Beta 5 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[ipsi]

Hmmm... I imported some flashcards from an XML file that I've written, but it froze at the end for several minutes. May be related to an email coming in, not sure...

Anyway, had to soft reset, but it worked flawlessly. All my cards are there, with the definitions I was expecting, etc. All I need to do now is write some code to deal with duplicates on my end (I prefer combining the entries to make sure I don't miss a definition), and it'll be good. Once I've done that, I'll probably merge the score information from 1.0 and start using it.

Hmm... Thinking about it, I think it might be nice to have some form of merge option when you hit a duplicate, mostly because if I'm importing flashcards as I go through a textbook, I may hit a flashcard that's already been mentioned in the previous chapter. NPCR 1 is great for this, as Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 both contain 吗, with the exact same definition. If you're importing Lesson 2 only when you reach it in class, say, then it'd be nice to be able to add the category and leave everything else untouched. Not sure how easy that would be for you to do, and what else you should 'merge'. I think categories are the most important one, to be honest.

File looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<plecoflash formatversion="2" name="NPCR.txt" generator="ipsi" created="1217482036" platform="Ubuntu 8.04">

<categories />

<cards>

<card language="chinese" created="1217482036">

<entry>

<headword>你</headword>

<pron type="hypy" tones="numbers">ni3</pron>

<defn>you</defn>

</entry>

<catassign category="NPCR 1" />

</card>

<card language="chinese" created="1217482036">

<entry>

<headword>好</headword>

<pron type="hypy" tones="numbers">hao3</pron>

<defn>good; well; fine; OK</defn>

</entry>

<catassign category="NPCR 1" />

</card>
.
.
.
.
.
</cards>

</plecoflash>

 

[Alexis]

Alexis - that actually sounds like it might just be a normal character - what happens if you turn on Outline, does that smooth out the edges any? We're working on a much prettier stroke order system (using some new data we licensed from Wenlin) for 2.1, which we may end up using to render rare Chinese characters in regular definitions too.

The first time I look at the character, it looks normal (and very nice and smooth). When I close and re-open the exact same character it is very jagged and pixellated the second time. this was with outline on. Otherwise, when they are work they look really good and have a nice fill rate.

I also noticed something similar when giving the stroke order flashcards a test drive today. The first flashcard sessions are fine (though the characters randomly change sizes from big to medium size; not consistently either. Characters that were huge in one flashcard session come up medium size in the next one. In the second flashcard session the characters would often start to look pixelated and either crash at the end of the session or sometimes the characters would be so huge that the the whole character didn't fit on the screen.

I'll email you some pictures offline to better explain it.

 

[llammamama]

Still on the topic of flashcards:

I'm also getting a "do you want to resume your flashcard session?" message every time I start the flashcard module even though there shouldn't be (and isn't) one saved. If I just say "yes" it just takes me to the main flashcard screen (manage flashcards / choose profile / etc. screen).


When I finish a session that only has one card in it, when it displays the statistics for the session it says I had 2 correct and 0 wrong.


I just did a little bit more fiddling with the blank session issue, and it doesn't depend on the type of test or the specific category I choose. If there are no cards in the queue I always get a blank session which must be exited manually by clicking on the red X cancel session button and saying "no, don't save the session". I have not actually imported anything, so I doubt that has anything to do with it. All of the flashcards I'm using were added from within Pleco itself (from the reader and dictionary). I don't seem to have any strange 'empty flashcards' any more, though.

 

[daniu]

Hi!

I have not read all the 5 pages of long comments and suggestions because I also got other things to do ...

... and that is the point where I want to come up with the suggestion of setting up a bug-system. I believe that would help everybody. Beta-Testers to find out easier if the bug is a known bug or not and Mike not to read the same thing over and over again cause the Beta-Testers will be pointed to the place where the bug has been found first.

If this seems to complicated I want to suggest at least to seperate PPC and Palm since it seems to me that both systems are still quite different and I don't think there are many people who use PD on both systems thus making it unnecessary to anybody to read about the bugs of the other system ...

just my 2 cents
Daniel

 

[westmeadboy]

daniu - agree with you there. Although separating palm from ppc will create duplication for platform-independent bugs. Also, most people will not know if a bug they have is because of their platform or something else. Having a list of known bugs (and suspected bugs) somewhere would be useful for sure...

The vertical slider on the main screen (separating entry list from definition) can only be dragged a certain number of pixels from the right edge of the screen (to the left). This was the same in PD1 and I was hoping it would be different in PD2.

I usually use PD in landscape mode and so the divider will only drag to about a third of the way from the right-hand edge (half-way in portrait mode). Would it be possible to remove this restriction so that the divider could be pulled almost completely to the lefthand edge thus making the list entries far more readable???

