What's the latest Flashcard timing plan?

[JD]

Mike,
A few months ago, you had a detailed post about upcoming Pleco improvements that were planned for 2015. One of the most exciting items discussed was the complete revamp of the Flashcard system.

I've been using Skritter for the past year-and-a-half, and as my Skritter subscription comes up for renewal in a few months, I'm curious if I should continue with it or if Pleco's new system will be available by then. I haven't really even touched the Pleco flashcard stuff to date since I've been happy with Skritter, and after seeing the plan to revamp Pleco's flashcards, figured there was no reason to investigate something that was going to be overhauled.

So, can you fill us in on the timing plan? Or as much as is realistic, with the understanding that anything in development is just a PLAN, which is subject to change at any time due to various factors. (i.e. Never written in stone).

 

[mikelove]

Our Android Lollipop update took way longer than expected, which pushed things back a bit - it's only now in March that we're back to something like a well-balanced development schedule.

As far as our internal calculations are concerned at least, 3.2 was actually our first flashcard revamp update, though we didn't end up doing as much user-facing work as we would have liked - Cantonese support and repeating incorrect cards during tests were both big / wide-ranging projects, though.

Our next significant update is 3.3, the centerpiece of which is a massive update to PLC, along with some other dictionary UI changes, a modest general UI revamp on iOS (finally getting rid of the iOS-6-style icons and I think also the ugly drawer animation, both of which we ought to have dealt with last fall when we released 3.2), and a new feature add-on that we're not quite ready to announce yet. However, the user-facing changes to flashcards in that update will probably be relatively modest though we do hope to tick off one or two big items (and we're presently arguing about which ones).

3.4 is the first update that is likely to really feel like a flashcard 'revamp' (indeed we may end up calling it 4.0, though then we have to wonder whether to skip that and call it 5.0 for 四-avoidance reasons), and assuming Apple doesn't throw any massively complicated new requirements at us in iOS 9 (as thankfully sounds unlikely) that'll hopefully be out this summer.

After that my guess would be that roughly every other .x update will include massive flashcard changes, at least for the next year or so. The overall plan remains that we want to revamp the lower-level stuff before the higher-level stuff, but we may not always stick to that when there's a higher-level addition that operates in relative isolation (hands-free or Apple Watch support, e.g.).

 

[JD]

Excellent! Thanks for the thorough write up on where you hope to go with the flashcard changes.