So here it is, the official soon-to-be-very-long Pleco 2.0 Beta 5 Bug Report / Feedback thread.
Things We're Particularly Interested In Hearing About:
-- Crashes, obviously, especially of the reproducible (whenever I do X it crashes) sort.
-- Any sort of data corruption / data loss / files becoming inaccessible.
-- Obnoxious noises from the audio system (after making sure that it's unlocked and listed as such in the Ordering screen).
-- Instant Access not working correctly with common / widely-used applications.
-- Cards coming up in multiple-choice tests with the wrong lengths, e.g. it shows you two characters and one of the answers has three (non-parenthetical) Pinyin syllables.
-- Cards being scored inaccurately in free-answer mode; if you're entering characters, make sure to use the same character set (simplified versus traditional) that the system is set up to use.
-- Flashcard sessions inexplicably refusing to start - creating a new profile (or resetting your existing one) should fix this, but if you wouldn't mind backing up and sending the flashcard file with that bad profile in it to us beforehand that'll help us figure out how to check for / put up a friendly error message for whatever the problem is.
-- Overall flashcard system impressions / points of confusion / etc.
-- Document reader bookmarks - they should be retained pretty reliably now, but let us know if they're not.
-- Software refusing to start up on Pocket PC (requiring a reset before it will) - please be as specific as possilble about your system configuration and any other third-party software installed/running on your system.
-- Font-related conflicts on Pocket PC (CE-Star etc), or fonts appearing as blank / completely garbled, especially if this comes after you've just turned the device on with Pleco already running. (and please do install your font files on an SD card, we went to a lot of trouble to finally get that working correctly)
-- Major glitches in the dictionary databases - the "specchar" tags in GF (and occasionally 21C) are a known problem, they're rare characters we haven't gotten around to adding font support for yet, but if you see an entry which seems to consist of two entries merged together, or of the lopped-off end of an earlier entry, or is in some other way seriously screwed up, please do let us know about that.
-- Consistently incorrect traditional character conversions, especially in the GF/21C dictionaries (which are the ones in which we've had to do most of the conversion work ourselves).
-- Performance, especially in the areas of text rendering (you should notice dramatic improvements in some areas, like scrolling through long dictionary entries), dictionary searches (particularly with a good-sized user dictionary in the mix), and startup time (faster on Palm if you disable any search directories in Preferences that you're not using).
-- Full-text search: the easiest way to try this out is to enter a # (or whatever character you've selected in Preferences) before a Chinese character or English search query - with Chinese make sure it's at least two characters, with English make sure it's the whole word and not just the start of it.
-- All of the new preferences, particularly big-ticket ones like "auto-enter best handwriting match" (something people have been asking for since 2001).
-- Weird behavior in the category organizer screen, such as categories randomly disappearing / having their names changed / jumping around. (we've fixed a bunch of bugs in this area recently but there may be one or two still lurking)
-- Zhuyin / BoPoMoFo search and display.
Some Specific Known Issues:
-- Less-than-beautiful text display on Pocket PC: the subpixel font rendering option was just added a few days ago, but along with being kind of slow it isn't properly filtered yet, so characters can appear a little funky, and there are still a number of glitches with characters overlapping each other / not being kerned correctly / etc.
-- Flashcard imports on Palm will sometimes slow to a crawl, especially on the Palm TX and especially when using the "Pleco Flashcard Database" format, so for TX users especially we'd recommend using a regular XML file instead - it'll probably still take an hour or two (only so much we can do to speed up the process) but at least you might still have a little battery life left after it finishes. If it's working correctly then after a few dozen cards you should see it quickly getting through batches of 10 or 20 of them of a time with long pauses between those batches; if it's working incorrectly then around 1000 cards or so it'll start to slow down to just one card at a time, in which case you should probably reset, delete the flashcard database and try again.
-- It's also normal on Palm for the system to freeze for a minute or two after a big import - it hasn't crashed, it's just the Palm OS' file storage system taking a painfully long time to sync/write all of the new data to flash memory. (we'll probably add some sort of friendly "don't panic" message in those situations in the finished version)
-- Also slower than we'd like on Palm are the manage cards search / new session commands in flashcards; we actually do have one more optimization we can do that should help matters a good bit on that front, but if you're working with a particularly colossal flashcard set we'd recommend you limit sessions to a few thousand cards' worth of categories at a time to avoid really long waits.
-- Hardware button control in the document reader should work, but the up/down command is a bit awkward since it doesn't do a good job of sticking to the same left/right position in each successive line. (we're working on it)
-- Stylus detection for the resizer bars is a bit off, though we're still trying to figure out why - if you can't seem to hit it, move a few pixels below or to the right of it and that should hopefully work.
