2.0.1 New Features

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I have to first reveal the answer and choose Correct or Incorrect, before it lets me choose the answer quality

Not sure about showing the answer quality prompts, but you can map the "correct" / "incorrect" directly to buttons, and you don't need to reveal the answer to use those. I do it all the time to save time when I am sure I know the answer. I don't use the "incorrect" too often without revealing, but sometimes I do, when I am doing a "speed drill", etc.
 

ldolse

状元
There's not any killer minor feature I need for 2.0.1, but if we're talking about an updated manage dicts screen which can build indices for user dicts, then I have a suggestion. Instead of focusing on making 10,000+ entries fast I'd rather have Pleco build a full-text search index. I'm not sure if that's even possible with the SQLite structures though, so that may be a major feature.
 

renovator

榜眼
mikelove said:
johnowenschina
renovator - bit different from how you described this in the e-mail; so this would just be a way to play audio for highlighted characters?

Not 100% sure what you mean by highlighted characters. In flash card test sessions, an opportunity to play sound of the characters in the headword before having to enter pinyin so I can determine correct pinyin spelling or tones on words with same characters but more than one possible pinyin spelling or more than one possible correct tone combination.

Another, maybe even better, solution would be to have an option to send cards in a test session to an ignore list. That way there would be a list that could be reviewed from time to time of cards with these potential problem cards but these cards would not come up during a normal test session and would therefore not end up with bogus scoring. The cards would be ignored, and therefore their scores would not be affected. When there are multiple cards with the different pinyin or different tones, I would just keep what I consider the most important or most often used card in an active category and send the other(s) with the same characters to the ignore list.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Alexis - thanks, that's definitely a 2.0.1 possibility.

johnowenschina - not sure about an integrated help file, depends on how solid / finished we feel like the manual is with 2.0.1.

stephanhodges - OK, I get it now. Instead of Group, if you use Move and select the top category grouped under the category you want to put it in, that'll put it right below that category just as with adding a new one. But yes, that's still not completely on top and Import does add things to the end - not sure about whether we should change that, though, a lot of people might prefer having it on the bottom (particularly with imports) if they prefer having some frequently-used categories on top; if the 2.0 beta-test taught me nothing else it's that those sorts of little changes are much more dangerous / potentially-disruptive to people than they might first seem.

Eggwind - the system works that way now because with every test mode other than self-scored, the system decides for itself whether the card is incorrect or correct and you just have to tell it how well you remembered it. So it would take a good bit of work to get a whole separate 6-button interface set up just for self-scored mode.

ldolse - there's actually a full-text search module for SQLite, but we can't make it work on Palm so we're waiting until we drop Palm support before we enable it on WM.

renovator - OK, makes sense now. The ignore list is an interesting idea but there's no way we can think about adding yet another complicated organizational system to flashcards right now - have to make a lot of progress in other areas first.
 

stoney

举人
mikelove said:
stoney - so the audio would only be played on the button press and not as soon as the card comes up? You can already map the audio play to a button, actually (from the Flashcards section of Preferences), though that won't stop it from playing audio as soon as the card comes up. You can reveal parts of cards separately if you map hardware buttons to the "screen left" / center / right commands and enabled the reveal-separately option in the Modes section of Advanced Settings.

what I want to do with flashcards is, without auto play enabled;
1. See the 'headword' ie, the chinese characters, but no pinyin
2. say the tones out load ( or in my mind)
3. press a button, soft or hard, but preferably hard to play the audio
4. listen to see if I was correct

but now, I think the sound will only play if the pinyin is first revealed. I would like to be able to see the characters first ( therefore no auto play ) and think of the sound without prompting from the pinyin, then play the audio. I don't want to associate the sound with any pinyin, just with the characters.
Now you can hear the sound first with autoplay or hear the sound with a button but only after seeing the pinyin.

--------------------------------
Ok. I got the "reveal separately" part figured out now. Thanks.
 

ldolse

状元
No worries on full text search, was just a thought.