 

[ldolse]

Regarding full text search - easy enough now that you've explained it, but I must say it was completely unintuitive to me. Now that I see it working it's very cool. Will probably be a different story for new 2.0 customers in the future though.

Regarding the toggle vs. #, I can see your point on possibly confusing users, but the flip side is that users will never discover/use a really cool feature. A dedicated full text button toggle could definitely confuse users, but I think a tap and hold action on the current language button just to choose full text, and single click for E-C and C-E cycling is pretty intuitive and should prevent a user from getting 'stuck'. A user would naturally learn that button switches languages before they try tap and hold to find the third option.

The reasons I'm not a big fan of the pound sign is it's not seamlessly compatible with copy to input field and links. If you start a session that's primarily full text searches that means going to the soft keyboard a lot more frequently. That symbol must constantly be re-added via soft keyboard, and odd symbols aren't easily accessible on a lot of keyboards. In the end this really breaks the flow that Pleco is so good at allowing for normal searches.

Lastly - I'd definitely remove that auto-switch to full text as a default - that really confused me when it happened - I thought the app went crazy.

 

[ipsi]

You know, it'd've be nice if there was the option to output the 1.0 flashcards with tone numbers, rather than tone marks, because that'd be much easier for me. I managed to get my regular expressions to handle most cases, but not all. Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive. I don't really need my scores merged, but I would like to have them all assigned to my nice, new flashcards . For the record, something like dàn'gāo is a pain, as is something like diǎnr...

Anyway, it did help me catch a couple of errors in my base flashcard file, which is good. I'll try using the new 2.0 flashcard system from tomorrow .

 

[gato]

... and that is the point where I want to come up with the suggestion of setting up a bug-system. I believe that would help everybody. Beta-Testers to find out easier if the bug is a known bug or not and Mike not to read the same thing over and over again cause the Beta-Testers will be pointed to the place where the bug has been found first.

phpBugTracker might be worth a try:
http://phpbt.sourceforge.net/shots/

 

[kkuguru]

Mike - thx!

Mine is a HTC TYNT II running WM 6.1

Only played with Beta 5 for about 10 minutes total, and actually have not even gotten code in yet to unlock demo (waiting for Palm --> PPC platform switch), but one strange bug already. With Pleco running in the background, I am unable to select my Wifi signals as usual. Instead, there is a Pleco icon in it's place where I can conveniently open up Pleco. Convenient, unless I'm trying to open up the Wifi. Also, with Pleco running in background, there is always a new notification waiting for me. Usually it's a new text message or new mail, but now when I click on it, once again, Pleco opens up...

 

[Fleminator]

Has a fix been found for the Palm TX problems? I know there are a million things to work through, but I feel like I'm twiddling my thumbs while everyone else is having a heyday with the new beta.

 

[Harm]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the new beta! Finally I can admire the new functions of the flashcard module, in previous betas I only had crashes.
Now I really like it a lot.

To mention one nice surprise: I really like that now you can also go back to previous questions in the self-scored mode to review it just one more time. Going back even the tone-colors are shown. Really smart! However, you have to be careful not to go too far. After you have had your score, there is no way back and you enter in the flashcards menu.

Fleminator,
I had the exactly the same problems with the Converter on my Palm X|T: at number 6.500 or so a soft reset. So, it has probably nothing to do with corrupted files. It is probably some specific X|T bug. I succeeded to work around it. I installed the converter on my old Tungsten, beamed both my flashcards and the converter and, thank god, on this device it worked well. After thgis I beamed the exported files back to the X|T and now I am ready to play.

Until now I have only one problem: stroke order does not work anymore. While installing I got a quick notice that a specific file should be in the internal device in stead of the flashcard. I thought that after this notice the file was transferred automatically, but apparently this has not happened.
Mike, can you tell me which file should be in the internal device, so I can put it there. By the way, in beta 4 the stroke order was not a problem and I did not have to transfer files from the flashcard. Something has changed there?

Thanks again for an ever greater product!

Harm

 

[weight]

TX with everything running on a card, low battery power will cause a reset, after power back on I'll get a "no fonts installed" dialogue; using the "reset preferences" button on that dialogue has no effect. After I plug in the machine and do a reset pleco will come back up. Since the machine on low power is shutting down services including the card does this count as a bug?

 

[mikelove]

ipsi - glad to hear it! Sorry about the freezing, that's an issue that we've already fixed in our development versions - basically the software was forgetting to occasionally check for / clear out any new messages in the Palm OS message queue, so when the import finishes and it goes back to its normal UI behavior it has to work through several hundred (or several thousand) of them.