-- Handwriting recognition on TouchFlo Pocket PCs - it should work pretty well on the dedicated Input screen, but in the main interface you'll have to either turn off TouchFlo scrolling or hold down the stylus for a while at the start of each stroke. Basically TouchFlo screws up handwriting input whenever there's a scrollbar visible, we've managed to eliminate them in the Input screen but we're still trying to work out a way to trick it into thinking they're not there in the main dictionary interface.
Things To Try If You Feel Like Doing Something More Specific Than Your Normal Pleco Activities:
-- Unlocking and adding new dictionary databases on Pocket PC while the software is already loaded/running; this should be doable now, so try installing Pleco without a couple of dictionaries or a keyfile, launch it, put it int the background, install the keyfile, reopen it, see if it's correctly unlocked itself, then background it again, copy over the missing databases, reopen it, and verify that they're now unlocked / accessible.
-- Also on Pocket PC: the folder sync feature should now be able to back up flashcard / user dictionary databases while Pleco is running without putting up error messages, so try setting it up to sync My Documents and see if it actually does manage to back them up.
-- Different methods of installing databases to memory cards on Palm; we've added some new code to check for database corruption, but we're a bit worried that Palm Desktop might in some cases cause a file to appear to be corrupted when it's actually not, so try a mix of USB reader / Palm Desktop / Missing Sync / copy-from-internal-memory installations to the card and see if any of the databases fail to load correctly in Pleco.
-- SD card flashcard / user dictionary databases on Palm. Two ways to create one of these: either create it on a Pocket PC and put it in a memory card directory where the Palm will find it, or create the file on your Palm, copy it to your desktop, use a hex editor to remove the few hundred (or few thousand) bytes of data before the phrase "SQLite Format 3" (so that that's right at the start of the file), save it with the file extension .pqb, and put it somewhere on the card where your Palm will find it. In both cases you'll need to delete any flashcard databases in internal memory or else the software will automatically pick those ahead of the ones on the card. We're evaluating whether this is fast / reliable enough to make it an official (and obviously much easier-to-use) option in the finished release.
-- Data fidelity in flashcard import/export - if you're really a glutton for boring repetitive tasks, after you import your flashcard database, try exporting it to XML, deleting/moving the 2.0 flashcard database file, then importing it again and see if anything has been lost / altered. (the XML files won't be completely identical, since the modified dates and the order of the category assignments for each invidual card will change, but everything else should be pretty well preserved)
Things We're Particularly Interested In Hearing About:
-- Crashes, obviously, especially of the reproducible (whenever I do X it crashes) sort.
-- Any sort of data corruption / data loss / files becoming inaccessible.
-- Obnoxious noises from the audio system (after making sure that it's unlocked and listed as such in the Ordering screen).
-- Instant Access not working correctly with common / widely-used applications.
-- Cards coming up in multiple-choice tests with the wrong lengths, e.g. it shows you two characters and one of the answers has three (non-parenthetical) Pinyin syllables.
-- Cards being scored inaccurately in free-answer mode; if you're entering characters, make sure to use the same character set (simplified versus traditional) that the system is set up to use.
-- Flashcard sessions inexplicably refusing to start - creating a new profile (or resetting your existing one) should fix this, but if you wouldn't mind backing up and sending the flashcard file with that bad profile in it to us beforehand that'll help us figure out how to check for / put up a friendly error message for whatever the problem is.
-- Overall flashcard system impressions / points of confusion / etc.
-- Document reader bookmarks - they should be retained pretty reliably now, but let us know if they're not.
-- Software refusing to start up on Pocket PC (requiring a reset before it will) - please be as specific as possilble about your system configuration and any other third-party software installed/running on your system.
-- Font-related conflicts on Pocket PC (CE-Star etc), or fonts appearing as blank / completely garbled, especially if this comes after you've just turned the device on with Pleco already running. (and please do install your font files on an SD card, we went to a lot of trouble to finally get that working correctly)
-- Major glitches in the dictionary databases - the "specchar" tags in GF (and occasionally 21C) are a known problem, they're rare characters we haven't gotten around to adding font support for yet, but if you see an entry which seems to consist of two entries merged together, or of the lopped-off end of an earlier entry, or is in some other way seriously screwed up, please do let us know about that.
-- Consistently incorrect traditional character conversions, especially in the GF/21C dictionaries (which are the ones in which we've had to do most of the conversion work ourselves).
-- Performance, especially in the areas of text rendering (you should notice dramatic improvements in some areas, like scrolling through long dictionary entries), dictionary searches (particularly with a good-sized user dictionary in the mix), and startup time (faster on Palm if you disable any search directories in Preferences that you're not using).
