2.0.1 New Features

[mikelove]

johnh113 - yeah, that's been reported and should be fixed in the unfortunately-necessary 2.0.1 Beta 3.

radioman - good idea about a button for that, but it would actually be far more work than it sounds like to get that working because of the way the messaging / event-handling system in flashcard sessions is designed - as with the more powerful flashcard duplicate management system I mentioned before, this would basically involve jumping back and forth 3 or 4 times between the platform-neutral flashcard session code and the OS-dependent code for handing its user interface. But certainly something we can think about when we overhaul the flashcard session interface in 2.1 or 3.0.

 

[daniel123]

Probably more a thing for 2.1...

when pronouncing zhe4r, na4r or similar inside sentences ist would be great if that would be pronounced as one word. Now it would be pronounced as two different syllable: for example zhe4 and er.

By the way I found a thing that is maybe a mistake: When I choose the dictionary entry zhe4r, select the Pinyin text and copy it to input field I get: zher4 instead of zhe4r.

 

[mikelove]

More of a 2.1 thing, yeah. But thanks for the note on that bug, not sure what's going on there... some sort of glitch in our Pinyin segmenter I guess.

 

[radioman]

I have already called on the recommended work around a number of times. Not perfect, but glad to have it. I would rather time be put iPhone development anyway

radioman - good idea about a button for that, but it would actually be far more work than it sounds like to get that working because of the way the messaging / event-handling system in flashcard sessions is designed - as with the more powerful flashcard duplicate management system I mentioned before, this would basically involve jumping back and forth 3 or 4 times between the platform-neutral flashcard session code and the OS-dependent code for handing its user interface. But certainly something we can think about when we overhaul the flashcard session interface in 2.1 or 3.0.

 

[sinoreen]

hi mike! could you change the color of the duplicate card alert? for example black or coloured background of the alert field? now, with the same white background as the dict entry, it is often hard for me to get it that quickly before it's gone. shouldn't be a great deal of work, thanx

 

[anchan42]

Would be nice if the hard keys setting work with pop up dictionary. Like playing audio and adding flash card.
Also, ability to clear just one action hard key setting in preference page.
I set a few hard keys actions up and just wanted to clear one out. I could not find a way to do it so I ended up clear them all out and setting it back up one by one again.

 

[Wan]

Hi Mike,

don't know whether this has been mentioned.
I'd very much appreciate a feature giving the possibility to switch dictionary definitions while being tested on vocabulary.
e.g. accessing the dict-button from within a voc session, no matter whether you're being tested on writing, reading etc.
That's because I use different dicts all the time, switching from Tuttle to DeHanDict to GuiFan. So, because one single dictionary doesn't include all the translations, or, more important, the translations that are provided by my 课本.
This is what bugged me most and I'd love to see it in a future release.
I'd also like to know what the other learning users think about such a feature.

Shame on me if this feature already exists and I was too stupid to have it activated.

 

[renovator]

I have a totally awesome feature to suggest for the Definition portion of an entry in the custom dictionary. It would be great to have the ability to put in the definition section of a custom entry a copy of a character such as you have in the stroke order. Then also need the ability to change the color on one or more of the strokes. This would allow us to have flash cards for items such as strokes and structural parts of a Chinese Character. A simple example of a custom entry would be to put 斜钩 in the Simp: field. Pron: would be xie2gou1 Defn: would be Oblique hook stroke and then a stroke order picture of a character such as 代or 成。 Only the oblique hook stroke of the character would be highlighted. We would need to have the ability to click on any of the stroke(s) to highlight or un-highlight them.

Any chance of ever seeing something like this???

 

[mikelove]

sinoreen - good idea, but we're really just fixing bugs in 2.0.1 at this point, so it'll have to wait for a later release. Color settings also present a bit of a problem since we have to worry about them making things less visible (or worse yet, downright irritating) for some people - we'd have to either add a preference option for this or introduce it early on in a .0.x update so there'd be a couple of months of feedback before we made it official; if we introduced this in 2.0.1b3 I guarantee you there'd be at least one or two annoyed posts about "that ugly background color in duplicate card alerts" or somesuch.

anchan42 - hardware buttons in the popup dictionary screen would actually be really tough to implement on Windows Mobile - we only recently managed to get scroll buttons working in there (and even that took a lot of work). And while we haven't completely abandoned Palm yet it's tough to justify adding a feature like this if we'd only be able to implement it on Palm OS.

Good point about clearing hardware button actions, though I'm not quite sure what a better interface for that would be - I guess a little "X" button next to each one might work, there's certainly enough extra width on those screens to fit that.

Wan - I think it's been mentioned a couple of times before - it's a bit tricky actually because of the differences between individual dictionaries' interpretations of Pinyin, Tuttle for example applies sandhi transformations while Guifan doesn't and DeHanDict seems to apply them sometimes and not apply them other times. So if we insist on an exact Pinyin match we exclude a lot of matching entries, but if we don't insist on it we could end up showing you definitions for different words that share the same character(s).

renovator - interesting idea; not possible right now, but once we've gotten the new CDL character component / stroke data we licensed from Wenlin fully integrated into our software it should be quite doable. The UI for this would be a bit tricky, though, especially on iPhone.

 

[sinoreen]

sure another preference option is not a good idea for that and yes, no matter which color, some people would definitely not like it. but how about just making the background of the alert black and the text white? with a rather long dict entry in the background, the alert is now really hard to distinguish from the dict entry.

