Switched from Android to iPad

[SpikeX]

I've just switched from an Android tablet to an iPad, but I'm having trouble setting up Pleco on my iPad. There's a few features I can't seem to find :?

1. When using flashcard the handwriting box is small (system default?), how can I make it full screen?

2. Again, when using flashcards (fill in the blanks) sometimes I like to draw the character myself, other times input the character using the system pinyin input. On Android it's possible to override the handwriting input with system input, but I can't find this on the iPad.

Any help with these two issues would be greatly appreciated

 

[mikelove]

1. When using flashcard the handwriting box is small (system default?), how can I make it full screen?

"Use Full Screen" in Settings / Panels / Handwriting Interface.

2. Again, when using flashcards (fill in the blanks) sometimes I like to draw the character myself, other times input the character using the system pinyin input. On Android it's possible to override the handwriting input with system input, but I can't find this on the iPad.

Unfortunately, due to some legacy iOS keyboard-handling issues this is not currently possible; however, those issues went away in iOS 5, so we can / will easily fix them in our first update that requires that as a minimum.

 

[SpikeX]

Hi Mike, thanks for your fast reply.

I've just doubled checked and I definitely have "Full Screen" switched on, however I still only get a small box.

As for the second point, I've love to see the feature added in the future. I'd say I find it crucial for learning new vocabulary and its so much faster than having to draw each character. I guess we all learn Chinese differently and at the moment I'm more concerned about recognising characters than recalling each individually, so the ability to use a pinyin input for this is perfect. It'll be a tough switch from Android to iPad, maybe I'll start using self scored.

 

[mikelove]

I've just doubled checked and I definitely have "Full Screen" switched on, however I still only get a small box.

Hmm... yeah, it seems like we never implemented iPad full-screen handwriting in flashcards. No reason we couldn't (we do support it on iPhone), we just didn't think it was a user interface mode that anybody would be interested in (since it necessarily limits your interactions with other parts of the flashcard interface) - the only reason we support it on Android is because we started out with everything fullscreen and only later added a half-screen handwriting interface option.

It's funny, actually, in the past year I don't think we'd had a single email / forum post / etc about full-screen handwriting on iPad (originally it wasn't even an option, we quietly added it about a year-and-a-half ago in a minor update which nobody particularly remarked on) but in the last day we've gotten no less than three emails on the subject from three different people... probably just a coincidence, but it suggests that in general this might be something that more people are interested in now than they used to be.

Are you on an iPad Mini by any chance? (that could be an explanation for the sudden increase in interest in full-screen iPad handwriting - on a non-mini iPad it seems like rather a large area to draw one character)

 

[SpikeX]

I'm using the full sized iPad. I guess I've just got used to using full screen in Android and I quite like drawing large characters.... makes me pay attention to detail!

 

[andria]

Any other observations on differences in features? Do you use the OCR?

 

[SpikeX]

Generally I prefer the iPad version, it seem to be much quicker and responsive. I don't use the OCR so can't comment there. However, the loss of the two points I mentioned above are particularly big losses for me and even after one week it's still taking some getting used to.

 

[mikelove]

Generally I prefer the iPad version, it seem to be much quicker and responsive. I don't use the OCR so can't comment there. However, the loss of the two points I mentioned above are particularly big losses for me and even after one week it's still taking some getting used to.

Have you thought about buying a stylus for your iPad (at least as a temporary solution)? They're pretty cheap - $10 or so will get you a fine one - and should make the lack of fullscreen handwriting less annoying; it also might make it less of of a sacrifice to delete our handwriting add-on altogether and rely only on Apple's system, in which case the flashcard system would fall back on system keyboard input so that you can then switch between Apple's handwriting and Pinyin input systems.

 

[SpikeX]

Just wondering if this feature was added to V3?

I've tried looking, but then I can't remember how I used to enable it on Android! Selecting 'fill in the blank with character input' still only allows handwriting input. Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

No, we ended up punting the flashcard stuff off to other updates since we were already doing so much with the rest of the app in 3.0.

 

[Tatarik - 晨星]

Unfortunately, due to some legacy iOS keyboard-handling issues this is not currently possible; however, those issues went away in iOS 5, so we can / will easily fix them in our first update that requires that as a minimum.

Just like SpikeX, I was wondering as how to fill in the blanks with Chinese characters using the keyboard on my iPad. For many people keyboard entry will be the only input method in their life. There are no really other way to study flashcards by putting in characters based on a [definition] or [definition + pinyin].
Is it possible to enable keyboard characters entry for the fill-in-the-blanks flashcards mode? This would be great

Thanks

Note: I can actually do it on my Android version of Pleco. Flashcards > New test > Test settings > Use builtin input method (checked)
Not on iOS though

 

[mikelove]

We actually do support it now, but oddly enough the checkbox for it seems to have gone missing... if you uninstall our handwriting recognizer add-on and try to do a character fill-in-the-blanks test you'll see you get a standard system text input field.

 

[Tatarik - 晨星]

This workaround worked for me.
Only problem now: it seems the input field for the characters (during the flashcard test session) can only take a limited amount of characters.

For example, I tried to write "离开离别" in the input field, but I could only write ”离开li bi". In this particular case it was okay since the keyboard automatically proposed the two last characters when I typed "li b".
But I guess it might be a little a little bug there..

 

[mikelove]

That one's a bug, yeah - we'll fix that along with bringing back that checkbox in 3.2.1