weird hanging problem when I hit magnifying glass

[ssaito]

Hi,

I re-installed plecodict recently on a new phone (at&t 8525). I have ued plecodict since late last year on palm and ppc platform and have never seen this problem: when I hit the magnifying glass, plecodict just hangs. I try going to Settings->Memory to stop the program, but it just sits there and can't be activated or stopped. I end up rebooting.

This might have something to do with problems with the install. It always fails, with the pda saying some file was unsuccessful in its installation. But I find the .CAB files on my storage card, and just manually install them.

Does anyone have a clue as to why this is happening? I've tried uninstalling and re-installing several times. One thing I noticed is that when I uninstall, and reinstall, Plecodict suspiciously remembers what word I last had up in the Input Field. Perhaps that's stored in registry or some safe place.

Thanks,
Steve

 

[ldolse]

There are a lot of issues with WM5 AKU3 and newer, which is what the 8525 runs. It's the same crash issue that manifests in Windows Mobile 6.

Only suggestion I have is to hack your phone and downgrade to another operator's firmware that's running an AKU2 version, though this won't be supported by anyone.

The best version for the 8525 and Pleco is probably this one on XDA developers:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=284043

It's the one I've been using while waiting for 2.0. However, as 2.0 beta is getting closer you may want to wait and see if it's less buggy than 1.0 on this OS rather than risk your phone.

 

[mikelove]

That's odd, we've actually only gotten one or two other reports of problems on AKU 3 (though ldolse's appear to be severe and frequent) and I know for a fact we've got at least a few dozen customers using 8525s.

Have either of you experienced any recurring crashes *not* involving highlighted text in the definition field? It would be nice if we could narrow down the scope of this a little more definitively just to make sure we don't leave something unfixed in 2.0.

But as far as those crashes go, we've traced it back to some sort of change Microsoft made to the HTML rendering user interface control in WM6 (or possibly it seems in AKU3) which either disabled or otherwise screwed-up the undocumented command we use to copy the currently-highlighted text out of it. Since there is no "official" way to get highlighted text out of an HTML control, the only way we have to fix this is to get rid of it entirely and use our own control, which luckily we had already been planning to do in 2.0 before this problem even cropped up. But that's why we haven't just issued a simple patch for it, it's a pretty complicated fix to say the least.

 

[ssaito]

I haven't really had other problems, and as long as I don't hit the magnify button pleco is ok. (once there was a problem hitting the on/off button for full-screen character recognition, but a reboot fixed that).

For the record, the 8525 is running WM5. The build number is 15706.3.5.2. I think the x.3.x.x means that it's AKU3, but I'm not sure. I got it within past 2 weeks, so it makes sense.

I think I'll wait for v2.0.

Thanks for your advise, ldolse and mike.

 

[ldolse]

It's only that crash - I don't remember it happening with the magnifying glass, just with highlighting text and using copy or copy to input field. I just use those sorts of functions so much I'd feel crippled without them. I guess the other users with WM6 just don't do that so much.

 

[ssaito]

actually i've started to have *occasional* problems with the button that copies characters to the input field, as well as the hand writing recognition on/off buttons. it's intermittent, unlike the magnifying glass, which always causes a hang up. also, with the other buttons the crash generally makes pleco close, but I can restart and use it again. w/ the magnifying button pleco crashes and can't be shut down. i need to reboot the phone so that I can restart pleco. -steve

 

[mikelove]

But all still related to reading text from / copying text out of the definition, right? It seems pretty clear that that's the source of our problems, and makes a certain amount of logical sense too since I believe AKU3 was mainly meant for smartphones and hence might reasonably include some changes to the HTML renderer. Which actually causes a number of other problems too, in many cases the system's spending more time rendering the definition on Pocket PC than it does performing the actual search that leads to that definition, so in hindsight we probably shouldn't have used it in the first place.