Categories are always added for duplicates, actually, or should be - might not be happening correctly if you manually tell it to skip the card, but when the importer's told to always skip duplicates it always still includes the categories and compares / takes the more recently-reviewed score.

Alexis - thanks for the pictures, looks like something screwy with the T3's resizable display (early version of Palm's Virtual Graffiti system) - should be easy enough to fix on a test system.

llammamama - could you e-mail me your flashcard database file? (should be under My Documents) Sounds like something may be getting configured oddly but it's tough to guess at what.

daniu - thanks for the suggestion, but it's a little late in the game to roll out a bug database system at this point, particularly since we've already got our own internal one, and as westmeadboy says there are enough bugs in common on Palm/PPC that there's likely to be a fair amount of duplication in those threads. Another issue with public bug databases is that they often still end up with a lot of duplicates, since people don't necessarily know how to explain/classify a problem clearly and don't always look through the database to see if there's anything related before adding their new bug. You can use the "Search this Topic" feature in the forums to quickly search the discussion thread for a particular issue, though. It's not the end of the world if we get a few duplicate posts, either, they can help for determining how widespread a problem is - if it's a big/serious issue we'd much rather have multiple posts about it than no posts at all.

westmeadboy - this should be pretty easy to fix, the system actually recalculates the range of positions for the text resizer every time it rearranges the display so it should just be a matter of telling it to let you to move the thing farther when the display is in landscape mode. We'd then have to check it hadn't been moved too far when the screen was rearranged again in portrait/square mode, but that's something it already should be doing. You can get the list to take up the entire screen by putting it in fullscreen mode, though - if you set the preferences to open the list on searches and close it when you tap on an entry that would give you a good way to see as much list width as possible.

ldolse - good point on users missing out on the feature, but even a tap-hold list is something people will often hit by accident and then not be able to figure out what they did - we get messages about this all the time in 1.0 with the toggle list button, people somehow manage to get the list over to the wrong side of the screen and can't figure out how it got there or how to get it back. (we removed the popup list option for that button altogether in the first few betas but brought it back by popular request)

The pound sign actually should stay in place for Copy to Input as long as the "Keep on Clear" option is checked - not entirely sure if that's working correctly yet but that's how it's supposed to work at least. I suppose we could implement that popup list by having it add the pound sign when you selected one of the full-text options, but then we'd have people wondering how that weird character got there. (we definitely need to add that symbol to the soft keyboard, though, don't know how we missed that)

Maybe just an "Insert Character" or "Insert String" toolbar button option, that could have a number of other uses too depending on the limitations of someone's PDA's keyboard / input system.

ipsi #2 - you could always import your old cards into 2.0 with duplicates permitted and then re-export them; that would indirectly get them converted into tone numbers. The ABC dictionary is very good about Pinyin orthography (the printed version even includes an intro note from Prof. DeFrancis asking people to pay more attention to it), so the apostrophes in those entries at least should be placed in a consistent manner - the basic rule is that apostrophes are used in the middle of words whenever there's a syllable which begins with a, e, or o, so that shouldn't be too difficult to encapsulate into your REs.

kkuguru - turn off the Instant Access notification icon option in the External section of Preferences and that will get rid of that icon and the notification messages.

Fleminator - still working on the TX; the message-queue fix I mentioned above to ipsi was the one I mentioned earlier as potentially getting things working on the TX, but it turns out that the TX's internal file storage system keeps randomly losing chunks of databases for some reason - we're still trying to figure out why, the exact same operations on a Treo 680 (running in theory the same exact version of Palm OS) yield a perfectly good clean intact database. Worst-case scenario we can work around this by using the TX's internal file store (it actually has one like the T5, it's just hidden) directly, thus getting around any problems with the way the TX handles files, but it'd take a week or two to get that properly tested/debugged.

Harm - glad you're liking the new back function. Still no idea about what's causing that converter bug, since 90% of the code in that converter is the same as in 1.0.3 and the problems appear to happen even if you're writing files to a memory card (thus eliminating the possibility of the TX's internal storage being the culprit) - worst-case scenario we'll just tell TX users they can e-mail us their files and have us export them for them, though perhaps if we get to the bottom of this lost-database problem that will shed some light on this. The specific file mentioned on startup was the handwriting recognizer database, which has nothing to do with stroke order... check the Ordering screen, is the stroke order database listed there under demo, paid, or not at all?

weight - not really a bug so much as a bad idea on Palm's end, but at the very least the error message ought to check to see if the battery is low and tell you to plug your Palm in and soft reset it if that's the case.

