Pleco 2.0 Beta 6, the "everything works pretty well, we hope" release, is finally ready for download. This is the first version put out under our new "drop it out of the sky one day when nobody's particularly expecting it" product release policy, which is likely going to be our standard operating procedure from here on out, as I've really gotten pretty sick of making endless "we're really close" and "just a few more bugs" proclamations.
Full download archive is available at: http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd2b6.zip
The new application programs by themselves are available at: http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd2b6-apps.zip
Most of the data files aside from those are unchanged, but we did tweak the indexing in four of the dictionaries (ABC/GF/OXCE slightly and ADS heavily) - if you're on a slow internet connection and don't want to download the full package, you can get just those changed dictionaries at http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd2b6-changeddicts.zip
Audio files are unchanged from Beta 5 and are at: http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd2b5audio.zip
(we're in the process of re-encoding them to fix some glitches and smooth out the volume, and of course that'll include the full 30,000-word extended vocabulary set too)
Username and password for the beta directory are "plecobeta" and "beijingkaoya".
Note: this software is not finished, will crash on you frequently and may even damage your handheld, so use extreme caution when downloading/installing/using.
Rough installation instructions are included in the download - basic instructions for actually using the software should be posted here soon, and an automated installer on Pocket PC is also forthcoming before too long.
To obtain your Pleco 2.0 Beta keyfile, log on to the Beta My Orders page (use the above plecobeta username/password to access the page and your regular My Orders username/password to log in once the page is loaded) and activate your software. Choose Ordering from the Help menu in the 2.0 beta to get the required Machine ID code. To purchase new add-ons, activate your software on that Orders page and then click on the appropriate link for the add-on you'd like to purchase.
Palm and Pocket PC users each get a new little utility program in this package. For Palm it's our oft-discussed PlecoMover utility, which lets you move flashcard / user dictionary databases between main memory, hidden internal flash memory and SD cards, converting between PDB/PQB along the way.
For Pocket PC it's something I just wrote this morning called PlecoLaunch and it's basically designed to make the Instant Access situation on Pocket PC a lot nicer; you simply assign it to an application button (or use some other launcher utility to activate it) and run it and it'll bring up Pleco with Instant Access for you. The main reason this is better than the "on program activate" option is that it's a lot faster; with "on activate" Windows Mobile has to load / verify the entire 2 MB Pleco application program before it can figure out that it's already running and activate it, but with PlecoLauncher it only has to get through a little 50 KB mini-app. It also brings up Instant Access if Pleco isn't currently running in the background, something "on activate" for technical reasons can't do. Along with this we retired the "from button press" option, since the only buttons it seemed to be working with consistently were the application launch buttons (and those not very well).
Other major feature changes / improvements in Beta 6:
-- After 3 years, Palm finally gets a file browser; not so much a browser as a list of files with the correct extension, but you can now open up flash/reader files without having to fiddle around with path names.
-- After SEVEN years of putting this off, we've finally made the Pinyin search algorithm behave correctly with regards to syllable splitting; it now requires a space/apostrophe/tone number in the middle of the word before any syllable that begins with an a, e, or o, rather than the earlier system where it simply looked for the longest Pinyin match it could find at the start of a word. This will make searches like "keneng" come up correctly (it knows it's ke neng rather than ken eng), but will require you to put in a space/apostrophe/tone in searches like "chang'an" where you could previously get away with not doing so.
-- Also on Palm, the new VFS-based flashcard/user dictionary storage system makes its official non-experimental debut; should provide some significant stability improvements, and performance ones too for some models (our TX at least feels much much faster with that than with PDBs). The first time you run Beta 6 you'll be prompted to select a location to store any new flash/user dictionary files; you can change this later in the Search Paths part of Preferences (which unfortunately get reset, but the rest of your preferences should stay intact).
-- Instant Access on Pocket PC now has a button to jump to the regular dictionary. (too tricky to get this working on Palm, unfortunately)
-- Audio volume has been bumped way up, and a volume control was added in Preferences. (Misc)
-- PPC now has an option to not hide the menu / task bars in flash/reader sessions.
