Preview of Beta 3 for PPC Posted

[mikelove]

Get it here: http://www.pleco.com/ppcdownload.html. (this link has now been updated to point to the official Beta 3 release)

Aside from fixing nearly every bug that's been reported to us so far, we've also made a number of tweaks and improvements to the user interface: the Navigation section of Preferences now supports all of the options from the Palm version, we've eliminated the old Text Size button and added in its place the option to select different font sizes for the definition, list, magnified text (shown inline with dictionary entries or flashcards) and pop-up magnified text (shown when you press the magnify button), we've added a character magnification checkbox to Test Settings, Preferences will now remember the last panel you were viewing, the Manage/Session flashcard screens have been merged into a single screen so you can move between them without changing panels (though there's a bug that prevents the separate screens from updating each other - should be fixed in the official Beta 3), and last but not least, your current dictionary is now remembered for both languages (so if you're using the Oxford E-C and switch to C-E mode, when you go back to E-C you'll get the Oxford again and not the NWP).

If you do find any bugs in this aside from that one I just mentioned, please feel free to post them here. We're very much hoping that Beta 3 will be the last beta we have to release, though if a Beta 4 does prove necessary we should still be able to get 1.0 ready before Christmas.

 

[sfrrr]

Omigod. And to think I was about to quit for the night. A new PD beta version--be still my heart.

Sandra

 

[sfrrr]

Oh, and FYI: you may already have solved this problem, but I got tired of having to rerun the key every time I cleaned my PD entries in the registry, so I have been deleting every key except the 2 registration keys. So far, so good. But then, it's only been a day. I still have to redo my toolbar and other preferences, but I'll live.

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

We have (I think) solved that problem now, so the registry settings should stay put and not disappear/change/etc.

This preview version doesn't fix the multiple databases bug, but I had a flash of inspiration (actually while I was sitting in a movie theater) and as soon as I got home I tested it and was correct - it happens whenever you unlock the software with an old User DB still installed. PlecoDict searches for dictionaries before it searches for keyfiles, and if it's in demo mode it skips over free and user databases, so when it subsequently unlocks itself it notices there's no user database available and so creates a new one. In fact it looks like this same bug can even happen on Palm in some cases. Anyway, now that we know what it is it should be easy to fix for the "official" Beta 3 release.

 

[sfrrr]

I'm up to eleven user dictionaries now. And that's after doing some house (or Axim) cleaning.

When I installed PlecoDict (following your directions), I couldn't replace the pinyin font with the two new ones. That's predictable, given that the pinyin font was already loaded. Renaming the old pinyin font to pinyin.ttf.old took care of that. But maybe you should warn newbies?

More irritating was that I got two of all dictionaries except Unihan and CEDict. This, I believe, was because I had put a complete backup of PD on my CF card. (I use my SD card for PD.) So, I deleted the CF backup and that took care of that. But it lost all of my flashcards except ones I restored back on October 15 from a text file. I can see the files in Resco Explorer, but PD can't. (For some reason, I originally had them in RAM my documents. When PD couldn't find them, I moved them all to the PD directory on the SD card. Didn't do any good. But it just occurred to me that maybe PD beta 3 might want to be in its own folder in the SD card's root directory. With PD beta2, it made no difference. Is PD beta 3 different enough for it to matter now? And where, ideally, should I store the flashcard files?

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

That's another bug we should be able to fix - it would be very easy to double-check if a particular dictionary was already installed and only bring it up once. (though that wouldn't help with the memory wastage)

I'll make sure there's a note on the download page that you should soft reset your PPC before updating - that should get the font replacement to work.

With the flashcards, the best place to put them is in My Documents - it's faster and it can be set to back up via ActiveSync. But if it can't find them anywhere then there's a chance the data file might be corrupt, in which case I'd suggest that you restore them again from a text file. Beta 3 searches everywhere that Beta 2 did plus many other places it didn't, so if Beta 2 could find the files and Beta 3 can't then it's probably not because of the files' location.

 

[sfrrr]

Oh, God.

Sandra

 

[Eric]

Beta 3 seems to take a long time to load

I'm playing with Beta 3 now and it takes a lot longer to load than Beta 2.

I start with 23MB total free ram and it takes about 30secs or more to load.

I do have the part 1 and part 2 flash cards from you website loaded.

Thanks,
Eric

 

[mikelove]

30 seconds? Hmm... approximately how many files do you have on your SD card? In our testing it's never taken more than 3 or 4 seconds, so if it has the potential to go up to 30 then we definitely need to work on that. Perhaps a compromise approach, we can program the software with a list of likely locations for PlecoDict to be installed, have it check all of those places and the original installation directory on startup, and only fall back on the super-thorough search if it can't find the files anywhere else. Anyway, thanks for the bug report.

