2.0 update

Rick31

举人
OK, I have been reading these posts long enough to know that you are not going to give us a date...but any updates? Please Mike, give us something!?!? :oops:
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Fair enough:

http://www.pleco.com/pdpreview.html

First screenshots, all on Palm and mostly focused on the new flashcard system. Check the bottom of the page for more. Also notice the magnified characters and underlined text (= hyperlinks, callooh callay) and the handwriting input screen that doesn't require you to return to the main interface after entering each character. The absence of a new feature in these screenshots does not imply that it won't be in the final version, only that it's not in the particular build these were taken from.

Anyone with questions about what a particular option means or how a particular feature works, feel free to ask...
 

gato

状元
Thanks. The flashcard system still look quite complex. Is there a mode that's designed to be used without having read the manual?
 
Thanks for the update Mike. The flashcard section looks awesome.

BTW did you ever get around to converting an English <-> English database?
Also, will we finally be able to creat English -> Chinese dictionary entries for our USR dictionary? Even at my Chinese level (approaching 2 years of study, all here in Beijing) I still often wish I could create English -> Chinese dictionary entries for words that are not in the English -> Chinese dictionary that I find hard to remember the Chinese words for off hand. Of course the English to Chinese section will be improving dramatcially with the addition of the "21st Century Unabridged English-Chinese Dictionary" and the newly created ability to search through both the English and the Chinese dictionaries for words.

Darrol
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
gato - yes, there's a "simple mode" interface we've designed but haven't gotten around to implementing yet which puts all of the session options on just one screen, and streamlines Manage Cards down to just a category search.

hairyleprechaun - haven't gotten around to it yet, in fact at the moment the only dictionary working in development builds is the ABC. But yes, user-created E-C entries should be possible in the new version, thanks to the new SQLite database engine we can pretty much do whatever we want with regards to creating / editing / searching user-generated content with a minimum of extra programming work.
 

Shadowdh

状元
ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod

I cant wait... tell me its soon... real soon.. puhleeeeeeessee... sigh... ok I'll wait... looks really good Mike... something to be proud of...
 

ldolse

状元
Repeat entries??

Very cool!

However, I couldn't help but noticing there were four instances of 好 in the manage flashcards screenshot. Is that a bug? I was hoping one of the things that would change was preventing the creation of duplicates of the same character/words.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Shadowdh - thanks!

ldolse - That's already a feature in 1.0, actually, and we're certainly not planning to take it out, we just haven't gotten around to re-implementing it yet. The necessary indexes slow things down by 10% or so (even when the feature is disabled), and when you're doing fifty consecutive 10,000-card import operations in an attempt to find a rare bug in the database system, every little bit of performance matters.
 

ldolse

状元
I got really excited for a second thinking I could get my cards cleaned up when you said 1.0 has that feature, but I found it and already have it enabled. I think the issue with 1.0 is it only views a card as a duplicate if it's the same word AND same dictionary reference, so I still have tons duplicate words tied to different dictionaries I've got to manually delete as I discover them.

If 2.0 cards aren't tied to specific dictionary entries (which I believe is the case) then I think the 1.0 feature will really do the trick now, but it would be very nice to have the upgrade routine remove the duplicates by the new 2.0 duplicate definition.
 

gato

状元
only views a card as a duplicate if it's the same word AND same dictionary reference, so I still have tons duplicate words tied to different dictionaries I've got to manually delete as I discover them.
The program wouldn't know which entries to delete if they have different definitions. Do you want it to prompt you? Don't know how common of a problem this is.
 

Sarevok

进士
The new flashcards system looks really good! But I want to ask about one feature which is not apparent form the screenshots... will it be possible to to move a card to another category or delete it completely "on-the-fly" during a flaschcard session? Sometimes when I am halfway through a session I come across a card I don't want to appear in the sessions anymore and it would be good to have an option to move/delete it straight away (now I have to end the session and search for the card in the flashcard list... which could be quite painful and time consuming, especially if your lists are quite huge)
 

ldolse

状元
Gato: I think the problem comes when importing various lists of cards. I generally don't include the definitions in the import file unless it's a list of obscure words and/or definitions I really want in my user dictionary. So if you import without definitions then whatever dictionary happens to be selected when you do an import is the one the definitions get tied to. If the word already exists, but it's tied to a different dictionary than the one during import I don't believe it's seen as a duplicate.

