Beta 6 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[radioman]

Palm to Axim X51V Conversion Issue.

- XML file for Flashcards - I modified the XML file. But many of the categories came over wrong. My guess is that all the cards are there, but the categories were lost. However, the main category "committed" was apparently in tact, so I believe I can work with this (its a hack but I think I can make it work).

Latest Issue -

- "No Flashcards were found that met your desired criteria. Please change your session settings and try again" ... Well, I think I can say with some confidence that I have tried every setting (or left them all unset), and this message still comes up. Any ideas? Is this some sort of known problem.

As an example, if I go to "manage flashcards", then the category... set it to "lesson 23", then hit search, I get 32 flashcards identified.

Now If I want to go through some testing of this specific set of characters, I go to "New Flashcard Session" and select categories "lesson 23", then move to card filter and have none of the boxes checked, it comes back with the same error.

 

[mikelove]

goog1e - thanks for that - it looks like the score-last-increased and score-last-decreased times in the database are getting screwed up somehow, the file doesn't seem to be corrupted so it's probably just not saving them correctly. Anyway the times are wrong enough that it's pretty easy for us to check / correct these bad values (which I imagine are in several other people's databases too at this point), so once we find/fix the source of the problem we should be able to get it to check for / fix any wrong values it does encounter so that your database won't remain screwed up. In the meantime if you temporarily disable the "only change once per day" option in the Scoring tab of Advanced settings, that should get those cards to stop coming up on every session (after reviewing them one more time).

radioman - not sure what's going on with sessions not starting, but if you send us your flashcard file we can take a look and see why that session isn't coming up. If you send along your modified XML export file too we can see if there's anything in that that would be likely to make the categories not come up correctly.

 

[KesterN]

Hi there,

Pleco 2b6 is working very well on my Treo 680.

Things I really like about Pleco 2:
-The new dictionaries
-Being able to loop incorrect flashcards at the end of a session

Audio bug?
Hua2 is spoken as Hua4 by the female voice.

Related to points made by others:
-Yes, reader doesn't leave any lines of the previous page visible when scrolling. Agree that one or two lines overlap would be better.
-I don't get any crashes when using flashcards with pTunes streaming radio in the background

My Reader tip:
I subscribe to China Mobile's 'newspaper', which is a selection of mostly Xinhuanet and ESPN.cn articles, SMS-ed to me twice a day. I can then copy articles I want to study in more depth into the Reader.

Highlight text --> Copy --> Open Pleco --> Open Reader --> Source: Clipboard --> Text Encoding: GB-2312 --> Start.

To do subscribe from Gansu, I had to text CXP to 10658000, then send a blank message to their confirmation reply. 3 yuan per month. You might want to check your local provincial cost and subscription method.

 

[ipsi]

You can set it so that it will auto-open the reader if you copy in a long bit of text. It's under Preference/External Should save you rather a lot of effort. However, as it currently stands it will go straight to the reader every time you open it, as it doesn't clear the text from the clipboard...

 

[KesterN]

Ipsi: Nice tip, thanks. I can just change the preferences prior to a 'newspaper' session, then change them back afterwards.

ABC entry list bug?
Not sure if this was mentioned before. When I look something up, then switch between dictionaries, the first time I scroll down the entry list in the ABC dictionary, it always jumps back up to the top entry. After that, I can scroll down with no problem.

 

[mikelove]

KesterN - glad to hear it's working well. The audio bug you mention is a known issue, we've gone through and cleaned up a lot of those (double-checking every single-syllable recording especially) so there should be a lot fewer audio errors in Beta 7. We've now added an overlap to the reader so that too should show up in B7. (turns out it wasn't implemented before) I'm not seeing this ABC scrolling problem here - could you give me an example of a search that causes it? Which dictionary are you in when you do the initial search.

ipsi - that checksum thing I mentioned earlier proved surprisingly easy to implement, so that's in place now and in Beta 7 it should only look up the clipboard contents when the clipboard has changed since the last time Pleco was opened / activated.

 

[KesterN]

Mike: Re. the ABC entry list skipping

I've done several tests, changing the initial dictionary and the entry word (single and multiple character words, using both pinyin and characters), and it happens with every search, regardless of which dictionary I was in for the initial search (including ABC*).

After an initial search, when I toggle through the dictionaries, GF, OX, ADS, USR all let me scroll down the entry list. But in ABC, the first scroll (whether it be 1 entry down or several) always results in being sent right back up to the first entry on the list. The second time I attempt it, there is no problem. If I toggle through the dictionaries again, the same thing happens on return to ABC.

* Note: this only happens after toggling through the dictionaries, so if the initial search is in ABC, I can scroll through the entry list without this skipping issue. However, if I then toggle through the dictionaries and arrive back at ABC, the problem is now there.