 

[ssaito]

mike, i think it's true for the button to copy stuff to the input field, but less so for the full-screen handwriting recognition on/off button. Does that button interact with the html renderer at all?
thanks,
steve

 

[mikelove]

It does, actually, because of the graying-out-while-you're-drawing-a-character feature. Though I'm not sure if that interaction would cause the same sort of crash...

 

[_iOn_]

I've been having quite a lot of trouble eversince I installed wm6 on my pda.
Basically, almost everytime I highlight (or try to highlight) some text, the program will hang and crash. Also happens with the magnifying glass.
The "copy to input field" seems to behave strangely too, it works randomly and leads to the familiar "hang-and-crash-fest" half of the times.

I'm really looking forward to v2 which I hope will bring full wm6 support (as advertised, may I say ), because there's just no way I'm flashing my firmware again.

Jia you guys !

PS : I tried a TouchFlo plugin for my HTC wizard as well, and the finger scroll function turned out making pleocdict's handwriting input totally unusable, not that I really care but I just wanted to let you know.

 

[mikelove]

Yep, sounds like typical WM6 problems sadly. 2.0 should definitely correct this, particularly since there don't seem to be any complaints that don't involve the now-completely-overhauled definition text field in some way.

Hadn't heard there were problems with TouchFlo, though - is it unusable in the sense that it won't even capture strokes, or do the results get corrupted somehow? Do any other controls fail to work? We probably should pick up a Touch here at some point, we just got an iPhone for idea-stealing and a BlackBerry 8300 and HTC S620 for port-evaluating purposes but we've been neglecting our Pocket PC hardware collection lately.

 

[_iOn_]

Well, first of all, just to be clear, my ppc's not a touch, but I flashed it with a firmware that integrates the HTC Touchflo interface. Here's the link to it. I don't really know if the bundled soft is the genuine HTC TouchFlo soft, or a rewrite, but one sure thing is that it either wasn't meant to be used on my ppc in the first place, or was sloppily written. That's why the problem I experienced might very well not be found on a Touch.

The problem was the following : the software seemed to be polling the stylus’ position every second or more, making the writing of a character virtually impossible, basically, all I could draw were straight lines spreading between the first and last position of a stroke. Well, with enough patience, one could eventually succeed in drawing a simple character, but it was impractical enough to be qualified as unusable.

Like I said, I got rid of this issue by disabling the “finger scrolling” functionality of the TouchFlo software.

I didn’t notice any other issue with plecodict afterwards, but I must say I didn’t use the firmware for long, it was way too unstable (and tacky) for my taste.

 

[mikelove]

Interesting... I didn't know anyone had rigged that up to run on non-Touch systems yet. Sounds like whatever software this is is intercepting pen messages before they even get to our software, which would likely cause compatibility issues with almost any drawing program... did you see this behavior anywhere else while you were running the hacked firmware?

But yeah, not exactly something we're going to worry about debugging-wise, at least not unless it turns out to be a problem on the actual Touch as well...

 

[_iOn_]

Actually yes I also had CE-star with the handwriting soft installed, and weirdly enough, it worked without any glitch. That's what lead me into thinking that the problem might have been specific to Plecodict, but yeah of course this is not worth debugging if it only occurs in that very specific case.

Speaking of handwriting, would it be possible to include in the v2 a functionnality that inserts the recognized character after a handwriting input ? It just would have to insert the most-likely character in the input field. Ce-star works like that, and if the caracter's not right, you just have to choose the right one to be inserted instead. Well, that's not a major functionality, but that's a time saver, and a small ergonomy improvement needing minimal coding.
But maybe you've already planned it, or maybe it's an option that I didn't find that's already present in v1.

Cheers

 

[mikelove]

It's possible, but we've shied away from it because of all of the issues we've had with text controls on Pocket PC (like the subject of this thread); we'll consider adding it in a later beta release depending on how solid things are in Beta 1, but obviously we'd rather not sacrifice stability for a modest convenience boost.