Disappointment with Pleco Android

[sthubbar]

Mike,

Pleco on Android is only a shadow of what it is on the Palm.

I would say the biggest feature missing is the instant lookup, where the user can highlight a character or characters and then push one button and the dictionary would show up on top of any application then when I was done, exit the pop-up and return to my application.

Now, this type of thing has to be possible with Android since several SMS replacement programs do exactly that. They produce a pop-up over the current program and even allow the user to respond to the SMS and then when closing the window returns to the previous program.

With Palm, I would use Pleco everyday and couldn't imagine being without it. Any unrecognized characters in an SMS message, no problem just look it up. Now with Android, the process is so cumbersome, highlight the text (and good luck trying to do that, it's a challenge in itself) now copy the text, then exit the current program, load up Pleco, copy the text, then exit Pleco and try and find out where you left off in the previous program.

Instead I just go back to being illiterate and ignore the stuff I can't read.

As the instant popup was the most compelling feature, and is missing, I can't seem too much difference between paying over $100 for Pleco and the several free dictionaries out there.

It's so disappointing because I have sung the praises of Pleco for many years and also the great support from you.

 

[mikelove]

I would say the biggest feature missing is the instant lookup, where the user can highlight a character or characters and then push one button and the dictionary would show up on top of any application then when I was done, exit the pop-up and return to my application.

Now, this type of thing has to be possible with Android since several SMS replacement programs do exactly that. They produce a pop-up over the current program and even allow the user to respond to the SMS and then when closing the window returns to the previous program.

It's actually not; we do support it in a limited way with the new "Clipboard Monitor" feature (accessible via Settings / General), but there's no general-purpose way to pull out the highlighted text from another Android app when invoking an arbitrary command; it was actually a huge security vulnerability that that was possible on Palm OS, and newer OSes like iOS and Android don't allow for it.

Clipboard Monitor is a bit buggy at the moment (to varying degrees depending on the individual and system) but if you try it now it should at least give you a general sense of how it will work; highlight a piece of text and copy it to the clipboard and boom, Pleco pops up. There's a little more inconvenience involved in going into Pleco and turning it on (and we plan to streamline that at some point by giving you the option of having a separate app icon to toggle it on and off), but once it's working it should be pretty comparable to what you used to have on Palm.

You could also just turn on the option in Settings / General / Startup Actions to search for the clipboard when opening Pleco; then, to look up a word simply copy the text to the clipboard and launch Pleco using any number of Android quick-launch programs. (or by just holding down the home button until the recent app menu pops up) This can be configured to use our document reader module to let you tap-lookup words anywhere in a document, so if you copied out the entire SMS this way you could look up unknown words in it very quickly.

With Palm, I would use Pleco everyday and couldn't imagine being without it. Any unrecognized characters in an SMS message, no problem just look it up. Now with Android, the process is so cumbersome, highlight the text (and good luck trying to do that, it's a challenge in itself) now copy the text, then exit the current program, load up Pleco, copy the text, then exit Pleco and try and find out where you left off in the previous program.

Tap-hold selection is iffy on Android in general and not a Pleco-specific problem.

As the instant popup was the most compelling feature, and is missing, I can't seem too much difference between paying over $100 for Pleco and the several free dictionaries out there.

That's the only thing you thought was unique to Pleco? There were a bunch of other apps that did that on Palm, including I believe a couple of free Chinese dictionaries, and to the extent that we support that functionality at all on Android (or iOS for that matter) we do it in our free app as well as our paid ones - copying-and-pasting in text is included, as is Clipboard Monitor. And on Palm we supported it in the cheapest version of our app as well as the $100 one - the only difference between those two was the dictionaries - so I'm not sure why you spent $100 on Pleco if that was the only feature you were interested in.

Is there anything else on Android that you're missing besides this, or are you dubbing our entire product worthless because of this one particular feature that doesn't quite work exactly like it did on Palm OS for reasons entirely beyond our control?

 

[Supaiku]

mike, you might check out Antek's status bar lookup feature. They have a status bar icon for quick (status bar popup) clipboard lookup. Or at least consider making a status bar icon availible so we can enter pleco with ease (though the recent apps menu is pretty quick for me

 

[sthubbar]

Mike,

Sorry to imply that I think your product is worthless.

Pleco is a great product and your support is superb.

I'm just missing the Palm.

I'll check out the clipboard monitoring feature.

 

[burdenofhope]

The only thing I really miss from the Windows Mobile time is the character selection, I loved how you could choose how many characters you wanted to mark and then pop-up the definition. Now when I for example type ketchup I get 番茄酱. Now I want to know what 番茄 means. In the Windows Mobile version I would just mark the first two characters, but here I just have the option of tapping on one of the characters and I get the whole word. Besides that, I really like the Android version.

 

[mikelove]

mike, you might check out Antek's status bar lookup feature. They have a status bar icon for quick (status bar popup) clipboard lookup. Or at least consider making a status bar icon availible so we can enter pleco with ease (though the recent apps menu is pretty quick for me

Isn't that a rooted-phone-only app?

Sorry to imply that I think your product is worthless.

Pleco is a great product and your support is superb.

I'm just missing the Palm.

I'll check out the clipboard monitoring feature.

No worries, I certainly understand that it's a tough transition - there are a lot of things I miss about Palm OS too.

The only thing I really miss from the Windows Mobile time is the character selection, I loved how you could choose how many characters you wanted to mark and then pop-up the definition. Now when I for example type ketchup I get 番茄酱. Now I want to know what 番茄 means. In the Windows Mobile version I would just mark the first two characters, but here I just have the option of tapping on one of the characters and I get the whole word. Besides that, I really like the Android version.

You can do that on Android; just tap on the |<- arrow button (in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen) after you've tapped on the word to shrink the selection.

 

[Michaels1980]

Mike, the Anttek dictionary works on un-rooted phones: (URL removed)
I agree with Supaiku that this status bar feature would be useful. Also, when you search in this way, the results are displayed in a small popup window over the current app. Not sure how easy it would be to implement this popup window behaviour with Pleco, but I think it would be quite useful.

 

[mikelove]

Mike, the Anttek dictionary works on un-rooted phones: (URL removed)
I agree with Supaiku that this status bar feature would be useful. Also, when you search in this way, the results are displayed in a small popup window over the current app. Not sure how easy it would be to implement this popup window behaviour with Pleco, but I think it would be quite useful.

Thanks for the link, but I had to remove it since it appears they're offering a number of pirated dictionaries on their website. (this is why we don't support any of those common dictionary formats like StarDict - far too much stolen content moving around that way, and I'm convinced that a big part of the reason for the slow pace of improvements to Chinese dictionary databases is because theft is so rampant)

The popup window behavior doesn't seem to be working on the device I'm testing it on (Galaxy S2, stock Samsung 2.3) - it shows the popup window but it shows it on top of the full AntTek app. So it appears that that part at least may not be compatible with all devices, which makes sense given what I know of Android activity relationships.

I didn't realize that the taskbar icon was simply bringing up the dictionary on whatever's in the clipboard - that would certainly be possible and in fact quite easy, but it occurs to me that we might want to consider making a taskbar item to toggle Clipboard Monitor on/off too. (assuming we can get it working more smoothly, and we think we've found the root of the problems now)