Mike - Pleco continues to be the coolest tool on the planet!
Heeding the warnings about instability I pulled an old Palm out of the bottom of the closet and loaded up Beta3, after it ran so stable on my old machine, I decided to put the new beta4 on my main machine, a T|X ... Arrrrrrgghh!
OK, I think I have found the magic combination of settings, for the most part, but I have had a lot of annoying problems getting here. None that have made it useless, but very frustrating.
1) First, 'hide list' - and this one took some time to figure out. I use the Palm in landscape with the list in full screen and the input pallet anchored on the right. This way I can input characters then select from the list and it switches to definition. In Beta4 when I select a word or phrase from the list it appears to switch to definition view - but the list apparently stays out - touching the screen is now very confusing as it may highlight and select words behind the definition from the list, or words in the definition view itself. It's like the two screens are open and ghosted over each-other, both active to the cursor/stylus at the same time. Finally I found the "list tap action" option for "hide list" on tap under stylus actions, which for the most part fixed the problem above. I 'think' in Beta3 this list tap=hide list was automatic with 'full screen' selected for list pallet layout. I can't imagine why this wouldn't be automatic in full screen list mode, especially since a fullscreen list without this keeps putting you in the situation where the definition and list are both open and 'ghosted' over top of each-other. OK, not sure if that made sense, but its hard to describe these things.
2) The pop-up dictionary has been completely useless in Beta4, sadly as this was one of my favorite features in beta3. Everytime I use pop-up definitions I get a soft reset. Originally this was a lot of pain, I was losing a lot of preferences, because I hadn't figured out what the problem was and each time I opened it I made a lot of changes and had not yet closed and re-opened to 'lock-in' the preferences. So now I've isolated this problem as the pop-up definition function. If I set any button on the tool bar as 'pop-up def' the machine soft resets when I hit that button, if I make the 'pop-up def' any of the stylus actions its the same - soft reset, if I use the pull down menu or the short-cut for 'pop-up def', all equal soft reset. This is disappointing as the pop-up def was one of my favorite features.
3) The reader is WAY COOL! I hadn't tried this in any previous version, but I like this a lot. It works really well in wide screen - makes good use of the landscape layout, the functions on the bottom are very intuitive and make sense. My only disappointment here is that I don't have the hard copy book I'm reading right now in a file I can put on the reader. One question, in the definition area there are two sets of left and right arrows - what's the difference? They appear to do the same thing.
4) In general there are a lot of appearance problems on the wide screen / T|X. Whenever I open or close a function the right third of the screen keeps a shadow of the previous screen until I open and close the hidden graffiti pad. I also think, since I keep the handwriting input area open on the right, that when I open the hidden graffiti pad it should just cover up the Pleco input section that is set on the right. Now what it does is push the pleco input section over if a definition is showing, but hides it if the list is showing. This is backwards to me. I'm much less likely to need an input pallet when I am at the definition screen than when I am at the list. Anyway, each time I change or move the graffiti pallet or any of the pop-up windows like preferences or flashcards, etc, when I come back to the main screen I get a lot of very un-clean screen with a few lines of pixels that still show parts of the last pop-up screen, or in between buttons, etc.
5) And for a random observation. The button on the handwriting pallet with the eraser and black arrow (erases one character at a time from the main dictionary cursor line) is a super useful button, but it has nothing to do with the handwriting pallet where it shows up. Why not make this button available for somewhere on the main tool bar or better with the thee fixed buttons (eraser, copy into input and list mode) next to the input field. Similarly the place that this erase one character button is in really needs a full erase button that clears the input field. Right now you can undo one stroke, but if I've written half a character in their I either have to undo 4-5 times, or just hit recognize character and start over.
Over-all GREAT PRODUCT and I can't wait for the final release version!!! Now that I've got the layout relatively stable I'll try to figure out the flashcards. So far the differences in the flashcards are too many for me to figure out. Is there a flashcard tutorial somewhere for the new system? I like to have my cards sorted by the chapter or lesson in the book I am reading, but I can't figure out how to do that yet with this one. Anyway,
Thanks again Mike, great work, great product.
Dan