Update: possible cause?
I had a thought that this could in some way be connected to having CJKOS enabled (with Input Field Compatibility Mode on), so I unchecked IFCM and the problem disappeared...

 

[kkuguru]

Hi,

Probably a known bug, but If you enable the "Flash on Change" option under Preferences, Display, Dict Name, then every time the dictionary changes and the notification comes on, the cursor is no longer in the input field. In other words, if you start typing a new word, and in the middle of the word the dictionary changes, you have to reclick in the input field to continue typing (most of the time you only realize after you finish typing the whole word, then look up only to realize only half of your word is in the input field and you have to click in it to get the cursor back.)

Also has somebody already mentioned that in the flashcard, scoring options area, that there's a typo? It says add xxx points for every correct answer and subtract xxx for every correct answer. Should read subtract xxx for every INcorrect answer.

Thx,

K.

 

[radioman]

Some comments on B6 specific to Flashcard sessions. My own opinions of course

- Windows Mobile on Axim x51v
- Landscape Mode.

1) The flash card module in Landscape mode is great looking, with large selection buttons, scalable fonts, etc., makes it very easy to set up and very configurable. I cannot see how the overall presentation for the main screen. Quite nice.

2) The fonts for the "information" screen off the main flashcard is very small. I am not clear on why there is no apparent scaling there.

3)**** MAJOR CONCERN **** There is no way on Windows Mobile (from what I can see) to highlight an individual character and flash card mode and be able to see the definition. For instance - PengYou. 朋友 ... with the Palm, at least on the information screen, I could highlight 朋 and it would bring up the "card definition/character draw/ other combination" screen and it would break down 朋。 Very useful when trying memorize a word to look at the individual characters (which I may or may not know at the time). I cannot seem to do it on the WM device.

4) It would be good to have a battery indicator that highlights how much power is left on the device. Especially useful for long flashcards sessions.

5) Color pallet under miscellaneous is not properly scaled, so that it does not fit on the page, not in landscape anyway.

6) The built-in keyboard in landscape mode does not scale to the size of the screen which would be very handy. It remains small as in portrait mode. Using Pleco's own keyboard (if it scaled) would be a great option. Nice big keys, etc.

7) It would also be good to have the writing pallet scale to fit the screen in landscape mode. More room means easier writing. Also it looks "unfinished" with the space there.

8 When the flash cards session in landscape mode. The time is shown truncating the seconds, so you can't see all of the seconds. So if I am into a session for 1 hour and 5 minutes and 15 seconds.... it looks like this. 01:05:1 ... the last 5 is missing.

###

 

[goog1e]

3)**** MAJOR CONCERN **** There is no way on Windows Mobile (from what I can see) to highlight an individual character and flash card mode and be able to see the definition. For instance - PengYou. 朋友 ... with the Palm, at least on the information screen, I could highlight 朋 and it would bring up the "card definition/character draw/ other combination" screen and it would break down 朋。 Very useful when trying memorize a word to look at the individual characters (which I may or may not know at the time). I cannot seem to do it on the WM device.

radioman,

I'm using WM6 and I have found out how to look up individual characters in flashcard mode (though I'm not using landscape mode). You can't do it until you have answered the question right or wrong (that would be cheating if you could!). I believe the default is highlight + tap&hold on the character, then you can select the Char Info option from the list and it brings up the Unihan dictionary, Stroke Order, and Compound Words. I'm not sure how to break a character down into pieces a la zhongwen.com's dictionary if that's what you mean. That would be nice.

 

[goog1e]

Display Bug:

I am using WM6 on an iPAQ 110.

I start at the main dictionary screen looking at the last entry I searched for. I enter the "Input" window via the 入. Then, if I hit the built-in input button (in the middle of the blue bar at the bottom of the screen between "Menu" and "Modules"), and then hit it again to make it go away, the "Menu" and "Modules" buttons stay white spaces. Only the pen icon is updated. I cannot see, nor can I push the Menu and Modules buttons.

UPDATE
This bug happens in the Preferences too, not just the input window.


Flashcard Bug:

I started a flashcard session yesterday morning ~9 am. Then I stopped and didn't come back to it till about 9 pm at night when I resumed the session. When I finished the session, the final time elapsed statistic said something like 12 hours. However, during the session, on the elapsed time clock it correctly had ~ 40 minutes.


Menu Suggestion:

In Menu -> Preferences, it wasn't clear to me what options I could actually change... I didn't discover the last drop-down menu for a few days because to me, it looks like all the rest. If we could someone make the drop-down list of option screens stand out from the other options, I think it would help a lot of newcomers.