 

[johnh113]

Wan - I think it's been mentioned a couple of times before - it's a bit tricky actually because of the differences between individual dictionaries' interpretations of Pinyin, Tuttle for example applies sandhi transformations while Guifan doesn't and DeHanDict seems to apply them sometimes and not apply them other times. So if we insist on an exact Pinyin match we exclude a lot of matching entries, but if we don't insist on it we could end up showing you definitions for different words that share the same character(s).

Dear Mike,

I agree with Wan that a dict button in flashcards would be great. But even more important, right now in flashcards I often get the wrong definition from Tuttle. Different words that share the same character often, in Tuttle, show the wrong definition for the given character/pinyin. In the reveal, the correct character/pinyin appear, but the Tuttle definition if for a different pronunciation of that character. Very annoying. And yes, I know you suggested that I shouldn't use Tuttle in flashcards, but I like Tuttle. It often explains the meaning of the individual characters that make up a two character word, and it often shows an antonym for adjectives. Both very nice features of a dictionary.

John

 

[mikelove]

sinoreen - I still think some people might be bothered by white-on-black; we've gotten enough complaints about changes to the color theme that I always get antsy about forcing a change like that on everyone. And it would also be quite a bit of work to implement; changing the text color isn't that hard but changing the background color is, thanks to the hoops we've had to jump through to get font rendering working at a decent speed.

But I guess we could put it in as an experiment in B3 and see if there actually are any complaints - there aren't a whole lot of future updates left, at least on Palm, so potentially useful little improvements like this are always worth trying.

If you want a more obvious way of seeing duplicated cards, though, you could just enable the new "Prompt" option for duplicate card handling - that way you'll get a whole separate alert in those cases so that you can easily tell that it's a duplicate card.

johnh113 - as I said before, a lot of that has to do with Tuttle and its different approach to Pinyin than most other dictionaries. But we did just fix a bug on that front today (the Pinyin check was actually being skipped entirely in some cases, which wasn't supposed to happen) so you might find in b3 that in a few cases at least it'll now match up correctly when it didn't before.

 

[sinoreen]

Personally I don't like the prompt setting so much because it often happens that when I tap on "Add to FC" while looking at an entry in dict mode, the alert tells me that this card already exists and then, only when I'm in "Keep Cats" Mode I can immediately add it to another category by tap-holding on the "Add to FC" button, so I'd be glad if you changed the background of the alert to black in B3 and see whether there are complaints. However, I don't think there will be.

Another point about the duplicate cards alert: would it be possible that the alert shows in which categories a card currently is in? probably not a thing for 2.0.1 though.

 

[johnh113]

Hi Mike,

don't know whether this has been mentioned.
I'd very much appreciate a feature giving the possibility to switch dictionary definitions while being tested on vocabulary.
e.g. accessing the dict-button from within a voc session, no matter whether you're being tested on writing, reading etc.
That's because I use different dicts all the time, switching from Tuttle to DeHanDict to GuiFan. So, because one single dictionary doesn't include all the translations, or, more important, the translations that are provided by my 课本.
This is what bugged me most and I'd love to see it in a future release.
I'd also like to know what the other learning users think about such a feature.

Shame on me if this feature already exists and I was too stupid to have it activated.

Dear Wan,

While I agree this would be a nice feature and I have also asked for it, I think it is a very low priority because the work around is trivial, and more powerful.

What I do is call up the "Popup Defn" for the word. The "Popup Defn" screen has the dictionary button and so it is easy to move from dictionary to dictionary comparing definitions. I use this a lot. This way also gives you the flexibility to look up which character or characters you'd like to see. It's more powerful than just a dictionary button on the flashcard screen.

By the way, I don't use the default stylus actions. I only use two stylus actions. First I select the text of interest, and then I tap to bring up the "Popup Defn" ("Tap sel action"); or I select and then hold to bring up the "Char Info" ("Tap-hold action"). I don't use the "Tap char action" or the "Sel text action" because I often end up tapping or selecting the wrong characters and then the dictionary goes off searching for something I don't want. Both the "Tap sel action" and the "Tap-hold action" are easy to do with my thumb while walking.

John

 

[mikelove]

sinoreen - we're adding a "Keep Cats" option to the duplicate prompt, actually - I still really don't like that approach to creating flashcards, but my dislike for it isn't going to stop people from using it so we might as well make it easy to access. Showing the current category assignments in those alerts would require some really complicated business with message-sending between the core cross-platform engine code and the Palm / WM / etc front-end code, so that's not really a possibility before 2.1.

johnh113 - for what it's worth, we've added "Menu" options to the sel / tap-sel Stylus Actions too now - realized it was trivially easy to do code-wise and those get around this problem of mis-selection by making it easy to dismiss and try again if you select the wrong thing (no popup window / wait for a dictionary lookup).

 

[Wan]

Dear John,

thanks for your feedback!
I use the popup definitions, too. Especially, when being confronted with new vocabulary in Tuttle examples or GuiFan explanations. I get more new words by reading my way through the dictionaries this way, than by strictly learning the "must-know" lesson vocabulary.
The problem is: You have to enter your solution first before getting to the tap menu.

Wan

 

[mikelove]

I'm officially closing this thread now, since we're not really planning to do anything more on 2.0.1 aside from bug fixes now that B3 is out - please put further feature suggestions in the main Feature Suggestions thread.