Beta 5 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[ipsi]

Interesting. Treo 680 here, and I can access the Stroke Order, Char Info, and Compound screens juts fine.

In fact, everything works so far! Awesome! Loading time is still slower than Pleco 1.0, but I think you said that'd always be the case, and it's not too bad.

I like the fact that the centre button (on my 680 at least) will now change the dictionary. Very cool. The "Send to Reader" option is fantastic, and works just fine. Still need to test my other documents, but looking good so far .

Will probably test flashcards tomorrow, as I need to shower and go to bed very shortly.

 

[Fleminator]

its been a while since I posted because I've been waiting for more flash-card functionality because that is what I use on a daily basis. VERY EXCITED!

I deleted all the old Pleco Beta 4 files I could find, used FileZ to delete all the Plde files. I have not deleted Pleco 1.3

The converter seemed to be working, but some time after the little counter reached 6500, I got a soft reset

I also cannot open Pleco Beta 5 without a soft reset...it says that it accepts my keyfile (I downloaded a new one just to be sure), but then it does a soft reset...so far, I appear to be the only one having this problem. I've tried keeping up with the forums, but if there is an obvious answer somewhere, I apologize.

Thanks

Palm TX
v.5.4.9
I have a 1 GB SD card, but I have space (with about 7 MB to spare) on the internal memory, which I prefer
14 MB of 114.8 MB free (internal memory)

 

[ipsi]

Carnfraggle: I imagine you'll have to wait until Mike's back at work before that can be solved. On the other hand, I don't imagine it will be particularly difficult .

Radioman: I haven't exactly tested a lot, but I was able to add one flashcard, and start a flashcard session? Did you reset your handheld as suggested? More importantly, did you remove your 2.0B4 flashcard files? They could be causing conflicts and suchlike. Everything from B4 should have been deleted and replaced by the stuff from B5, or just deleted. This obviously includes the 2.0 flashcards (not 1.0), and the user-created CE/EC dictionaries, etc.

Couple of other points: IA is still as slow as the IA beta. Not sure if you've made any changes there or not. But it works! Also worth noting that on a Treo, external encoding should always be set to Big5 or GB2312, even if you only copy stuff from Blazer. Flashcards, in general, seem as though they could use a bit of a performance boost - they feel a bit slow at the moment. Interface seems much better though!

Would it be possible to have an Undo button on the sketchpad?

That's all for now I think. And off to bed...

 

[ipsi]

Flem: Tried deleting all the B5 stuff? Might be worth clearing Pleco's preferences using FileZ as well, just to be sure. Could just be a corrupt flashcard DB though? Choices choices...

 

[ldolse]

The font thing seems to be partially tied to some incorrect names on the font files - renaming ZYSongEbdt.ttf to ZYSong.ttf, which was the old name got headwords to display, but I'm still not getting definition text....

 

[ldolse]

Deleting the old registry is also important - everything is working once I did that. Maybe that was all that was neccessary, not sure..

 

[kiwi123]

Kiwi123: Did you install the stroke-order file? It's called stroke.pdb, I believe. If so, is it unlocked? Could be a problem with you not having purchased it.

Yes, the stroke-order file is loaded - so is everything else. Can't see anything to to do with unlocking it.
How do I purchase it? I thought this is a beta? I own the "Complete Bundle" of the current version
It works on one or two characters then crashes.

 

[Fleminator]

I have already tried deleting all the B5 stuff, using FileZ to delete preferences. "Corrupt" Flashcard DB...I'm not sure what that means exactly, but I have noticed that I have a lot of User dictionary flashcards that show up as INVALID in Pleco 1.3 I would delete them if there was an easy way to find them, but they are burried among several thousand cards, and one of the most attractive things about Pleco 2 was the hope of a more powerful flashcard system that would all me to search and delete those bad cards...I still don't think my database is corrupt. If it is "corrupted" it HAS to be recoverable...there as to be a solution.

 

[ipsi]

kiwi123: Strange. The best I can say is that it works on mine with no problems. Guess you'll have to wait for Mike to come along then.

