Experimental B4 w/ Instant Access

[mikelove]

ipsi - well you never know, some little shift in the code base might somehow make a reset more likely to trigger that busy flag - anyway there's been the potential for this problem to occur with every build so we need a more definitive fix regardless. Pocket Tunes hacks the OS at such a low level that I don't know what you could do with that - there's no way to disable it within pTunes itself?

ldolse - strange that that's happening on WM6 too. I'm wondering how other dictionary programs have gotten that icon mechanism to work reliably - perhaps there's another undocumented call we can use which just puts the icon up without creating a formal notification; undocumented calls were the only way we solved the no-copying-text-out-of-SMS issue so it's something we should look at at least. The notification softkey issue has been mentioned before, I think.

neilperks - the center selection button I believe sends a return key by default, so that may be why it's replacing the highlighted text - Pleco might somehow be preventing the application from catching that key stroke and turning it into something other than a return key. We'll try to reproduce this on the WM2003 simulator.

sfrrr - the two big issues actually sound like they might be preferences configuration problems; are you sure your delay before search is set to something relatively low and the "exact pinyin match" option is turned off? Is the list configured to change List Mode on tap in the Stylus Options screen? IA requires the full Pleco to be running in the background so since the startup time for that is still so long I'm nervous about forcing it to launch whenever your Pocket PC does - I suppose we could create some sort of stub application which set up those activation methods and didn't actually launch Pleco until you ran one of them, but that could complicate/delay things considerably so it might be more of a 2.1 thing.

 

[daniel123]

It's great that there are the new audio checkboxes in the flashcard advanced settings (Modes/ Audio in all cards and auto-play).

But they don't seem to work. After I checked both boxes I nevertheless cannot see any audio inside the flascards. When I go back to settings they are unchecked. Unpossible to save them as checked.

 

[daniel123]

Scrolling down inside the dictionary now is really a lot faster. But scrolling up (backwards) still hangs a little bit.

In PD 1.03 it was possible to mark any word or charcter in the dictionary entry and copy it to the clipboard or copy it to the input field by pressing "copy to Input Field" button. Both don't work any longer (or I don't know how to configure ist).

Is there any way to get the old behaviour back? I used it very often.

THX

Daniel

 

[thomashb]

On my Tungsten T3:

In the "Char Info" window the "Details" tab does not show any character information any more. It is completely empty now when it should show "all details". When it is set to show "selected details" the field names lke "Pinyin" or "ZhuYin" are there but no contents. And if I tap on one of the field names the list (which used to show all field names) is shown with a length that would be fine for something like 10 entries, but it is empty, too.

The Stroke Order and Compounds tabs still work fine.

 

[roddy]

Ok, playing with IA now on my HTC Touch with its 'unique' firmware - China Mobile with a few idiosyncratic touches from the guy I bought it from, including his logo in more than one place . . .

Basically it seems to work fine in Word Mobile and the SMS app. In Opera it just brings up the main application and doesn't pick up the word from selection or clipboard.

Unfortunately, as others have reported, it conflicts with the notification systems - if I have the IA icon on the task bar and an SMS comes in, it changes to the speech bubble. When I tapped that to bring up both the SMS and Pleco icons, the device froze. So, progress, but not yet ready for day to day use.

 

[mikelove]

daniel123 - yes, we haven't enabled those audio options yet - part of the reason for the "experimental" tag is that we're still working on a lot of the Beta 5 changes. With Copy to Input not working, what happens when you try to use it? Have you enabled Input Field Compatibility mode by any chance?

thomasb - any chance the UniHan dictionary database might have been uninstalled / deleted while you were installing the new software?

roddy - we haven't figured out how to copy text out of Opera yet, unfortunately you may be stuck with IE for Pleco-enabled browsing. The notification icon definitely needs to be fixed or possibly just killed outright on WM since it's causing so many problems for people - once "On Activate" is working that'll provide you with pretty much the same functionality anyway if coupled with any of the many available application launcher bar programs.

 

[sfrrr]

sfrrr - the two big issues actually sound like they might be preferences configuration problems; are you sure your delay before search is set to something relatively low and the "exact pinyin match" option is turned off? Is the list configured to change List Mode on tap in the Stylus Options screen? IA requires the full Pleco to be running in the background so since the startup time for that is still so long I'm nervous about forcing it to launch whenever your Pocket PC does - I suppose we could create some sort of stub application which set up those activation methods and didn't actually launch Pleco until you ran one of them, but that could complicate/delay things considerably so it might be more of a 2.1 thing.