I did remember a request from a long time back, I think it goes back to before the Pleco 2.0 forums. I study sporadically, so while repetition spacing seems like a good idea it doesn't work so well in practice unless you study daily. Some time back I brought up the idea of using sessions as the repetition incrementer rather than calendar days or hours. That way if I lstop studying for a bit everything is exactly where I left off when I return.
 

TroiOi

秀才
I don't know if it's in your list already or not.

I need to enable input entry in external lookup. Right now, the external PlecoDict show no input entry. Therefore, I cannot lookup some words in other app.

BTW, it seems I must drop my Palm now :(. Should be switch to WM.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
stoney - we're probably going to add an option to not auto-play audio until you tap on the audio button, so that should take care of this. (we're demoting the Dicts tab in Advanced settings to a launch-with-a-separate button screen and divvying up Display/Modes and some new options between three different tabs)

weight - tricky license, unfortunately, we've had terrible luck with the Taiwanese publishers so far.

ldolse - it's a good thought, and certainly we'll try to add it at some point, just not an option in 2.0.1. Repetition-spacing by sessions worries me a bit because of the question of how you deal with interrupted / skipped sessions (or just short on-the-bus type ones that they don't want to count) - do that once or twice and the new card pile would grow pretty rapidly (and it would be difficult to untangle if people then wanted to scale back the next few cards that had come up).

I would like to do something for people who miss a few study sessions, just not sure what the best fix would be - perhaps adding back the # of cards counter for rep-spaced sessions after all (after I just defended it in the bug-fix thread), if you set, say, 50 cards it would show you the 50 cards that were the longest past due for review, and if you set more than the number of cards due for review it'll draw from the cards that almost but don't quite need another review yet.

TroiOi - yeah, a few people actually spoke up against adding an input field there (in the name of avoiding interface clutter), which I mostly agree with, though I can see how in Instant Access it might be handy - not really sure what to do about that yet, guess we need to add Yet Another Checkbox.
 
not sure about whether we should change that, though

Well, you asked for items that needed to add a new checkbox (option), so this would fit under that. I've already outlined why I think it's an improvement, but I agree that it's better to only offer optional changes to this type of user interface change.

I didn't realize "Move" would also do grouping (if I move from outside to inside). But, that's faster than clicking "up" a large number of times! :oops:
 

marsch

举人
My suggestion is about adding flashcards, specifically about the "Duplicate Flashcard" message.
I get that message quite a lot as I imported the 3000+ words from CME, but I'm not quite there yet. So often when I try to add a new word to my collection (I put them to "Uncategorized" by default, so I can decide later what to do with it) I get that warning, but I have no idea whether I should know that word (studied before, but forgotten) or whether it's just in the CME words that I'll study in the future.
So I'd like to have a feature where I can easily access the flashcard to a given word in the dictionary (in the same way as from within "manage flashcards"). That way I could add/change/remove cats or just see in which way I'm using the word so far.
What I do now to emulate that: I add that word to my "special category", then go to manage flashcards, filter for that cat and then click on the word. A bit tedious...
If that's too much for a "small change" for 2.0.1 then it would be nice to at least show the "current cats" in the "Duplicate Flashcard" message.
Thanks. Looking forward to the new version.
 

radioman

状元
Was pondering this one. Seems simple enough to come under a X.01 release so I thought I would put it out there.

Summary up front is to get in and out of current flashcard sessions fast. This is not neccessarily to change current functionality and prompts but to request an added way to get out and save a flashcard session, and then resume quickly.

Further Description.

