1.0.2 Requests?

[mikelove]

David - how is Instant Access configured? The "Experimental" option can sometimes cause these sorts of freezes, but the other options shouldn't... it seems unlikely that Instant Access could corrupt SuperMemo's database, editing a database on Palm OS requires you to use a special database-writing command so it's very difficult to do by accident.

My guess is that SuperMemo just doesn't get along well with Instant Access, and the corrupt database message is coming up for reasons that have nothing to do with database corruption. But try tweaking the Instant Access settings and see if any of the options allow it to work smoothly.

The Use Clipboard setting will actually do that paste-on-startup for Instant Access, I suppose we could add this to the main system as yet another option but we're kind of running out of space in the Preferences screens

 

[beirne]

My guess is that SuperMemo just doesn't get along well with Instant Access, and the corrupt database message is coming up for reasons that have nothing to do with database corruption. But try tweaking the Instant Access settings and see if any of the options allow it to work smoothly.

I'm able to use them together and haven't had any problems. I'm only one case but I just wanted to say that they aren't necessarily incompatible.

 

[Jamie]

Suggestions

Mike,

1) The handwriting feature works great. However, when you press the handwriting icon the default setting should be on not off. This would save you a keystroke since you obviously want to use the handwriting feature when you press the icon.

2) I would like to be able to exit the flashcards, look up a word or radical, and then come back to the same card that I was using when I left.

3) The flashcard lists can be a bit unwieldy, especially when you collect a lot of words. When editing lists, e.g. moving words between lists, I would like the option of seeing the words in English, pinyin or character. If I havent' yet learned the pinyin, it makes it difficult to place it into the correct list.

Thanks for making a fantastic product! :lol:

 

[mikelove]

beirne: thanks, nobody else has reported problems either (as far as I know) but given the weird things SuperMemo does with fonts I certainly wouldn't be surprised if there was a conflict on certain PDA models.

Jamie:

1) Yes, it should enable it automatically - this got lost in the shuffle when we changed the default setting for "Disable palette HWR after input" from enabled to disabled.

2) This is actually not very easy to implement, but it's something we're thinking about for 1.1.

3) Another 1.1 feature - we expanded the rest of the flashcard system but we left the edit list screen pretty much unchanged from our old Oxford E&C software, and that definitely needs to be remedied.

 

[Anonymous]

Flashcard hardware keys

Currently, pressing the "Show" button once reveals both the pinyin and the definition at the same time even if the session is set to reveal the pinyin and definition separately. It would be nice and consistent if you could make the "Show" hardware button reveal first the pinyin, then with subsequent pressing of the same key, reveal the definition.

Also, I think there is a bug regarding setting hardware buttons for flashcard sessions. Seems like assigning the up and down keys of the navigation keys doesn't work.

 

[mikelove]

Some people might want to do that in opposite order (definition and then Pinyin), but one idea we had was to use the Next/Prev entry buttons (which are of course disabled in testing mode) to also act as triggers for the first and second fields - that would allow you to reveal individual fields with buttons while also letting you reveal them all at once if you preferred.

You're right about the up/down keys (though left/right do work correctly) - I'm surprised we didn't discover this before now.

 

[gandq]

Hi Mike,

a few more requests:

- it would be nice if you could take another look at the reavealing bug on my nx80 / other clie devices that i told you about earlier: using hardware buttons for right/wrong in flashcards (next card fully revealed).

- i like the 'card added' confirmation in plecodict. why not have it in the resident as well?

- "exclude" mode for flags: flagged cards that you don't want to show up during the session will be excluded

that's it for today.

thanks,



jo.

 

[mikelove]

We'll take a look at the revealing bug, assuming we can work out a way to reproduce it. The "card added" is a little tricky to add, I'm afraid (it's dependent on a global variable which isn't normally available in Instant Access mode), so I don't know if that will be possible. And as for excluding flags, this wouldn't be that difficult but it's a little more involved than what we're looking to do in 1.0.2.

We're considering doing another update along with the Pocket PC release, though, something that would more closely synchronize the Palm OS version with the Pocket PC one. We may end up calling that one 1.1 and making the release we were previously calling 1.1 into 1.2.

 

[bryant]

I know you already have a list that is way to long for 1.0.2 but what the heck.

I find that the action I do most often is go from the ABC dictionary to the 'New Session' screen of the Flash Card application. It would be nice to do that with 1 tap rather than 3 (Menu, Flashcards, New Flashcard Session).

 

[Jim]

It would be nice to be able to select other functions for the erase and search buttons. The backspace key on the Treo 650 is convenient enough that the erase button is not too important and I find I don't need the search button either. I would like to use more than 9 of the functions available for the other buttons. I suspect this might be little more involved than the simple changes you want to make in 1.0.2 though.

 

[mikelove]

bryant - you can do that already; just go to the Toolbar section of Preferences and put the "New Flashcard Session" button on the toolbar.

