Beta 3 Feedback Thread
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
Hi Mike,
Yesterday I bought and installed the full upgrade including the new dictionaries. I am a die-hard Pleco-user for several years now, not really "computer savvy", but I managed to get the Beta 3 installed on my Palm XT without problems. I really enjoy the new features: the audio, the stroke order and the text reader ! I also like the idea to display the five tones in different colours very much. I hope it will help me to remember them better later !
(by the way, why does this not work in the new dictionaries?).
At the beginning of this thread it is said that you are particulary interested in our opinions on the new flashcard system. Since I use the flashcards very often in PlecoDict 1, I thought I could do some testing and give valuable feedback. But now I am afraid that the new flashcard system has become too complex for me to understand it without some kind of manual. Setting up the preferences for the flashcards is already puzzling, especially the flashcard buttons.
In the flashcard system I discovered a few small problems, but I understand that you are aware of most minor bugs, so it is not very useful to post them here.
One thing I hoped to find in the new version is probably not there: a way to set a selection of cards created between two dates. This could help to keep the number of flashcard lists limited and still allow users to repeat specific lessons. Maybe a small idea for a later update?
Since I did not succeed to import a text file from my flashcard lists of PlecoDict 1 (not sure if this already works anyway), I was wondering if it is possible to download one or two updated flashcard lists for testing in PlecoDict 2.0 beta3 (like HSK 1 & 2), just like "The True Story of Ah Q" for the Reader. Next to these also a few clues about how to use the operating parts of the flashcards system would be very useful (or did I overlook something?). If this is possible, then I would be glad to provide the kind of feedback on the flashcards system you would like to know.
Anyway, thanks for all the good work and keep it up! I don't know where my Chinese would be now if there had not been Pleco along the way
(probably it would have been buried by now under a load of bulky paper dictionaries!)
Cheers,
Harm
Yesterday I bought and installed the full upgrade including the new dictionaries. I am a die-hard Pleco-user for several years now, not really "computer savvy", but I managed to get the Beta 3 installed on my Palm XT without problems. I really enjoy the new features: the audio, the stroke order and the text reader ! I also like the idea to display the five tones in different colours very much. I hope it will help me to remember them better later !
(by the way, why does this not work in the new dictionaries?).
At the beginning of this thread it is said that you are particulary interested in our opinions on the new flashcard system. Since I use the flashcards very often in PlecoDict 1, I thought I could do some testing and give valuable feedback. But now I am afraid that the new flashcard system has become too complex for me to understand it without some kind of manual. Setting up the preferences for the flashcards is already puzzling, especially the flashcard buttons.
In the flashcard system I discovered a few small problems, but I understand that you are aware of most minor bugs, so it is not very useful to post them here.
One thing I hoped to find in the new version is probably not there: a way to set a selection of cards created between two dates. This could help to keep the number of flashcard lists limited and still allow users to repeat specific lessons. Maybe a small idea for a later update?
Since I did not succeed to import a text file from my flashcard lists of PlecoDict 1 (not sure if this already works anyway), I was wondering if it is possible to download one or two updated flashcard lists for testing in PlecoDict 2.0 beta3 (like HSK 1 & 2), just like "The True Story of Ah Q" for the Reader. Next to these also a few clues about how to use the operating parts of the flashcards system would be very useful (or did I overlook something?). If this is possible, then I would be glad to provide the kind of feedback on the flashcards system you would like to know.
Anyway, thanks for all the good work and keep it up! I don't know where my Chinese would be now if there had not been Pleco along the way
(probably it would have been buried by now under a load of bulky paper dictionaries!)
Cheers,
Harm
dom - Not sure what's going on with #1, the delay-before-search works correctly on our Palms here. Did you change that preferences setting from its default? Perhaps the preferences panel is screwing it up somehow. #2 is a known issue, if you exit and reopen it should show traditional in both places (though I'm not 100% sure if that's working yet). #3 is kind of funny, actually, though it definitely should be fixed soon, and with #4 you will indeed have to wait for the finished version and in fact the new MakePlecoDict may not be out for another month or two after it's released (since we wouldn't want to hold back the rest of 2.0 while we finished that).