 

[radioman]

Goog1e,

It would appear you are right. I highlight the characters on the main flash session screen (even before confirming whether I got the card correct or not) and can bring up the character information, etc. Not quite sure about highlighting, tapping, double tapping, etc., but I can get to the data, so this one I think is covered OK. Thanks for your input.

Ed.

3)**** MAJOR CONCERN **** There is no way on Windows Mobile (from what I can see) to highlight an individual character and flash card mode and be able to see the definition. For instance - PengYou. 朋友 ... with the Palm, at least on the information screen, I could highlight 朋 and it would bring up the "card definition/character draw/ other combination" screen and it would break down 朋。 Very useful when trying memorize a word to look at the individual characters (which I may or may not know at the time). I cannot seem to do it on the WM device.

radioman,

I'm using WM6 and I have found out how to look up individual characters in flashcard mode (though I'm not using landscape mode). You can't do it until you have answered the question right or wrong (that would be cheating if you could!). I believe the default is highlight + tap&hold on the character, then you can select the Char Info option from the list and it brings up the Unihan dictionary, Stroke Order, and Compound Words. I'm not sure how to break a character down into pieces a la zhongwen.com's dictionary if that's what you mean. That would be nice.

 

[stoney]

KesterN We've now added an overlap to the reader so that too should show up in B7. (turns out it wasn't implemented before)

It would be nice to make it an option. I prefer without overlap.

 

[FUmminger]

BUG - In Manage Categories, if I create a new category that is a duplicate, then the new category only gets populated with only a single flashcard from the original.

-Frederick

 

[mikelove]

KesterN - ah, Input Field Compatibility would definitely explain it - we haven't done much regression testing with that yet, though we will before the finished version is out.

kkuguru - the "Flash on Change" issue I think you mentioned earlier with Zoom Chars, actually - we think we've got it fixed now for Beta 7. And yes, we've fixed that typo too.

radioman - On #2, the Card Info screen looks fine on our X51v here - is the font really unusually small or just smaller than your normal definition font size? If it's the latter, that's just because there's such limited space on that screen - have to pack a lot of information in there. #3 as others have said can be done with a tap-hold. You can get a battery indicator for #4 by enabling the "Don't hide menu bars in flash / reader" option in External preferences. I see what you mean about the color palette in #5 - that's actually all Windows Mobile's doing but maybe we can find a way to get it to shrink the thing.

#6/7 The keyboard / handwriting areas don't scale on that separate Input screen because rearranging screens like that on-the-fly is really complicated and we haven't gotten around to implementing it yet (ironically we have done so on Palm). The on-screen ones do scale, though, so especially with handwriting the best bet might be to use them in that mode. #8 I think has already been fixed on Palm, and the screen arranging code is actually cross-platform for that screen, but we'll double-check that it's working correctly on PPC too now.

goog1e - character component breakdown a la zhongwen.com actually is coming to Pleco, we've licensed the necessary data for it just recently and are hoping to put it in 2.1/3.0 (along with an improved stroke order diagram function based on it, and finally a reasonably modern and better-than-a-printed dictionary radical lookup feature which allows multiple radicals and non-radical components).

We fixed that blank space bug just the other day, actually - happened on all of those tabbed property sheet screens. Not sure what's going on with the end-of-session elapsed time, guess there must be some old code in there pre-dating the saved session feature. A couple of people have mentioned Preferences being confusing - more a problem on PPC than Palm, I think, since people are accustomed to popup-menu-driven interfaces on Palm (and had one for preferences in 1.0), but we could easily add a "Choose Panel" text label next to that popup list (the only screen where it wouldn't fit is Flashcards and we can move the Buttons... selector button up a line to make room).

stoney - there are a bunch of options we'd like to add to the reader, actually, that and hiding the scroll buttons and switching from % to character position are the three big ones - we're pretty well set on not adding any more options in 2.0 but we'll probably add a whole screen or two worth of reader customizations in a later release.

FUmminger - that's a new one... thanks, we'll investigate this.

 

[radioman]

Thank you for the prompt response.

The following I consider "non critical" but worthy of mention.

- #2 My guess is that the font I am seeing is the one you intended. I understand the balancing act required for a GUI, but the reason I like to scale the fonts is strictly so I can read the text. If the layout is very nice, but I cannot read it, then that is an issue. (I realize you are not running an eye care clinic...). I am just suggesting that if it was possible to scale some of the text on the information page, I would likely do it even if it meant sacrificing some nice formatting.

- On a related Item, maybe this one was articulated before, but with regard to the "Character Information" page, it appears that all the formats are pre-sized to facilitate portrait, so in landscape, there is unused room. Not sure anything can be done there, but as in the case with the compounds, extending the viewing area all the way across the screen would provide more information to the viewer. This is not essential, but is a "nice to have"...