-- Scrolling up in the reader has been made dramatically faster / less terrible, and the reader finally knows how to jump to the last saved location. (it was actually saving it out correctly all along, just not jumping to it, so you may find when you open a document again it'll already know where you are)
-- Toggle full-text toolbar button option added - all it actually does is insert the full-text search prefix at the start of the input field, but combined with the "keep on clear" option in Query preferences it basically gives you a toggle switch for full-text searches.
-- Several more commands added in Stylus Actions, stylus accuracy for tap/tap-sel improved considerably, and there's now a tap-hold popup menu in flashcard sessions.
-- Flashcards now have the option of adding the default / selected category to a card even if it's a duplicate, and that's also now configurable in the Import screen.
-- New flashcard session options: "loop" for reviewing incorrect cards at the end of a session, "taller" option for self-scored sketchbox (replacing the resize bar), a new option to disable the keyboard in free-answer Pinyin sessions (for people whose PDAs have hardware keyboards or who live in those scary parts of the world where they don't use QWERTY), minimum score option in manual scoring mode.
-- Manage Flashcards now has a friendly card count at the bottom of the screen, and a new "exact category" search option (only in Advanced) which looks for cards that are only in a specific category (without searching any child categories under it).
Bug fixes are almost too numerous to count - we've fixed (or tried to fix) every bug reported in the Beta 5 feedback thread, along with a whole bunch of others; memory leaks in audio on both Palm and PPC and in font rendering on PPC (particularly acute on VGA devices, if you set the headword font size big enough you could eat up all of your system's memory in about 5 minutes of usage), crashing issues all over the place, various preferences not saving correctly, some seriously weird behavior in frequency-spaced flashcard sessions, windows/dialogs disappearing on PPC, saved sessions getting mis-saved / saved out as null files, missing stroke order undo button in flash on pocket pc, incorrect numbers of response spaces in free-answer flashcard sessions, the list goes on and on...
With (hopefully) the last significant design/feature changes out of the way, betas should get more frequent from here on out, so keep those bug reports coming.
Full download archive is available at: http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd2b6.zip
The new application programs by themselves are available at: http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd2b6-apps.zip
Most of the data files aside from those are unchanged, but we did tweak the indexing in four of the dictionaries (ABC/GF/OXCE slightly and ADS heavily) - if you're on a slow internet connection and don't want to download the full package, you can get just those changed dictionaries at http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd2b6-changeddicts.zip
Audio files are unchanged from Beta 5 and are at: http://www.pleco.com/beta/pd2b5audio.zip
(we're in the process of re-encoding them to fix some glitches and smooth out the volume, and of course that'll include the full 30,000-word extended vocabulary set too)
Username and password for the beta directory are "plecobeta" and "beijingkaoya".
Note: this software is not finished, will crash on you frequently and may even damage your handheld, so use extreme caution when downloading/installing/using.
Rough installation instructions are included in the download - basic instructions for actually using the software should be posted here soon, and an automated installer on Pocket PC is also forthcoming before too long.
To obtain your Pleco 2.0 Beta keyfile, log on to the Beta My Orders page (use the above plecobeta username/password to access the page and your regular My Orders username/password to log in once the page is loaded) and activate your software. Choose Ordering from the Help menu in the 2.0 beta to get the required Machine ID code. To purchase new add-ons, activate your software on that Orders page and then click on the appropriate link for the add-on you'd like to purchase.
Palm and Pocket PC users each get a new little utility program in this package. For Palm it's our oft-discussed PlecoMover utility, which lets you move flashcard / user dictionary databases between main memory, hidden internal flash memory and SD cards, converting between PDB/PQB along the way.