 

[Eric]

SD Card = 2234 files, 119 folders, 850MB
Flash dictionaries in My Documents =
PlecoDict User DB C-E.peb 37K
PlecoDict Flashcards.peb 635k
PlecoDict Flashcards-1079590149.peb 1.1MB
PlecoDict Flashcards-1079903436.peb 1.7MB

Thanks for the quick reply.

Eric

 

[sfrrr]

This is what I did on my weekend off. Thursday and Friday, PD's functions got more and more garbled and I was up to 22 (yes, I do mean ershier) user dictionaries. So I collated them all by putting them all into a flashcard list. For some reason, the setting for Do not make duplicate cards didn't work, so this was a bunch more work than I expected.

Nonetheless, by Saturday afternoon, I was spending more time either resetting my axim x51v or restoring it from a freeze or...whatever.

And, by Sunday about 7 pm, I realized that I had to delete everything that had anything to do with PD and start with a clean install. I did save copies of all of my user-created cards and definitions, thank heavens for small favors.

So, I installed PD from beta one, then upgraded to beta 3. And I put the whole thing into RAM, dammit. And now, Monday evening, I've gotten everything working just as it should (and once did) except that I lost a little over a month's lists--probably 12-14 that I have to re-enter. Well, at least I'll review my new vocabulary for the last month or so.

Now, I'm afraid to move anything to SD or CF. (not that I use CF for anything but storage since WM5 disappears it so often).

Also, thirty seconds to bring up PD is nothing. It takes me 2.5 minutes. I used to read something or put away my receipts, but lately I've taken to playing a game on the Axim while PD is loading. Makes it no slower nor faster.

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

The no-duplicates feature only works with cards from the same dictionary - to save time, we don't bother loading/comparing each new flashcard's text with that of every other flashcard. If we didn't do this, imports would take several times as long as they currently take. So it's to be expected that you'd end up with dupliate cards from duplicate dictionaries. Now that we've fixed what we believe to be the source of that multi-dictionary bug, you should be able to keep your one dictionary from here on out.

2.5 minutes, though, wow... did it take this long with Beta 2? It shouldn't have, unless for some reason you were storing thousands of files in the root-level directories of your SD and CF cards.

Sorry to hear about your other troubles, but luckily (for us at least) your experience doesn't seem to be a typical one - we've gotten very few bug reports with Beta 2 aside from the ones in this forum, and we're hopeful that there'll be fewer still with Beta 3. We've made some tweaks since that preview version that should help the startup time a little (I've e-mailed you an updated application file), and there's more we can do before 1.0 if this new preview is still in the 30+ second range.

 

[sfrrr]

No, beta 2 loaded in a few seconds. This is new to beta 3. I'm about to look for your email message and will try new build.

Thanks,
Sandra

 

[sfrrr]

You're a genius, oh mighty huang di. Loads in 10 or 11 seconds. And so far, only one user dictionary. But here's an oddity, the (older) flashcard lists of yesterday have disappeared in favor of the (much more recent) flashcard lists of a few days ago and before.

In a few days, I'll install the Axim ROM update, but I'm not ready yet to spend a few days reconfiguring the stupid thing.

Thanks,

Sandra

 

[Anonymous]

Working Great!

Mike,

My Beta 3 on my QTEK 9100 is working great!! Thank you so much. It took me a few tries going from the demo to the full install, I wonder if it would be good to include a readme in the full.exe install file. Just explaining for the WM5 users that we can't use the demo and MUST install the full.exe and where to install the keyfile and such. I know it's on your instructions on the download page when you login to "My Orders" but no where else (unless I missed it). That is my 2 cents of advice.

[ ] Also is there a way to import my Palm Flash cards to the pocketpc now that FINALLY have it running!

Thank you SO much! Good Job!!

 

[mikelove]

sfrrr - that's great! The disappearing flashcard lists are not all that unusual, actually - PlecoDict can currently open only one flashcard file at once, and it's pretty much up to Windows which one it finds first, so if you've got multiple flashcard files lying around your system you could randomly have one of them open one day and a different one open the next day. The best solution to this is to only keep one flashcard file installed at once, or use a utility like Resco File Explorer to change the extension of the files you're not currently using to something other than .pdb or .peb so that PlecoDict won't find them.

ausinasia - glad to hear it! And yes, we definitely need to put this WM5 information in more places - most of the website copy will be getting a significant rewrite for the release of version 1.0.

I'm afraid there's no way to copy your flashcards from Palm to Pocket PC directly, but if you use the "Export" feature on your Palm to dump the flashcards to a text file and then use "Import" on your Pocket PC to import that text file into PlecoDict, that should get your flashcards transferred over.