Beta 2 Priorities
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
Hi!
To be honest - after installing 2.0 I was a bit disappointed since I also know what Alpha means ...
I am afraid that I will not have much time to play around with it and will probably wait for the second beta. For me - flashcards are not that important but when I open Pleco 2.0 on my Dell Axim V51 I am somhow disappointed about the speed of the application and this little spaces between the characters is really annoying. I also use full-screen character input usually and did not find out how to get this to work so far ...
Since Mike told us what transfering flashcards means I would also appreciate him to save time and do it at the point where it makes most sense which is probably rather late ... and not so soon.
regards
Daniel
To be honest - after installing 2.0 I was a bit disappointed since I also know what Alpha means ...
I am afraid that I will not have much time to play around with it and will probably wait for the second beta. For me - flashcards are not that important but when I open Pleco 2.0 on my Dell Axim V51 I am somhow disappointed about the speed of the application and this little spaces between the characters is really annoying. I also use full-screen character input usually and did not find out how to get this to work so far ...
Since Mike told us what transfering flashcards means I would also appreciate him to save time and do it at the point where it makes most sense which is probably rather late ... and not so soon.
regards
Daniel
Full-screen character input doesn't work yet, but the character drawing speed is definitely something we're trying to improve. The little spaces should be gone in the finished version, but aesthetic issues like that aren't something we're likely to do much about until we've got a couple more beta releases out.
Coming sort of late to the party, but wow. The features are nice, and looking through the preferences there is a lot of stuff I'd been missing that I see will be included (sorting of results by length and auto-enter best handwriting match to mention two, though neither of these seem to work yet), but the speed is atrocious. I'm using it on a somewhat old PPC (HTC Blue Angel, late 2004 model), but I can't imagine why it would be this slow to render the entries. For a long entry, it takes about 2 seconds just to render the text! And scrolling through the result list takes forever. Apart from the speed issue, I guess I'm missing full-screen character input. Though really, I'm not even using 2.0b1 because the speed makes it useless. Will this be fixed in future betas/final version, or am I going to have to stick with 1.03? Why is it so much slower anyway, though? It's just rendering text, isn't it? Our Mac LCII could do that faster 15 years ago...
As for the alpha/beta thing, I thought a beta was supposed to be feature-frozen? :roll:
As for the alpha/beta thing, I thought a beta was supposed to be feature-frozen? :roll:
The speed is so slow basically because we haven't done any performance optimizations on our new font system yet; once we do those it should get much much faster. If we were using Windows' built-in system to draw text it wouldn't be an issue at all, but we've specifically stopped using that in 2.0 because it's the only way we can work around a number of serious bugs which Microsoft doesn't seem to have any intention of fixing, like the impossibility of loading font files from memory cards and the potential for some fonts to cause missing characters / weird behavior in Internet Explorer. But once we add glyph caching and make some optimizations to the color palette system the performance should be quite comparable to 1.03, and possibly even a bit faster due to the fact that we're no longer using the built-in (and incredibly slow) HTML renderer to draw definitions.
And yes, betas are supposed to be feature-complete but this one sadly isn't; as discussed earlier, we were worried that calling it an alpha would confuse people who weren't familiar with the term (or who mistakenly considered it to be *further along* than a beta). "beta" at least is something everyone has heard of.
And yes, betas are supposed to be feature-complete but this one sadly isn't; as discussed earlier, we were worried that calling it an alpha would confuse people who weren't familiar with the term (or who mistakenly considered it to be *further along* than a beta). "beta" at least is something everyone has heard of.