The other issue is when you're browsing through entries on your own and decide to add a word to a flashcard list manually. This word may already exist in the flashcard lists, but if it's tied to a different dictionary then it's duplicated. I'm not intentionally trying to set the new dictionary entry as the flashcard, I'm just marking that word as one I want to study later, and I can't always remember what's already in my lists.

Note I haven't really drilled into what causes the duplicates, I just know that I have that checkbox enabled and I still wind up with lots of duplicates.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
ldolse - The duplicate-checking only works with the same dictionary, yes; the headword and pronunciation aren't even included in 1.0-format flashcard databases, so checking for duplicate words would require us to go through every single card already in the database, retrieve its headword / pronunciation from the associated dictionary and check it against that of the newly-added card. So as you say in your second post, if an import card gets linked to a different dictionary than the card that's already there it won't be marked as a duplicate.

In 2.0, though, headword information is stored in the database along with the dictionary reference (as evidenced by the "headword" and "pron" search options in Manage Flashcards), so it'll be much easier for us to check for duplicate words. It'll be kind of slow for things like imports (which are already a lot slower in 2.0, unfortunately, with duplicate-checking enabled it could take a good 20-30 minutes to go through something like the HSK list) but should be fine for everyday card additions. 1.0-to-2.0 conversion will be a 2-step process, you run a little utility to dump your 1.0 cards to a 2.0 XML file (which includes score / correct % / flag / etc info and specifies the exact dictionary entries to link to) and then import that into 2.0 like any other XML flashcard list, so assuming we do offer a "remove duplicates" option in the 2.0 import screen, turning that on would let you get rid of those duplicated cards.

Sarevok - yes, there's no screenshot of the "display" settings screen but it lets you add a number of extra buttons to the flashcard interface, including one to delete a card, one to instantly change its score (so you could effectively "bury" it by multiplying its score by 10x or 100x), and one to add it to / remove it from a specified category.
 

Babaôrom

Member
Hi,

This new version seems full of good things... However, I would just say that I have a big problem with the flashcard list (categories now) editing system. You only see the chinese characters in the edition mode, and if these words are in my flashcards it's exactly because I don't know the chinese character.

I'd prefer if when testing myself, when I find a card I don't want anymore or not in this list, I could edit this card and delete it, or re-assign it, because it's when I'm testing myself that I discover that a card appeared just because I typed the add button but not on purpose, and on this screen, I've got all the information about this card (character, pinyin, translation etc...). I think it would be a lot more convenient this way.

EDIT: Sorry, should've read the first posts, already answered!
 

Smoodo

举人
What about a small desktop utility?

Have you considered using a utility on the desktop to clean up the flashcard files? Desktops are cheap power. I dislike making inevitable small mistakes and having to wait 20-30minutes for the results so I can discover my error, wash, rinse and repeat.

One of those small mistakes might be accidentally choosing the wrong dictionary for associations to words. It would be nice sometimes to be able to freshen up my cards with a different dictionary to see different examples and in some cases extra info like the Pinyin for an example, vs just having a character example. When switching over dictionaries, it would be nice to keep the repetition spacing data in tact so I don't have to re-enjoy the most basic words all over again, but don't have to go in and manually remove them.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That's part of what the planned desktop version of PlecoDict is for; you'll be able to perform the import on that and then sync the resulting cards to your handheld, which should save lots of time.

In 2.0 we're significantly reducing the connection between cards and dictionary entries, so that you can easily remap a card to a different dictionary and may even be able to specify a custom dictionary priority order for a particular session (so you might use a dictionary with shorter entries in multiple-choice mode than in self-scored, for example).
 
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