For Pocket PC it's something I just wrote this morning called PlecoLaunch and it's basically designed to make the Instant Access situation on Pocket PC a lot nicer; you simply assign it to an application button (or use some other launcher utility to activate it) and run it and it'll bring up Pleco with Instant Access for you. The main reason this is better than the "on program activate" option is that it's a lot faster; with "on activate" Windows Mobile has to load / verify the entire 2 MB Pleco application program before it can figure out that it's already running and activate it, but with PlecoLauncher it only has to get through a little 50 KB mini-app. It also brings up Instant Access if Pleco isn't currently running in the background, something "on activate" for technical reasons can't do. Along with this we retired the "from button press" option, since the only buttons it seemed to be working with consistently were the application launch buttons (and those not very well).
Other major feature changes / improvements in Beta 6:
-- After 3 years, Palm finally gets a file browser; not so much a browser as a list of files with the correct extension, but you can now open up flash/reader files without having to fiddle around with path names.
-- After SEVEN years of putting this off, we've finally made the Pinyin search algorithm behave correctly with regards to syllable splitting; it now requires a space/apostrophe/tone number in the middle of the word before any syllable that begins with an a, e, or o, rather than the earlier system where it simply looked for the longest Pinyin match it could find at the start of a word. This will make searches like "keneng" come up correctly (it knows it's ke neng rather than ken eng), but will require you to put in a space/apostrophe/tone in searches like "chang'an" where you could previously get away with not doing so.
-- Also on Palm, the new VFS-based flashcard/user dictionary storage system makes its official non-experimental debut; should provide some significant stability improvements, and performance ones too for some models (our TX at least feels much much faster with that than with PDBs). The first time you run Beta 6 you'll be prompted to select a location to store any new flash/user dictionary files; you can change this later in the Search Paths part of Preferences (which unfortunately get reset, but the rest of your preferences should stay intact).
-- Instant Access on Pocket PC now has a button to jump to the regular dictionary. (too tricky to get this working on Palm, unfortunately)
-- Audio volume has been bumped way up, and a volume control was added in Preferences. (Misc)
-- PPC now has an option to not hide the menu / task bars in flash/reader sessions.
-- Scrolling up in the reader has been made dramatically faster / less terrible, and the reader finally knows how to jump to the last saved location. (it was actually saving it out correctly all along, just not jumping to it, so you may find when you open a document again it'll already know where you are)
-- Toggle full-text toolbar button option added - all it actually does is insert the full-text search prefix at the start of the input field, but combined with the "keep on clear" option in Query preferences it basically gives you a toggle switch for full-text searches.
-- Several more commands added in Stylus Actions, stylus accuracy for tap/tap-sel improved considerably, and there's now a tap-hold popup menu in flashcard sessions.
-- Flashcards now have the option of adding the default / selected category to a card even if it's a duplicate, and that's also now configurable in the Import screen.
-- New flashcard session options: "loop" for reviewing incorrect cards at the end of a session, "taller" option for self-scored sketchbox (replacing the resize bar), a new option to disable the keyboard in free-answer Pinyin sessions (for people whose PDAs have hardware keyboards or who live in those scary parts of the world where they don't use QWERTY), minimum score option in manual scoring mode.
-- Manage Flashcards now has a friendly card count at the bottom of the screen, and a new "exact category" search option (only in Advanced) which looks for cards that are only in a specific category (without searching any child categories under it).
Bug fixes are almost too numerous to count - we've fixed (or tried to fix) every bug reported in the Beta 5 feedback thread, along with a whole bunch of others; memory leaks in audio on both Palm and PPC and in font rendering on PPC (particularly acute on VGA devices, if you set the headword font size big enough you could eat up all of your system's memory in about 5 minutes of usage), crashing issues all over the place, various preferences not saving correctly, some seriously weird behavior in frequency-spaced flashcard sessions, windows/dialogs disappearing on PPC, saved sessions getting mis-saved / saved out as null files, missing stroke order undo button in flash on pocket pc, incorrect numbers of response spaces in free-answer flashcard sessions, the list goes on and on...
With (hopefully) the last significant design/feature changes out of the way, betas should get more frequent from here on out, so keep those bug reports coming.