusing layouts, so it's probably best to stick with a square or portrait orientation and not change it while running Pleco.
- There are still quite a few memory leaks we haven't tracked down, so you should exit / reopen frequently (ideally with a soft reset in between) to ensure that you don't run into out-of-memory errors.
- There are crashes aplenty, of course... not much else to say on that, but try not get too mad, we're doing our best
- The Palm OS font files are mostly unchanged from the previous version, so there's still no full-width pronunciation support; we have, however, finally made the difference between first-tone 'i' and toneless 'i' clear, so that's something to celebrate at least.
- Tap-hold text cut/copy/paste doesn't yet work on Pocket PC, and Pocket PC text fields will sometimes display a bit oddly (e.g. with narrow vertical lines between characters when highlighted) Also, we just added VGA support 2 days before the release of Beta 1 so there may still be a few more graphical glitches on that than on regular 240x240/240x320-screen models.
- Pocket PC font rendering tends to be on the slow side, too, especially on VGA, though this should improve considerably after another beta or two.
- Audio playback on Palm currently only plays the first syllable for multi-character words that it doesn't have audio for; on Pocket PC it should correctly break the word down and play each of its component syllables.
Dictionary:
- The 21st Century dictionary conversion is still very rough, so you'll likely find lots of glitches and may also occasionally run into trouble searching for words.
- The Standard Dictionary has a lot of rare characters (indicated by N???? codes) which we haven't gotten around to finding/coding in yet.
- The interface to access full-text search is rather fussy, basically you have to switch into the language mode for the search you want to do rather than the dictionary you want to do it in. Also, particularly with Chinese full-text searches some matches may be missing / not found.
- It's currently not possible to add/edit user dictionary entries on Pocket PC, and they don't work very well on Palm OS either. Though the user dictionaries will still (annoyingly) come up when cycling through dictionaries on a non-matching search.
- There's no support for reshuffling the dictionary search order yet.
- ZhuYin support should work in headwords everywhere, but the only dictionary that currently supports it in example sentences is the ABC.
- Pop-up definitions don't work on Pocket PC yet, and magnifying a character just gets you the Character Info screen.
- The embedded document reader palette in View Mode doesn't really do much at the moment, so it's probably best to just stay in Search Mode all the time for now.
- The Recent Queries list doesn't work yet, the functionality's actually in there but the UI doesn't know how to show you the previous entries' texts.
- The definition field doesn't update correctly in some cases, and on Pocket PC search inputs may occasionally fail to be processed too.
Flashcards:
- Audio flashcards don't work at all yet, nor does the flashcard statistics screen.
- English-Chinese flashcards don't work yet either, nor do tones-only multi-choice flashcards.
- Flashcard export is not suported yet, and import only works with text or PalmDoc files.
- As stated earlier, hardware button support is not implemented yet, so you have to tap on the onscreen buttons to navigate through flashcards.
- Some of the extra commands in Manage Flashcards don't work either, and a few of the search options (e.g. category search) are very flaky.
- There's no support yet for searching / filtering / etc based on sub- or sub-sub- categories.
- Multi-choice flashcards tend to misbehave when there's only a small set of possible choices, so make sure you're doing them with a lot of cards (several thousand or more would be ideal).
- Stroke order test flashcards will fill in in the direction it thinks your stylus was moving when you tapped on the stroke, so if you see a stroke going the wrong way that's probably why.
- Flashcard databases may still get lost on occasion on Pocket PC, though this time it's usually not due to data corruption but simply to files being marked as in use by the operating system; a soft reset and delete of the new file will restore your flashcards in most cases.
- On rare occasions, flashcard databases on Palm do become corrupted, in which case all we can suggest is that you restore from a backup or start a new flashcard set.
- FLASHCARD AND USER DICTIONARY DATA FORMATS WILL BE CHANGING IN THE FINISHED VERSION, so you will likely NOT be able to migrate flashcard/user dictionary data from the beta into that.
Reader:
- Resizing the definition palette in the full-screen document reader doesn't work yet, nor do the add to flash or audio controls.
- Document format support is rather limited, and it may not like documents with weird line breaks / encodings.
- Word lookups can be painfully slow in some cases.
- So just in general the document reader probably isn't something you want to make a lot of use of right now. (apologies to those of you who were really looking forward to it, but we completely rewrote it just a couple of weeks ago and it hasn't quite stabilized yet)
Character input:
- The ->chars modes don't work yet in the keyboard part of the input screen.
- The auto-recognize timer doesn't work in handwriting recognition.
- Full-screen handwriting input doesn't work yet on Pocket PC.
- The checkboxes for particular sets of radical characters don't work yet, though they do work in the handwriting recognizer part of the screen.
Character Info:
- Stroke order diagrams appear in a different style for traditional and simplified characters; this is simply the format of the data we're using and is not considered a bug (and isn't really something we can fix).
- The entries beginning / entries containing screen is very slow to come up, especially on Palm.
- This can't be activated from the menu or toolbar at the moment due to a late-breaking bug, so go to the Search Navigation section of Preferences and set it up as the action on definition tap (we really need to make these screens less confusing) and that will bring it up when you tap on a character.