- Immediate hardware hotkey exit from Flashcards - Right now, if I am in a flashcard session, and I need access to the dictionary, I need to press (1) cancel, (2) "yes, I want to resume later", and then (3) "done". I still would like the ability to select whether I want to save. However, I find my self in a constant state of running flashcards when I can, with some of the sessions utilizing hundreds of cards that could be run over the course of a day or more. When I need the dictionary (which is often), I also would like the option to quickly bail out (using a hotkey would be fine). In fact, right now, sometimes I just bail out with a hotkey to an external program and then go back into Pleco. It seems the flashcard session file is still there (I believe it's a temp file). (High Priority - not mission critical, but I would be using this all the time...)

- Flashcard Return - Currently, I can return to the flashcard session pretty easily via hardware keys, but still have to hit a few keys to restart. (this is less important, but if there was an elegant way to do it, I would certainly like to have it.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
stephanhodges - true, could certainly add that as a new preferences option.

marsch - well that's another argument for an Edit Card / Card Info option in the duplicate popup, I guess - I'm still a little worried that that's making things more confusing, though. We'll try a UI sketch or two anyway.

radioman - yes, the session does get saved when you switch out of Pleco. Interesting idea about a hardware button for that - basically a "toggle session" button, almost. Probably want to improve softkey support in general on WM first, though - works fine on Palm but doesn't work too reliably on WM outside of the 5-way direction pad.
 
If that is easy to be done, it would be nice if invoking the popup definition of a character would also work when I am already inside the popup definition of another character. Sometimes I call the popup defintion for one character, and in the definition or example sentences find another character I also do not know.
 
andreas.koenig said:
If that is easy to be done, it would be nice if invoking the popup definition of a character would also work when I am already inside the popup definition of another character. Sometimes I call the popup defintion for one character, and in the definition or example sentences find another character I also do not know.

A nice "trick" is to use the "send to reader" option which then has both a running dictionary (if you turn on the dictionary window) AND a pop up from within that dictionary window (last time I tried anyways).
 

renovator

榜眼
[quote="mikelove
renovator - OK, makes sense now. The ignore list is an interesting idea but there's no way we can think about adding yet another complicated organizational system to flashcards right now - have to make a lot of progress in other areas first.[/quote]

OK, ok Mike. I’ll give you an easy programming, relatively speaking, out on this one. Try this: The program looks for all duplicate cards with same characters in headword. When testing cards, next to the headword a small text like card 1, card 2 would come up. The cards would always be sorted in tone order, lowest tone first. That way I know that when it says card 2, I need to use the pinyin with the highest tone, either 2,3,4,or 5.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
andreas.koening - yeah, a lot of requests for that - if we can squeeze two extra buttons into that UI without making it too garbled (two because we'd need a Copy to Input and a Back button) we certainly might try to provide some way to cross-reference within cross-references.

renovator - oh it's not about the programming, it's about the interface - there are way too many options / screens / etc for people to deal with as is. Letting people customize the sort order of cards in categories, for example, is another thing I'd love to consider for 2.0.1, but it's a terrible idea in terms of simplifying the interface, so for that reason alone it's going to need to wait until 2.1. Thus my one-checkbox comment at the start of this thread. This particular feature might not require many new checkboxes, but that extra "1" is going to generate a massive amount of e-mail (just like the *s after ABC headwords and the numbers before them do now) and general confusion so it would have to be added very cautiously.
 

daniel123

榜眼
I also would like to have a possibility of flashcard annotation. Would be great if you can do a light version already in 2.01.
 

koreth

榜眼
My request would be to allow editing the text of a flashcard during a test session. A couple times a week I find myself wanting to add some little bit of clarification to a card (usually to distinguish between two nearly-synonymous words) and it's a little annoying to have to end the flashcard session before I can go edit the definition.

I don't really need to be able to edit the headwords or pinyin (at least, I haven't yet found myself wanting to do that), just the definition, if that helps.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
daniel123 - yeah, lot of support for that :)

koreth - Well it certainly might help if we limited it to just the definition, but as long as we keep the cards from coming up again in the same session it should be possible to allow full editing - just a question of whether or not it'll work reliably enough for us to keep it enabled in a non-development version.
 
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