Nope. They are set up properly in the preferences. Got any other ideas. It worked in all the previous betas as well as version 1.x.

 

[sych]

ipsi: re Pocket Tunes, I presume you're using the 3.x version that was bundled by palm (e.g. on the Treo 680) and not the commercially available version. The commercial version of Pocket Tunes 3.x (i.e. not the Palm bundled one) had a different set of options for key bindings that aren't present on the bundled ver, you might want to try downloading a demo of the commercial version and see if there is a suitable option there. I believe that the bundled version of PocketTunes 3.x was specially "hacked" to work with that button on the Treo.

NB: They're now up to 4.x (or is it 5?) so the situation might have changed a bit.

 

[daniel123]

With Copy to Input not working, what happens when you try to use it? Have you enabled Input Field Compatibility mode by any chance?

If I just use copy to input button it copies the main Chinese entry to input line correctly. But if I mark something and use copy to input it just copies any rubbish to input field.
Example: I switch to the word "de" in ABC dict and mark the word "subordination" and copy it to input field the result at input line is "porcelain; bl". From my memory I would say it worked at the beginning directly after installation but no longer after the first crash. Not sure about it.

I didn't change the default Preferences. Sorry, don't know where to find Input Compability mode.

Besides the function to mark any word of the dict entry and copy it to clipboard does not work any longer. I really need this using also an English-German Dictionary that can translate the English word on the fly. Very useful because I am not an English native speaker and there are often words I would like to translate. I hope very much that this will work later like in 1.0.

 

[mikelove]

sfrrr - not sure what's going on with those issues then, we're definitely not seeing them here. Has anyone else experienced this? Any chance you might be inputting, say, full-width letters using CE-Star or somesuch? The list hitting problem really does sound like a preferences issue, in fact I don't know any way that this could happen without checking for that preference to be set, so perhaps the preferences are getting corrupted / mis-read somehow.

daniel123 - I think we've found this bug now; seems like the software is switching dictionaries before it pulls text out of the field, so that it ends up pulling out the text at the same location in the new dictionary entry instead of the old one. Which function are you talking about with copying text to the clipboard? Just a regular Copy command or is there some other specific functionality you had before?

 

[daniel123]

Which function are you talking about with copying text to the clipboard? Just a regular Copy command or is there some other specific functionality you had before?

Going to any dictionary entry. Then I just mark a word or a text part and use /c (slash c) to copy it to clipboard (general Palm clipboard function). I can copy but I can see that it doesn't work because if I try paste it I don't get it but the clipboard stuff from before. This worked in PD1.0

 

[sfrrr]

Have I already mentioned that I can't use copy to input to switch between Chinese and English. And vice versa? The highlighted phrase in the input box disappears when I switch from one language to the other (which I now have to do manually) and, even if I use the Copy command in Edit, I can't recover the input phrase.

I suspect that my installed PD 2 is getting more and more corrupted. May reinstall, may just put up with it and wait for next beta, so you don't need to respond.

Sandra

 

[thomashb]

thomasb - any chance the UniHan dictionary database might have been uninstalled / deleted while you were installing the new software?

The UniHan db was still on the device, but I reloaded it and now everything is fine again. Maybe there is a hardware problem... Thank you for this hint, Mike.

 

[ldolse]

@sfrr, have you checked your preferences? Pleco's default setting clears the input field when languages are switched. I've always wished the default was the other way around myself.

 

[mikelove]

daniel123 - OK, looks like there was a bug with copy-paste - should be fixed in the next release. (there'll probably be one more experimental one in a few days, since we've made some changes to the startup sequence which we're a bit worried about)

sfrrr/ldolse - that definitely could be another preferences issue, yes - try using the Reset Prefs To Defaults button and see if that improves matters on any of these. ldolse, you'll be pleased to know that we're changing that default in 2.0, mainly because the new auto-detect language feature is working well enough in the latest builds that we're leaving that on by default; thanks to the latest changes, if you're in E-C mode and type "ni" it will direct you to the first of many E-C results that begin with 'ni', but if you add three more letters to get "nihao" it notices the lack of an exact E-C match for that and cheerfully looks it up in C-E instead. (so it's checking the actual dictionary rather than just checking to see if the query is theoretically valid Pinyin)

thomashb - might have been an old version of that database, or perhaps there's a name conflict between that and the 1.0 one. Glad it's working now anyway.