- #4 Battery indicator, like in a flashcard session to the left of the time. I think that, even with the "don't hide menu bars" highlighted, there is no indicator in the flashcard session. Also, I would not want to give up screen real estate just for the indicator.

The following items look very good.

- #3 OK, I got that working. Very useful.

- #6/7 - I now see there are other options for making the keyboard larger. I think that addresses that one as well.

###

radioman - On #2, the Card Info screen looks fine on our X51v here - is the font really unusually small or just smaller than your normal definition font size? If it's the latter, that's just because there's such limited space on that screen - have to pack a lot of information in there. #3 as others have said can be done with a tap-hold. You can get a battery indicator for #4 by enabling the "Don't hide menu bars in flash / reader" option in External preferences. I see what you mean about the color palette in #5 - that's actually all Windows Mobile's doing but maybe we can find a way to get it to shrink the thing.

#6/7 The keyboard / handwriting areas don't scale on that separate Input screen because rearranging screens like that on-the-fly is really complicated and we haven't gotten around to implementing it yet (ironically we have done so on Palm). The on-screen ones do scale, though, so especially with handwriting the best bet might be to use them in that mode. #8 I think has already been fixed on Palm, and the screen arranging code is actually cross-platform for that screen, but we'll double-check that it's working correctly on PPC too now.

 

[mikelove]

The problem with scaling text for #2 is that there really just isn't room - we'd have to either drop information or limit the text to one line. Or add yet another new preference to let people optionally make that text bigger, which as with all new preferences I'm hesitant to do. Reorganizing both Char Info and Input are things we're considering for 2.1 but as I've said it's a tricky thing to program. The battery indicator is tricky because as far as we know there's no built-in system to show a battery icon in a dialog box on WM as there is on Palm - we'd need to poll it and draw/update our own icon, certainly not that difficult but not feasible before a post-2.0 release.

 

[ipsi]

Couple more things on the reader:

If I tell Pleco that a file is, say, UTF-8 encoded (pretend that's its real encoding too), everything works fine. I can add bookmarks, etc.

But if I later tell Pleco that its a, say, UTF-16BE file (which it's not), I loose all of my bookmark information as Pleco thinks it's now a different length (in terms of Codepoints) and thus trashes all my bookmarks. Would it not be possible to keep a list the last two or three known lengths and the associated bookmarks? It's probably a lot of work, but it's quite frustrating to have your bookmarks trashed because you forgot to change the encoding back...

I've also been having some funny issues with the document reader selecting completely different text to what I expect. As an example, head to http://china.panlogicsoftware.com/ebooks.html and grab yc.txt (野草) by Lu Xun. Head to 死火 (54.69% of the way down) and try selecting 接 in the line beginning 这是高大……, then try selecting 冰天. For me, for whatever reason, it won't display either 冰 or 天, it just keeps on showing 接... I'm assuming that's because there's no entry for it, and it goes back to the last word selected.

This actually results in the page being scrolled up if the last selected word was on the previous page. Oops.

Also, just experienced a crash trying to enter Pleco. But I haven't reset in a while, so I guess it was a memory leak, or memory fragmentation or something. Nothing major. But there's a semi-useful error message!

PlecoOSPalm.cpp, Line:167, Error Loading Record!

Not sure if that's at all useful to you or not, and Pleco works just fine now that my 680 has rebooted.

Also, will the Appendices be coming out after 2.0? Or will we get a special preview as part of the Beta?

 

[mikelove]

We're dropping the file size checks too, actually - there's not really any reason your bookmarks should be lost if you add extra content to the end of a file, and if a file gets smaller it's trivial to make sure a bookmark doesn't go past the end. This also gets around the issue of potentially having two files with the same name, since their bookmarks could theoretically get along fine even if they were mingled - as long as you create separate bookmarks for each all you're really losing is the ability to save your last place in the file.

Not sure what's going on with that text selection issue, we'll take a look at that. That Error Loading Record bug is actually rather puzzling since the code that displays it only runs when the database system is running in 68k instead of ARM (which should only happen in our debug versions, basically) - might be an offshoot of the heap-corruption bug we've now fixed for Beta 7.

Appendices are probably going to be post-2.0 at this point, though we may get the dictionary usage guides at least formatted (as PlecoDocs embedded within the dictionary database files) for 2.0.

 

[ipsi]

That sounds interesting. Hope it works out .

Anyway, quick sanity check: You didn't release the debug version by mistake did you? Otherwise the Heap Corruption bug sounds like a good contender... Wait for Beta 7 and see I guess.

I'm not fussed on the Appendices, really. Having never used a printed copy, I don't know what I'm missing .