-- Full-text search: the easiest way to try this out is to enter a # (or whatever character you've selected in Preferences) before a Chinese character or English search query - with Chinese make sure it's at least two characters, with English make sure it's the whole word and not just the start of it.
-- All of the new preferences, particularly big-ticket ones like "auto-enter best handwriting match" (something people have been asking for since 2001).
-- Weird behavior in the category organizer screen, such as categories randomly disappearing / having their names changed / jumping around. (we've fixed a bunch of bugs in this area recently but there may be one or two still lurking)
-- Zhuyin / BoPoMoFo search and display.
Some Specific Known Issues:
-- Less-than-beautiful text display on Pocket PC: the subpixel font rendering option was just added a few days ago, but along with being kind of slow it isn't properly filtered yet, so characters can appear a little funky, and there are still a number of glitches with characters overlapping each other / not being kerned correctly / etc.
-- Flashcard imports on Palm will sometimes slow to a crawl, especially on the Palm TX and especially when using the "Pleco Flashcard Database" format, so for TX users especially we'd recommend using a regular XML file instead - it'll probably still take an hour or two (only so much we can do to speed up the process) but at least you might still have a little battery life left after it finishes. If it's working correctly then after a few dozen cards you should see it quickly getting through batches of 10 or 20 of them of a time with long pauses between those batches; if it's working incorrectly then around 1000 cards or so it'll start to slow down to just one card at a time, in which case you should probably reset, delete the flashcard database and try again.
-- It's also normal on Palm for the system to freeze for a minute or two after a big import - it hasn't crashed, it's just the Palm OS' file storage system taking a painfully long time to sync/write all of the new data to flash memory. (we'll probably add some sort of friendly "don't panic" message in those situations in the finished version)
-- Also slower than we'd like on Palm are the manage cards search / new session commands in flashcards; we actually do have one more optimization we can do that should help matters a good bit on that front, but if you're working with a particularly colossal flashcard set we'd recommend you limit sessions to a few thousand cards' worth of categories at a time to avoid really long waits.
-- Hardware button control in the document reader should work, but the up/down command is a bit awkward since it doesn't do a good job of sticking to the same left/right position in each successive line. (we're working on it)
-- Stylus detection for the resizer bars is a bit off, though we're still trying to figure out why - if you can't seem to hit it, move a few pixels below or to the right of it and that should hopefully work.
-- Handwriting recognition on TouchFlo Pocket PCs - it should work pretty well on the dedicated Input screen, but in the main interface you'll have to either turn off TouchFlo scrolling or hold down the stylus for a while at the start of each stroke. Basically TouchFlo screws up handwriting input whenever there's a scrollbar visible, we've managed to eliminate them in the Input screen but we're still trying to work out a way to trick it into thinking they're not there in the main dictionary interface.
Things To Try If You Feel Like Doing Something More Specific Than Your Normal Pleco Activities:
-- Unlocking and adding new dictionary databases on Pocket PC while the software is already loaded/running; this should be doable now, so try installing Pleco without a couple of dictionaries or a keyfile, launch it, put it int the background, install the keyfile, reopen it, see if it's correctly unlocked itself, then background it again, copy over the missing databases, reopen it, and verify that they're now unlocked / accessible.
-- Also on Pocket PC: the folder sync feature should now be able to back up flashcard / user dictionary databases while Pleco is running without putting up error messages, so try setting it up to sync My Documents and see if it actually does manage to back them up.
-- Different methods of installing databases to memory cards on Palm; we've added some new code to check for database corruption, but we're a bit worried that Palm Desktop might in some cases cause a file to appear to be corrupted when it's actually not, so try a mix of USB reader / Palm Desktop / Missing Sync / copy-from-internal-memory installations to the card and see if any of the databases fail to load correctly in Pleco.
-- SD card flashcard / user dictionary databases on Palm. Two ways to create one of these: either create it on a Pocket PC and put it in a memory card directory where the Palm will find it, or create the file on your Palm, copy it to your desktop, use a hex editor to remove the few hundred (or few thousand) bytes of data before the phrase "SQLite Format 3" (so that that's right at the start of the file), save it with the file extension .pqb, and put it somewhere on the card where your Palm will find it. In both cases you'll need to delete any flashcard databases in internal memory or else the software will automatically pick those ahead of the ones on the card. We're evaluating whether this is fast / reliable enough to make it an official (and obviously much easier-to-use) option in the finished release.
-- Data fidelity in flashcard import/export - if you're really a glutton for boring repetitive tasks, after you import your flashcard database, try exporting it to XML, deleting/moving the 2.0 flashcard database file, then importing it again and see if anything has been lost / altered. (the XML files won't be completely identical, since the modified dates and the order of the category assignments for each invidual card will change, but everything else should be pretty well preserved)