Fleminator: Right, sorry, I didn't initially see your problem. I was thinking more of the 2.0B5 Flashcard DB being corrupt, which would obviously present some challenges to Pleco. I think Mike has been able to recover most flashcards in the past, but it's pretty situationally dependant. More likely, I imagine you've just discovered a bug in the converter . Try outputting to XML, then try opening it in Firefox (if you run Firefox), or in the text editor of your choice. Though with 6000+ flashcards, most text editors are likely to struggle... If that doesn't work, I could have a poke around and see if it's exported anything, depending on if they're particularly personal or not.

 

[westmeadboy]

Renaming the font file worked for me. It looks like everything is now working on my WM5 i-mate Jama...

BTW, I removed Pleco1.3 completely before installing Pleco2b5

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the quick / detailed feedback (and for ipsi for filling in while I was in fact asleep).

The font file name was in fact wrong in the 2.0 installation download, so if you rename that from ZYSongEbdt.ttf to just ZYSong.ttf that should get Chinese characters working smoothly. I'll upload a corrected installation archive soon.

I just had a new idea on the Palm TX import issue which I'm trying out now (thus far seems to be working beautifully, importing almost twice as fast as it did before) so if it checks out with a few more imports I'll post that fix as 2.0b5(a) within a few hours.

 

[Fleminator]

EDIT: I guess in the process of my typing this post in Asia, Mike woke up from his very short night of sleep...I hope what he has for me will work, but I'll go ahead and next post because the next paragraph has a question about the Converter that is still unclear to me. -Thanks


I tried deleting PB5 and converter (and using File Z), installing just the converter again (not installing PB5 this time), and this time exporting to my external memory (which I believe is how I get it to be an XML file)...no dice. I watched it this time and it did the soft reset just after it passed 8000 cards...another thing I was wondering about the converter is how it handles duplicates. Will a card that has a rank of 1 that I've never studied, overwrite a card that has a rank of 15? I turned on "don't allow duplicates" PD1.3, but I definitely have tons of duplicates in lists that I don't really even use. How does the converter decide which card it should map the score from?

OK the following is probably Too Much Info, and pertains to how I have things set up to import into PD1.3 right now to use the Repition spacing method (my apologies):

I basically use just one, primary Master Testing list, that I use for testing all my cards. and one "Master Transfer List" so I don't accidently overwrite the rankings and flags of a card already in my Master Testing list. Every time I import a new list from my computer, I copy the new cards to the Master Transfer List, then I copy the Master Testing list to the Master Transfer list to overwrite any duplicates properly, then I copy the Master Transfer List back to the Master Testing List for study. That means I have a least one duplicate of every card in the Master Testing List...but I also don't delete lists or "Move" words from lists that I import, I just copy them over...so there are more duplicates hiding. Finally, I have about 20-30 lists already imported, that are sitting in my database right now, waiting to be copied to my Master Testing list so I can begin studying them...I'm excited for Pleco 2 to make this process more simple, but I don't want to loose all my work (primarily the rankings and flags for just more than 4000 cards that appear in my Master Testing List)

I don't use lists to distinguish cards except for before I import them...(importing, for example, one lesson at at time)...I use flags designate where the vocab came from (for example, curriculum X, Book 2)... any thoughts?

 

[mikelove]

Fleminator - the thing I'm talking about actually fixes import on the TX, not export from 1.0 - I'm not sure why that's crashing, it does sound like a corrupted flashcard database so if you e-mail that to me we'll take a look and see if we can figure out why it's causing problems with the converter. It certainly could have something to do with your use of flags instead of lists to differentiate cards, that shouldn't really matter but since flags aren't used that often we didn't do as much testing with them as with other areas of the exporter.

Re your question, the importer keeps the score from whichever card has been reviewed most recently, so the Rank 15 card you had studied would be favored over the Rank 1 card you hadn't studied.

Going over some other items in the thread:

weight - thanks for the note on Zhuyin dots, not sure why they're not being output but it should be easy to fix.

Mator - the reset might be due to your Palm running low on memory, though the 680 should be pretty solid on that front - how many cards are in that category? (you can check that in the Statistics screen)

radioman - as ipsi noted, did you make sure to delete the earlier version of your flashcards database?

canfraggle - send me your new Machine ID and I'll update your 2.0 My Orders page.