 

[weight]

Mike,

The converter immediately resets my palm after pressing the convert button... tried both internal and external as well as unchecking some of the options.

 

[mikelove]

Still really puzzled by why the converter isn't working - if you do a regular text flashcard export with 1.0's flashcard exporter, does that work correctly?

 

[ldolse]

I know which issues you're talking about with Tap and Hold in 1.0 - I think the main problem there is you need to tap and hold to get out of those weird scenarios as well. Single tap always toggling between C-E/E-C should resolve that - flipping between the language button is the most frequently used button along with the dictionary button.

That said, the 'keep on clear' option, along with a dedicated button that could quickly insert the pound sign would satisfy me as well. I just tested the Keep on Clear option though, it doesn't work as described, and it's buggy.
- Copy to Input clears the pound sign
- If you hit the erase button with that option checked it hops the cursor to the pound sign, but the text stays and it's unselectable via stylus at that point. Selecting something different in the history or typing is the only way to clear it.

 

[grabolus]

Hi,

Beta5 runs nice on my Treo 650.

I also have an issue with the stroke order screen. When I open it the screen gets corrupt. It looks like it tries to draw the stroke order but the coordinates are somehow misinterpretated: Many strange lines or triangels fill the screen. What is interesting with this is that with beta4b the stroke order first was ok, but after some week this problem came up. It looks like pleco crashed, but it is possible to click on done and pleco goes on without problems. Could there be an option that causes this broken screen or could there be a settings file thats wrong.

What is very good is that after handwriting input the two empty squares no longer appear in the search list.
I had a soft reset during instant access, looking for a sign that was in a memo.
I will be absolutely happy when the german dictionary becomes available...

Thanks

 

[sfrrr]

Mike--sorry about the dilatory report--surprise visiting firemen, my zui hao de kind.

Anyway, I can't get the stroke order function to misbehave--although I would swear it's hanged its typeface a couple of times (between a more cursive one and a blocky one). Whether outline is on or off, it works just as it should.

Before I go on with my report, I must say that I'm really impressed with this program. You guys did fabulous work. I love the new, clearer (and less Palm-ish) interface, the new, more intuitive menus, etc. I love the convert custom flashcards to user dictionary, although since I haven't been able to think up a custom card, I haven't been able to test it.

Also, so far the audio doesn't work--is that because I just haven't found a word included in this demo version? Is it possible to use the old audio files from beta 4?

This beta starts faster than any other version 2 ...um...version. Still not quite as fast (I think) as PD1, but then it's doing a helluva lot more.

Every once in a while, the input box forgets to register key clicks. That is, the cursor line is blinking in the input box, but when I type in some English or Pinyin, nothing happens, Tapping on the input box once or twice fixes it.

I have now tried many times, but I can't get more than 10 icons in the top toolbar. I've requested 14, knowing three of them will go to the search toolbar, but I don't get 11 icons in the main toolbar; only 10. And once I specified the 14 icons, I can't change to a different number. It doesn't matter what number I select in the toolbar drop-down box, I get only (I'm using an iPAQ 211, so it's VGA on the extra large screen.) Landscape toolbars have the requested number of icons. I'll keep fiddling.

So far, every word I've searched on has come up as usual. My big test will be how stable the flashcards and user dict is--if they don't get corrupted within the next month, I'll be a very happy camper.

Sandra

 

[ipsi]

Flashcards show both simplified and traditional characters when I ask it to show the headword, and the headword is magnified by default with no way to turn it off.

I also quite liked the ability in 1.0 to set the fields to display based on the rank. Not sure if there's an equivalent in 2.0, but it was nice as I could start with Pinyin + Headword, then go to just headword after I knew the definition. I suppose I could do the same thing in 2.0 with multiple profiles, but then I'd have to stop the current test to change what I was learning.

Also been having some issues with my imported flashcards I'll work on that when I get home. I think it was problems with the scorefile being funny. Also seem to have lost some categories from my cards. Not sure what's up there. Will check when I get home... In the mean time, I'll probably delete them all again and just use the flashcards from 1.0 or something.

EDIT: Got a soft reset on exiting. Oops.

 

[weight]

Still really puzzled by why the converter isn't working - if you do a regular text flashcard export with 1.0's flashcard exporter, does that work correctly?

Mike,

1.0 will export to a text file if the sd card is inserted, if not it gives me an error message and exits out, I've tried playing with the encoding and only checking single new categories, no help. The other two formats memopad and palmdoc seem to work without a problem.

Edit:
Nothing has changed aside from doing the above export in 1.0 and reviewing a few flashcards, but now it will actually start the export and reset at about 400 or so.