Latest on Beta 5

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Dan_78cj5 - thanks for the detailed info. You're exactly right about the logic behind categories, one card in two categories makes a lot more sense than having two copies of the same card in different lists.

It does sound like most of these issues are addressed by Beta 5 - there wasn't really as clean a system in beta 4 to assign / reassign categories as there should have been, but we've added one in Beta 5 along with bringing back the tap-hold category selector and adding an "uncategorized cards" search so you can easily find cards that aren't in any categories. You should already be able to search for cards in a specific category using Manage Flashcards, but if there aren't any cards in that category then naturally you'd get a blank result. The scores only change if you've specifically created / selected a different scorefile (in the Scoring tab in Advanced settings) for a given profile - in Beta 5 we also prompt you whether to create a new scorefile or link to an existing one whenever you create a new profile.

You can still beam a list like you describe, just choose "cards in categories" instead of "all cards" in the Export screen and you can dump a list of the cards in a specific set of categories to a file which can then be beamed over and imported back in on your classmate's system. And we've fixed the problems with landscape display garbage, the keyboard or Graffiti area automatically reappears when you're on a screen that doesn't expand (and disappears again when you go back to an expanded screen).
 

gato

状元
Uncategorized replaces the default category system, basically. It's certainly not useless, I used that term in response to Dan_78cj5's unhappiness about all of the flashcards being lumped into one big central place - cards don't need to be in a category to be usable, by default if you start a session it'll include all cards (categorized or non) and you can also select those uncategorized cards specifically just like any other category
The function from Pleco 1.0 I would like to keep is to allow one to easily switch from one flashcard list to another as the "default" list to which all "lookup cards" would be added. This way I could have one default list while reading doing lookups for one type of reading (say novel) and another default list when for another type of reading (say physics). It's useful for keeping different genre of vocabulary separate.

Is this going to be possible under Pleco 2.0?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yeah, it wasn't enabled in the earlier betas, we'd planned to take it out altogether in Beta 5 (since we think that putting them in Uncategorized and assigning them to appropriate categories later makes more sense), but in the spirit of not-wanting-to-take-away-features-people-liked-in-1.0 we brought it back - it's now a popup list instead of a bold label, though.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Still tweaking a few things, but if it isn't ready tonight it should definitely be out tomorrow. (the instructions/readme may still not be done yet, but that'll come soon enough)

The 1.0 flashcard converter utility should be posted in an hour or two, though, for those of you who know what to do with an XML file and want to see what exactly is in your flashcard data - it also exports user dictionary entries (a feature ironically enough not possible in the current 2.0 build) so that might be useful for some people.
 

ipsi

状元
Sounds promising. Can we assume the XML format will stay essentially the same? I'd love to get started on converting my flashcards. Be nice if you could post some details about the schema, and about what format new custom dictionaries should be in. :).
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It should, yes - we may add some tags / features to it but I don't think there's anything in there already that we're likely to change at this point. We'll try to release an official schema document along with 2.0.
 

ipsi

状元
Fantastic. Do they contain support for making categories that contain other categories and stuff? I forget what you called them. I'm hoping to turn my current chapter-by-chapter listing into a nice XML file.
 

ipsi

状元
That's probably why he hasn't replied :). Can't expect him to respond to everything we post on here. And anyway, I shouldn't be posting in class...
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Almost there on the converter, still poking away on B5 - various small-but-extremely-irritating bugs keep cropping up, like the auto-off timer not being properly disabled on Pocket PC (thus causing you to have to keep turning the thing back on every 2000 cards or so during an import).

Oh, and user dict entries can be exported after all, forgot we'd just added that - same format as flashcards (and hence have to be imported as flashcards even if you're just redirecting them to user dict entries) but at least you can get the data out of a not-quite-functioning-correctly system.

(can post now as I'm waiting for two different import sessions to finish)
 

sfrrr

状元
So, it sounds like tomorrow (or, on your coast, today) rather than today--the release, that is. 对不对?
Sandra

If you can't squash those last few bugs, how about releasing a beta 4.5 and then release b5 when it's clean enough for you to let it free?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
'fraid so, though it'll definitely be ready then at least - it's perfectly releasable now but an extra day of polishing is going to help a lot.

(and I should never, ever try to predict a release date this specifically - Beta 5 has gone from "next week" in early June to a month or so of always "a week or two" to the agonizing creep of the last few days, might as well have just said it'll be out in 2008 and dropped it out of the sky one day)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
ETA is about 90 minutes for those of you lurking - found a few bugs in today's regression / multi-device compatibility tests, but they all seem to be fixed now, so we're just doing a couple more imports to make sure we haven't somehow managed to screw up the flashcard database system in the 3 hours since we last tested it and then we should be good to go.
 

ipsi

状元
Woo... Looking forward to it :-D. Sadly it'll have to wait until I get home, and work's looking pretty busy today. Bloody Deque Full error in Geronimo on DB connection closure that I can't reproduce. Sigh.
 

sych

榜眼
sfrrr: my so-called "broadband" connection in Beijing is now downloading it at about 6 KB/sec, meaning I've got about 6.5 hours to wait! I suppose I should go out an have some lunch, maybe visit a 名胜古迹 or three while I wait!

mike, I like that this version is called the "everything actually sorta works" release - is that the official code name? :)
 
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