Kiwi123/radioman - not sure what's happening with stroke order - does it work correctly if you try running a stroke order flashcard session? (if you don't have your flashcards loaded yet, add a dozen or so single-character entries to your flashcard database and then try it out)

ipsi - glad the interface seems a little smoother at least. IA startup speed actually has more to do with copying text out of the application than with launching Pleco - if you try setting it to something other than Experimental mode (especially the first option) and then copy text out of a memo it should launch much faster. Aside from that one large-query-specific optimization I mentioned there's not that much we can do to improve flashcard performance on Palm, unfortunately - for people who really find it unusable the best bet may be to keep 1.0 around, you can export new flashcards from 2.0 as text and import them into 1.0. I'm still confident switching to SQLite was the right move, since the database stability situation on Windows Mobile was completely unacceptable and SQLite makes possible all sorts of cool features we didn't have before, but it is going to leave the Palm version lagging a bit behind others performance-wise. (all the more reason to push for a good iPhone version, I guess, since that'll give Palm users an upgrade path that doesn't involve Redmond)

 

[westmeadboy]

Now that there is a new Taskbar icon for IA, I get a "Notification" button at the bottom of my WM5 today screen where there used to be a "Lock" button. That Lock button was always the way I used to Lock the device. This Notification button is always there so long as Pleco is running (in the background).

The only way I can see to still be able to Lock the phone is to turn off the Taskbar icon (in Pleco preferences), but then I can't use Instant Access right!?

Is there any middle ground, where the Taskbar icon can be there without the Notification button...?

 

[weight]

Mike,

there seems to be a problem searching using such zhuyin syllables as:

ㄓˊ
ㄔˋ
ㄕˇ
ㄘˇ

to name a few,

it says there is no entry where if you type in the equivalent pinyin it will show an entry?

words with a single middle and final seem to work fine but I haven't tried them all yet...

I'll let you know

 

[sych]

Audio problem: the male speaker reads "pi2" as "pi1zhun3". I first noticed this when looking up "pi2qi5" (temperament), but it also happens on just plain "pi2" (e.g. skin).

Also, for "pi1zhun3", the male speaker says "pi1zhu4".

These problems don't affect the female voice.

 

[haraldalbrecht]

Beta5 Softreset on TX

Hello Mike,

while b4a1 worked on my T|X, b5 just soft resets when I try to start it (it takes one or two seconds before it soft resets).

Installation: using FileZ I removed all old Pleco preferences, also all old Pleco files from the main memory. Then copied the file from the archives into /Palm/Programs/PlecoDict.

Pleco2 then aborted with an error message saying that the font files cannot be found. Hmmm.

Deleted preferences again and copied font files over to /Palm/Launcher. Now Pleco2 soft resets my TX.

Sigh. Bad experience with this beta again.

 

[haraldalbrecht]

TX Crash --> wrong Path

Hello Mike,

looking at the Pleco2.prc I've found out that it searches for /PALM/Programs/Pleco, but not for /PALM/Programs/PlecoDict as the error message suggests. I've now renamed the directory containing the beta5 files on the SD card accordingly to /PALM/Programs/Pleco and now Pleco2 starts successfully. Phew.

 

[llammamama]

I'm running pleco on an Axim X50v (vga screen), using wm2003.

I managed to make the dictionary entry list disappear entirely by dragging it to the bottom of the screen while using the full-screen handwriting positioned at the bottom of the screen. Resetting defaults fixed the problem (nothing else, including messing around with the display options for the list helped). I haven't been able to reproduce it yet, though.

Also, the dragging of the dictionary entry list itself is rather wonky when it is placed on the bottom, and you are using full-screen handwriting minimized to the bottom; trying to make the dictionary list entry very small ends up making it big, and vice versa. This is reproducible.

Using full-screen writing mode, I didn't seem to be able to write on the bottom 2/5 of the entry display window for a little bit. This fixed itself after switching around some preferences (auto-recognition and auto-input), then moving some windows around. I haven't been able to reproduce it yet.


In the edit card screen, we are able to use the definition from the dictionary or make our own, however it doesn't seem to be possible to copy/paste into the custom definition text box. It would also be great (but not necessary if we could copy/paste) if the custom definition box by default had the text of the currently selected dictionary in it, allowing easy editing/deleting.


One of my flashcard sessions seems to have gone awry, and when I try to run a session it gives me all white except for my back, information, play sound, and cancel session buttons. My other profile works fine.



Still a few bugs lurking around, but overall I'm very impressed - great work!

 

[torrero]

No full screen on Clie TH-55. The virtual graffiti area is fixed and can't be pulled down.