Instant Access is back!

mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Let the rejoicing commence - had a flash of insight last night that had eluded me for months, and after about 3 hours of furious coding today there is now a fully functional Instant Access system on Palm again. Even has audio - it's identical to the popup interface in the regular dictionary. And unlike in the old version it uses our own code for rendering text, so there's full bold character / Pinyin tone mark / simultaneous simplified/traditional support. The only restriction is that it doesn't load the flashcard or user dictionary databases, mostly for performance reasons (they're responsible for about 2/3 of the current startup time) but also because they use up enough memory to do serious damage to stability; however, it will be easy to add a bit of code that stores the IDs of entries you want to add to flashcards in a little file somewhere and then adds them to the flashcards the next time you start up the software in full mode.

So barring catastrophe, the next beta of 2.0 will have full Instant Access both on Palm and on Windows Mobile - the WM version may still be a little quirky in terms of which applications it can get text from (hopefully SMS will work at least), but will have an actual popup window (same popup interface again) and should be invokable both from a taskbar icon and from an assigned button.
 
I

ipsi

状元
Huh, awesome!

I don't use IA that much, but when I do want it, it's really handy. :).

Anyway, that's going to please a huge number of people. Sweet.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Further to that - digging around on the internet today I finally found the secret/undocumented message which tells Pocket Internet Explorer (which along with browsing the web is also the thing that renders text in SMS conversations on WM5/6) to copy the currently selected text to the clipboard, meaning that the Windows Mobile flavor of Instant Access is now - at long last - capable of looking up words in text messages. And, of course, web pages too. So IA has gone from not-included-at-all to twice-as-good-as-it-was-in-1.0. And since we want to get people testing this as soon as possible there'll be an likely be an experimental IA-enabled release (beta 4.5, essentially) out in a bit more than a week.
 
I

ipsi

状元
Impressive :).

I'm surprised you managed this actually, it seems you've managed to cram a lot of code into 64K (or you've found a sneaky way around it). :D
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Snuck around it - it's actually possible to load an entire application even in popup mode, you just have to hack the runtime library so it thinks the popup launch code is a normal one. I'd tried this several times before without success, but I finally realized yesterday what I'd been doing wrong.

An alternate workaround would be to move most of the application code into ARM-land, since you're limited to 64k of 68k code but can have an unlimited amount running on ARM; however, getting enough of Pleco ported over to ARM to shrink the rest of it to under 64k would have taken weeks, if not months, so it wasn't a practical solution for 2.0.
 
J

Jim

榜眼
This is great, I find instant access very useful, so useful in fact that I was seriously considering not going with Pleco 2 at all even at the expense of not being able to use the snazzy new dictionaries. Now I am all gung ho again and you are very likely to get some more of my hard earned but in this case willingly parted with dollars. Nice going Mike.
 
T

TroiOi

秀才
Wahooo. It's great. I've been using IA alot with the text reader. But I've head that you will pop up all application into IA, am I wrong? There is anychance stroke order with IA? :).
 
S

sych

榜眼
Hi Mark,

This is great news!

Can I put my hand up to say please try your best to get the Flashcard adding feature to work in IA on Pleco 2.0 for Palm, because I like to use that feature a lot. (e.g. when I'm reading the news in the web browser or via MMS (China Mobile sends me daily MMS news reports) & I come across an unfamiliar word I want to learn.) Putting entry IDs into a temporary file to process later sounds like a clever solution to me.

Thanks
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That temporary file is already implemented and seems to be working correctly in our development versions - there should be an IA-enabled "Experimental" release sometime next week.
 
I

ipsi

状元
Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but: Blazer does a soft reset when I try and use IA from it. Not sure why. It comes up with a little copy box at the bottom, waits for a little bit (probably until it's about to display the box), and then resets. Could it be because I've told Pleco that I'm looking for GB2312 text while the stuff in Blazer is UTF-8? Answer: Nope.

Strange. Makes IA a bit less useful until it's fixed :).
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yeah, I'm seeing this too now - not sure what's going on there, we'll take a look. Though it may simply be that Blazer uses some sort of proprietary system for handling UTF-8 that won't let us copy it out correctly.
 
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