And yes, it'll support 320x480 screens just like 1.0 does now.
Harm - delighted to hear it's working well for you. The tone-color idea was developed by a friend of mine though he's done some research that suggests someone else may have had the idea for it almost a century ago - it's still kind of glitchy but I wanted to get it in 2.0 ASAP so we'd have a prior art claim if some idiot later comes along and tries to patent the idea. (I hate software patents)
I'm sorry you're having trouble setting up flashcards - I think the new design is pretty intuitive once you spend a little time with it but it's a big enough departure from the old one that I expect a lot of people to be confused. We're actually thinking about putting up a couple of video tutorials for 2.0 in addition to the instruction manual. I'm hesitant to post detailed instructions now since there'll be at least a few more changes in Beta 4...
Date ranges are a good idea, particularly since it's no longer possible to sort cards in a session by date - I'll see what we can do on that. The old lists should actually import correctly in the beta, though the importer is a little glitchy at the moment and often dies after a thousand cards or so.
And yes, it'll support 320x480 screens just like 1.0 does now.
Harm - delighted to hear it's working well for you. The tone-color idea was developed by a friend of mine though he's done some research that suggests someone else may have had the idea for it almost a century ago - it's still kind of glitchy but I wanted to get it in 2.0 ASAP so we'd have a prior art claim if some idiot later comes along and tries to patent the idea. (I hate software patents)
I'm sorry you're having trouble setting up flashcards - I think the new design is pretty intuitive once you spend a little time with it but it's a big enough departure from the old one that I expect a lot of people to be confused. We're actually thinking about putting up a couple of video tutorials for 2.0 in addition to the instruction manual. I'm hesitant to post detailed instructions now since there'll be at least a few more changes in Beta 4...
Date ranges are a good idea, particularly since it's no longer possible to sort cards in a session by date - I'll see what we can do on that. The old lists should actually import correctly in the beta, though the importer is a little glitchy at the moment and often dies after a thousand cards or so.
Everything that is said about Pleco 2.0 on this forum is really mouth-watering !
However, as I am not gifted in computer science I have not yet dared to try my luck at the beta version of Pleco 2.0.
It is written on the topic "Beta 3 Released + Download Info: "(...) This is not a particularly stable release even by our standards, so if you're one of the large group of people who are still waiting to try out 2.0 we'd advise you to keep waiting, at least until Beta 4 "
Will this beta version 4 be released soon?
Sorry for my bad english ! I'm French !
However, as I am not gifted in computer science I have not yet dared to try my luck at the beta version of Pleco 2.0.
It is written on the topic "Beta 3 Released + Download Info: "(...) This is not a particularly stable release even by our standards, so if you're one of the large group of people who are still waiting to try out 2.0 we'd advise you to keep waiting, at least until Beta 4 "
Will this beta version 4 be released soon?
Sorry for my bad english ! I'm French !
There's some kind of problem with TouchFlo (finger based scrolling) and the handwriting recognition. Handwriting recognition only works for the first character. After that there's a scrollbar in the character selection box and the touchscreen won't recognize new strokes corretcly. There's a strange workaround: just pop up the keyboard while using handwriting recognition and you can put in multiple characters. The other possibilty is just to disable TouchFlo scrolling in the registry.
Regards
Nicolas
HTC Prophet WM6
Regards
Nicolas
HTC Prophet WM6
At least on the TX it does. However, please note as Mike already warned us that the current beta still has quite some draw and redraw problems; the additional pixels are sometimes not correctly redrawn. Expanding and retracting the silkscreen area should help then. But for flashcards stay in 320x320 mode with the expanded silkscreen area, otherwise the flashcard check dialog will become unusable because buttons will be missing.
