Wow! (Beta 2)

[Steve]

What a great job!

There are some super improvements in this version. My favorite so far is the handwriting recognizer, which just gets better and better. I quickly docked it at the bottom in 480x320 landscape mode, and my only complaint is that there are too many excellent ways to use it, between shrink/expand, On/Off, and the option not to disable the palette after input, so you can look up matches one by one. The [<= eraser] backspace button is very cool.

The Pleco insertion point is also helpful - it's now much easier to select something from the definitions.

I'm sure there are more treats for me to find as I explore the many options.

Beta 2 is not buggy for me so far. The one thing I thought was a problem wasn't. Choosing hardware buttons from preferences isn't intuitive, and I first thought PlecoDict just didn't know about all the Zodiac's buttons. Then I read the manual... The only thing I can think of is to change ???? to PressBtn or Press!, but there isn't much room. It's clear in the manual, anyway. (Help or info from the preferences screens will also clear up any confusion, if that's planned for 1.0, but I'm sure not expecting that while the preferences are changing.)

Steve 谛文

P.S. Special thanks for the option to put the input field dropdown on the left!!

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! You're right that the ???? isn't very intuitive, perhaps we could do something like draw a large 'press button' message on top of the screen and then delete it after the button was pressed. (which would be a nice recycling of code from the dictionary switching and possily the "flashcard added" message)

 

[Anonymous]

the ???? isn't very intuitive, perhaps we could do something like draw a large 'press button' message on top of the screen and then delete it after the button was pressed.

There is other palmos software that simply displays something like "-- unset --", "unassigned", et cetera in the particular assignment button. In addition, this kind of software usually displays the name of the particular assigned buttons in clear text (as long as it knows the proper name for a particular key event). I have to admit that something like 10100503 is not exactly intuitively pointing me towards the center button of the T's 5-way navigator. 8)

A minor thing: assigning the center button also closes the dialog "Preferences | flashcards". Looks as if the key assignment code is not swallowing the keypress event, so it proceeds as asual, causing the dialog to close. And no, I didn't specifically searched for this bug

 

[mikelove]

Well yes, I suppose it would be nicer if we came up with names, but that's kind of tricky when you consider the number of different button schemes out there (some of which aren't even well-documented) - we might be able to do it if we confined ourselves to palmOne, but once you bring Sony into the mix it's pretty much total chaos. Another one of those do-it-if-we-have-time 1.1 things.

And we're aware of the center button problem, but we haven't found a fix for it yet; apparently the system processes the event regardless of whether or not we handle it. So we'll probably have to add a fix that flushes the event queue after the button press, to clear out any actions the system may initiate as a result of the press.