While roughly 75% of the effort for our Next Big Update has gone into dictionary stuff (the new search engine is indeed pretty darn cool) and general UI, we've been trying to make sure that there's at least one significant enhancement for every paid module too - PDF support for OCR, EPUB support (we think - just got that up and running today but it's looking pretty solid so far) for the document reader, expanded character set plus improved accuracy for handwriting, better component drill-downs for stroke order, synthetic text-to-speech example sentences for audio (have to charge for that but you'll get a generous discount), etc. But we have a few days in our schedule this month for flashcard enhancements that we're not quite sure what to do with. (we're actually finding ourselves with extra time now thanks to slow deliveries of a couple of high-priority dictionaries)
I think there's enough time for one, or maybe two, of the items on this list:
We've already done a number of other minor much-requested things (unlimited length for definitions in imports, easy switching of dictionaries when viewing a full card, icon to indicate if flashcard already exists, access to existing card's Card Info from duplicate alert, easy access to list of recently added flashcards from the dictionary screen, add set # of new cards "per day" instead of having a maximum pool size) but I think these are the most popular remaining requests. Any of them that we don't cover in this release would almost certainly be in the next one, which is generally more flashcard- and reader- centric. The SRS / custom field enhancements have the added benefit of being pretty much all in cross-platform code, so they would quickly benefit Android users too, whereas the others are mostly in UI or other platform-specific code and might not show up on Android for a while.
So: does any one of these strike you as a higher priority item than the others? Or is there another similar-sized improvement you'd like to see instead?
(Skritter-sync-related enhancements are on a different timetable though we have a couple of those in the pipeline too)
I think there's enough time for one, or maybe two, of the items on this list:
- Preliminary iCloud support (no conflict resolution, but your modified flashcards on one device will automatically go over to the other as long as you're not working on both at the same time)
- Timed auto-advance (review cards without tapping any buttons, with the option to have it read English to you too)
- Streamlined SRS (better statistics, everything in terms of intervals instead of all of this "score" business)
- Custom fields (extra items you can add / display, possibly including embedded images and audio)
- Automated list import (screen with a catalog of Pleco- and user-created, tap one button to download + import)
- Live rich text editing (would work for user dictionary entries too)
- Enhanced search (full-text option, plus you can scroll up to the top of an Organize Cards list and type in any combination of pinyin / characters / etc, with HWR available via a button)
We've already done a number of other minor much-requested things (unlimited length for definitions in imports, easy switching of dictionaries when viewing a full card, icon to indicate if flashcard already exists, access to existing card's Card Info from duplicate alert, easy access to list of recently added flashcards from the dictionary screen, add set # of new cards "per day" instead of having a maximum pool size) but I think these are the most popular remaining requests. Any of them that we don't cover in this release would almost certainly be in the next one, which is generally more flashcard- and reader- centric. The SRS / custom field enhancements have the added benefit of being pretty much all in cross-platform code, so they would quickly benefit Android users too, whereas the others are mostly in UI or other platform-specific code and might not show up on Android for a while.
So: does any one of these strike you as a higher priority item than the others? Or is there another similar-sized improvement you'd like to see instead?
(Skritter-sync-related enhancements are on a different timetable though we have a couple of those in the pipeline too)