Despite the current beta problems, 480x320 is definitely a "must" feature of PlecoDict: it gives useful screen estate.
feilipu14 - we're probably looking at sometime in March for Beta 4, we're not releasing another beta until we've got every single feature implemented and working and while we've made progress on a lot of areas there's still a lot of work left to do.
dom - yes, again it does this now in 1.0.
nico176 - we're aware of the issue with TouchFlo and are trying to figure out if there's a way we can programmatically disable it. Which may be what the keyboard is doing, we'll have to investigate that.
ipsi - doesn't support it yet, though I guess we'll have to get it working in the finished version - the automatic scaling would make our fonts look very ugly and borderline unreadable. Luckily since we already support VGA it's fairly trivial to add one more scaling factor.
dom - yes, again it does this now in 1.0.
nico176 - we're aware of the issue with TouchFlo and are trying to figure out if there's a way we can programmatically disable it. Which may be what the keyboard is doing, we'll have to investigate that.
ipsi - doesn't support it yet, though I guess we'll have to get it working in the finished version - the automatic scaling would make our fonts look very ugly and borderline unreadable. Luckily since we already support VGA it's fairly trivial to add one more scaling factor.
My guess regarding touchflo is that the keyboard isn't doing anything special - the touchflo software most likely has logic in it for when any SIP is brought up to disable itself. This would be especially important for Chinese handwriting SIPs, and seeing as touchflo is HTC software it's not surprising that they have exceptions for that.
I haven't messed with touchflo, but one would hope that there would be some ability to create a process list in it's prefs. Either that or maybe HTC has some sort of flag documented that could be used for the process.
Failing that, the one thing I can think of is installing an empty SIP - there are some floating around out there for similar past issues with hardware keyboards. Basically if someone goes into the HWR in pleco then Pleco would have to give the invisible SIP priority. I hope it wouldn't have to come down to that - that's a hell of a kluge just for touchflo.
The other option, which would be awesome, is to just make the Hanwang a full fledged SIP instead of integrating it into Pleco directly on PPC.
I haven't messed with touchflo, but one would hope that there would be some ability to create a process list in it's prefs. Either that or maybe HTC has some sort of flag documented that could be used for the process.
Failing that, the one thing I can think of is installing an empty SIP - there are some floating around out there for similar past issues with hardware keyboards. Basically if someone goes into the HWR in pleco then Pleco would have to give the invisible SIP priority. I hope it wouldn't have to come down to that - that's a hell of a kluge just for touchflo.
The other option, which would be awesome, is to just make the Hanwang a full fledged SIP instead of integrating it into Pleco directly on PPC.
Making Hanwang an SIP is not really an option - coding-wise it would be an absolute nightmare because of the design and general quirkiness of the handwriting recognizer library, plus we're really not supposed to let people use Hanwang as a general-purpose input method outside of Pleco and it would be tough to prevent that if we put the recognizer in an SIP.
I don't think we'd go to the trouble of setting up an empty SIP either - most likely we'll just prompt people the first time they run Pleco on an HTC device if they want us to update the registry to disable TouchFlo scrolling (maybe providing a button option in Preferences to do it later if they don't do it initially). I get the impression most of our customers who have TouchFlo devices have already disabled scrolling anyway for other reasons, so I don't think people would really be losing all that much. We can also try to see if there's any way tweak the window behavior in the handwriting recognizer to make it less susceptible to interference from TouchFlo, but that's about all we're likely to do for now at least.
I don't think we'd go to the trouble of setting up an empty SIP either - most likely we'll just prompt people the first time they run Pleco on an HTC device if they want us to update the registry to disable TouchFlo scrolling (maybe providing a button option in Preferences to do it later if they don't do it initially). I get the impression most of our customers who have TouchFlo devices have already disabled scrolling anyway for other reasons, so I don't think people would really be losing all that much. We can also try to see if there's any way tweak the window behavior in the handwriting recognizer to make it less susceptible to interference from TouchFlo, but that's about all we're likely to do for now at least.
mikelove said:
i must be doing something wrong, then... on my Tungsten T3, the "expand" button is grayed out. If I start out expanded, and I open Pleco, the screen shrinks to be square again, and this happens in both 1.0 and 2.0 beta. Is there a file i need to install to make this work?