Jim - this would be a little complicated, but it might be an option for 1.1. (particularly if we're making some enhancements to the toolbar anyway as a result of the Pocket PC release)

 

[bryant]

Thankyou Mike. It works a treat.

 

[Anonymous]

Bug in Flashcard Import

Hi Mike,

I think I have discovered a little bug in Flashcard Import function:

As you know, there are certain Chinese characters with more than one pinyin and definition. If I import a list containing such characters with different pinyins as separate entries, and the standard dictionary (i am using the Oxford Chinese-English one) has only one pinyin entry and not the other, the resulting flashcards would have two entries with the same pinyin as the one in the standard dict. Even if I were to add to the user dict the other pinyin and definition, and reimport the flashcards, it still would be the same, multiple cards of the same pinyin of the Oxford one. Also, if I were to switch to my user dict and then do the reimporting, the result would be the same but now the multiple entries would point to the pinyin in the user dict.

Do you get what I mean?

 

[mikelove]

We're aware of the problem, yes - the flashcard import/export system is far from perfect, it was mainly designed to allow quick input of pre-built word lists like the ones on our website and it's not really robust enough to maintain word lists between multiple exports/imports. We had a plan in the original PlecoDict design for a more robust export/import system (a really cool one, actually - XML-based, with tags to allow export of flashcard statistics, pre-set flags / ranks, and absolute links to specific dictionary entries) but we never got around to implementing it - it might show up in some form in version 2.0.

This particular problem is due to a design flaw in the importer - it only searches for Pinyin matches in the first dictionary that it finds a character match in, if it doesn't find matching Pinyin there it'll just take the first character entry and base its flashcard on that. This will hopefully be fixed in version 1.1 or 1.2.

 

[Anonymous]

HWR and Graffiti Anywhere

Mike,

I'm not sure whether my wish can be achieved at all, but I'm suggesting it in case it is a) realizable and b) not too much effort and c) of interest to more people than just me. Anyway, ...

... as a Tungsten T user which hates to open the slider I'm using Graffiti Anywhere in order to draw graffiti input on the screen instead of only in the silkscreen area. The problem now comes when I want to use PlecoDict's Chinese handwriting recognition (many thanks, Mike, for licensing the new HWR, it is sooo much better!): since Graffiti Anywhere is active it eats up all strokes and the automatic mode of Graffiti Anywhere where a non-Graffiti stroke starts with pen down and waiting is not very usable for drawing Chinese characters.

Would it be possible to automatically disable Graffiti Anywhere for the duration of the Chinese HWR input (as long as the HWR input indicator is green/ON)? Of course, restoring the original state of Graffiti Anywhere afterwards would be good. Since I don't know whether there is an API (PalmOS, Graffity Anywhere) available for this I'm asking here ...

Harald

 

[mikelove]

This would be difficult, unfortunately - as far as I know, Graffiti Anywhere doesn't provide an interface for us to enable/disable it (unlike the similar feature built into newer palmOne models, which does provide such an interface) so I don't know how we could do it unless we hacked around in Graffiti Anywhere's preferences settings.

We have, however, recently discovered that our new Hanwang recognizer actually includes English text input capability too (even does backspaces, in fact), so while it wouldn't be quite as fast as Graffiti, we might make it an option in future releases (using the auto-recognize timer), which would eliminate some of the need for Graffiti Anywhere et al, at least within PlecoDict.

 

[Anonymous]

Bug in Flashcard Import

Mike,

I found out I could actually work around it by including the definition of the problem entry in the list before importing. Plecodict would automatically create the entry in the user dict and the flashcard would point to that.

So no problem there.

 

[chaiusa]

choose the first character instantly

Mike,

Is it possible to implement an option that allows the pleco to choose the first character of the list and put it in inputfield automatically after the users use handwriting input?

now i try to use pleco handwriting input instead of penpower since it is more precise but i have to do one more tap very time i write a character.

thanks

 

[Jamie]

History Pulldown

Mike,

The English pull-down history menu (next to the eraser) contains many partial words. This reduces the number of words that fit into the history menu's memory. Anyway, thanks for a great product. I literally use it every day.

 

[mikelove]

chaiusa - this is certainly possible, in fact there are a number of other things we can do with the new recognizer we haven't done yet, like recognizing gestures (backspace, etc) and English letters along with Chinese characters. We made the decision to put the Hanwang recognizer in PlecoDict 1.0 at the last minute (we were originally going to wait until 1.1, but we didn't want our Pocket PC customers to get it before our Palm ones did) so we didn't really have a lot of time to take full advantage of its capabilities, but automatic character input is high on the list of probable 1.1 features.

Jamie - thanks! But I'm not quite sure if I understand what you mean about partial words - are you seeing multiple substrings of the same word, i.e., "ni", "nih", "niha", and "nihao" for a "nihao" query? That isn't supposed to happen. But certainly some partial words can end up in there; essentially it saves out the longest version of any particular query, so if you type in "nihao" but mistakenly enter a "q" and then delete it and re-type "o", you could end up with both "nihaq" and "nihao" in your search history.