I have not yet taken the plunge to get Pleco 2 (will wait till the beginning of Feb for that) but using pleco one on the vario III (a tmoblie branded TyTN II) does the same thing as Nico commented on re 2. When the definition needs a scroll bar touchflo kicks in... I tried to except Pleco in the options/settings of tflo but that hasnt worked... thought I had found a work around... sigh...
dom - it's actually not a Pleco issue but a bug on the T3; Palm shipped it without the necessary libraries to enable resizing the digitizer area. We used to include the missing libraries with Pleco, but people kept installing them on other Palms, and thanks to some boneheaded design on Palm's part those libraries will cause non-T3 Palms to get stuck in an endless crashing loop that can only be fixed by a hard reset. So they're still installed by the automated installer (which can actually check to make sure you're using a T3 before it installs them), but because of that crashing issue we don't include them in manual-install Pleco distributions anymore.
Anyway, you can download the missing files from http://www.pleco.com/t3dia.zip - install the files in that .zip archive to your T3 and soft reset it and you should then be able to resize the screen.
Shadowdh - yeah, HTC seems to be putting this TouchFlo stuff on just about all of their devices now. Hopefully either they or Microsoft will release some sort of a standardized interface to disable it soon.
Anyway, you can download the missing files from http://www.pleco.com/t3dia.zip - install the files in that .zip archive to your T3 and soft reset it and you should then be able to resize the screen.
Shadowdh - yeah, HTC seems to be putting this TouchFlo stuff on just about all of their devices now. Hopefully either they or Microsoft will release some sort of a standardized interface to disable it soon.
mikelove said:
Hi Mike... TBH I quite like the touchflo app and the cube is pretty cool too (I have flashed a ROM that enables cube on the TYTN II and it works well) but I just wish that when you except an app it actually is excepted... another work around is to switch to a dictionary that does not have the scroll bar down the side and that allows you to keep on writing the characters with no problem...
dom - no problem! Glad we figured that out.
Shadowdh - actually that gives me an idea; perhaps if we use an alternate scrolling method (say, up/down buttons instead of a scrollbar) that would keep TouchFlo from trying to get in the way. Though this still doesn't explain why TouchFlo is causing problems in the character input screen... perhaps the presence of *any* scrollbar is enough to invoke it, in which case we'd need to do the same thing with the Entry List and anything else that might be scrollable. (part of an alternate "TouchFlo Compatibility Mode", yet another Stupid Option We Have To Add To Work Around An Incompetent OEM)
Shadowdh - actually that gives me an idea; perhaps if we use an alternate scrolling method (say, up/down buttons instead of a scrollbar) that would keep TouchFlo from trying to get in the way. Though this still doesn't explain why TouchFlo is causing problems in the character input screen... perhaps the presence of *any* scrollbar is enough to invoke it, in which case we'd need to do the same thing with the Entry List and anything else that might be scrollable. (part of an alternate "TouchFlo Compatibility Mode", yet another Stupid Option We Have To Add To Work Around An Incompetent OEM)
hi,
beta 3a looks good and performance in fonts and handwriting is excellent. nice job, mike! i wanted to be sure i reitereated an error i'm having with my at&t 8525 because i think i've may have seen it mentioned once or twice in this forum, but surprised i haven't seen it mentioned more.
basically pleco seems to forget whatever keyfile i've loaded - or it selectively remembers certain parts of the keyfile. i've had to mail myself a keyfile and keep it in outlook (since pleco consumes the keyfile).
i've noticed with every version of the beta that's been posted so far, and while i think you mentioned that it's not considered a "major" feature bug, it's still a bug i wanted to be sure was fixed by b4.
thanks,
steve
beta 3a looks good and performance in fonts and handwriting is excellent. nice job, mike! i wanted to be sure i reitereated an error i'm having with my at&t 8525 because i think i've may have seen it mentioned once or twice in this forum, but surprised i haven't seen it mentioned more.
basically pleco seems to forget whatever keyfile i've loaded - or it selectively remembers certain parts of the keyfile. i've had to mail myself a keyfile and keep it in outlook (since pleco consumes the keyfile).
i've noticed with every version of the beta that's been posted so far, and while i think you mentioned that it's not considered a "major" feature bug, it's still a bug i wanted to be sure was fixed by b4.
thanks,
steve