2.1 Feature Requests

[stisev]

A binary preferences file could work, I guess, as long as we made it platform-specific; we're already storing them in a binary file on iPhone since the iPhone's built-in preferences store isn't really powerful enough for our needs, so it'd just be a matter of switching from the registry to that on WM.

Why?. I don't understand the logic, mike. You should be going for as MUCH cross-platform as possible! Imagine, plugin my WM cell phone, a program automatically syncs with my desktop pleco.

IMO - this is my ideal scenario:

1) file where settings can be altered >>> acceptable solution to make it unaltered but IMO I think open is always better
2) Platform-universal
3) Accepted medium of text (.ini for example)

Still, just having portability is better than nothing. I ask that you make it platform universal as well, unless you have some persuasive reason to not do so

 

[mikelove]

Having cross-platform preferences mean carefully figuring out how to translate preferences from one platform to another - there are significant differences between them in terms of what can be changed and what it can be changed to. Every platform has at least 10 or 20 OS-specific settings, iPhone has something like 70 of them, and even some of the settings they have in common use different numerical scales (list size, fonts, etc). It would be a useful feature, but it's tough to justify spending the time on it in light of all of the other stuff we're working on.

Moving preferences from the registry to a binary file in \\Program Files\Pleco is pretty reasonable / straightforward, but doing anything beyond that is tough to put high up in our priority list.

 

[stisev]

Obviously, I'll take anything I can get You're right about being a major PITA. Maybe in the future when all the products are released/stable?

 

[mikelove]

Sure, it definitely goes into that category of things-we'd-like-to-work-on-for-the-long-term-health-and-flexibility-of-our-cross-platform-code-base.

 

[radioman]

... I am probably oversimplifying this, but dropping the tilde in "Pinyin Off" mode, why couldn't in that mode ANY tilda just not be displayed (i.e., no special database coding)?

As for starting and stopping of recordings, I have been working with a number of the recording programs, and still trying to figure out which one I personally like. Once I experiment a bit more I can pass more thoughts on this.

radioman - could add a button for disabling Pinyin, I guess, as with SC/TC. Filtering any Pinyin might be doable with an intelligent filter, I suppose - we'd store them in the database in sylalble+number format and then render that to tone-marked / Zhuyin / nothing at all depending on your setting. Dropping the tilde would be workable once our databases were coded correctly, but doing it in user dictionaries would be tough - of course people aren't likely to use tildes in their own examples anyway.

A flashcard audio search is a very good idea, definitely. A tap + vibration makes a lot of sense, maybe accompanied by a screen-flash or something as well - tough to be sure about that until we actually try it, though, the feel of it / actual level of lag / etc are all big factors here.

 

[mikelove]

We could also just leave them in, couple of errant tildes aren't really going to get in the way (and would be less annoying than not seeing where the tilde was supposed to go in an example sentence).

 

[radioman]

Oh yeah...

I forgot that they exist in all the sample sentences - Hanzi / Pinyin / English

 

[HW60]

Support of "Cards learned":

My main goal in learning flashcards is
- cards learned = 100%
- last review not more than 6 weeks ago of all cards learned

Unfortunately "Cards learned" is not very welll supported by Pleco; only in the Statistics the number of cards learned is visible, but it cannot be used elsewhere. If I want to know if a particular card is learned, I must create a separate category, copy the card to that category, and look at the statistics for that category - not an ideal method. Actually it looks like a miracle that the statistics screen can be shown for all categories, but not for a single card in the Card Info Screen.

Now my suggestions:

1. In "New Flashcard Session/Card Filter" change
Last answer: correct / incorrect to
Last anwers correct: > 0, 1, 2, ... or < 1, 2, 3, ...
Then <1 is incorrect, >2 is learned (default), and <3 is not learned (what I actually would like to choose from time to time to reach my goal of 100%).

2. I would prefer If the Card Info Screen would show the "Cards learned" information. Therefore change
Record: 9-3 (9 * correct, 3 * incorrect) to
Record: 12-2 (12 * total, last 2 correct = not learned if default = 3)
If you do not mind adding a new field to the card info record, Pleco could as well show
Record: 9-3-2 with the obvious meanings of above

3. You will certainly change some screens. I suggest to use the full screen of the different PDA especially for the Card Info Screen, the Edit Card Screen and the Statistics (Cards learned always requires scrolling!)

 

[mikelove]

Good suggestions. These are all certainly doable - Card Info I think I've mentioned earlier we're planning to redesign, should now have 2 or 3 different tabs at the top (ideally one of them an embedded Edit Card tab to spare you jumping into yet another dialog for that) and with more space available for statistics we can easily put this information in there. Adding in-a-row search capability to Card Filter is a bit harder but still might be feasible (at least in a later release if not in 2.1).

 

[Lurks]

I have a feeling this has been requested... I'd like to have the head word inserted into definitions in place of the ~ symbol for those dictionaries that do this (most of them?).

Having used a dictionary that repeats the words, I've realised I vastly prefer it. I prefer to read an example sentence without having to try mentally insert the headword.

Seems like it's an easy automatic thing to be able to do... but maybe there's a license restriction here or something?

 

[johnh113]

Dear Mike,

In Pleco 1 there was an option in repetition spacing to not review characters after they reached a certain score, signifying that they are learned. I liked that option.

I thought that maybe the "Learned" score would do that for me but it doesn't seem to do that. I currently have my "Learned if score >= 72000" and yet I see cards with a score of 72000, so I guess maybe the learned limit only works if I check the box above it? But if I have to check that box, it would limit me to a max of 500 unlearned cards and I have 15,000 unlearned cards, and often, on a daily basis, I do more than 500 cards. On the statistics page, it calculates learned based on 72000. But I continue to see cards that are already learned.

John

 

[mikelove]

Lurks - we've actually added this feature on iPhone and will be adding it on Palm/WM in 2.1, though it currently only works with one dictionary (ACE/PLC) - hopefully we'll get at least the ABCs coded up for it as well soon. It's actually not automatic, we have to go through and check that the headword matches up cleanly with where the ~ is positioned, get the capitalization correct for Pinyin, etc.

johnh113 - you can get this in 2.0 through the "Card Filter" tab of "New Session" (http://www.pleco.com/manual/flash.html#cardfilter) - the "Score Filter" option will let you limit the scores of cards in a session. (the "Learned" limit is a guideline, the system doesn't stick to it unconditionally if it can't come up with a satisfactory number of cards otherwise)

 

[johnh113]

johnh113 - you can get this in 2.0 through the "Card Filter" tab of "New Session" (http://www.pleco.com/manual/flash.html#cardfilter) - the "Score Filter" option will let you limit the scores of cards in a session. (the "Learned" limit is a guideline, the system doesn't stick to it unconditionally if it can't come up with a satisfactory number of cards otherwise)

Dear Mike,

Thank you for reminding me. I do use that feature, but when I changed the "Learned" score number I completely forgot that it is actually implemented with the "Score Filter" option. Everything is fine now, no problem.

John

 

[llammamama]

A feature which delays dictionary lookup while a character is being input would be a nice addition.

When inputting a two- or three-character word from the main dictionary screen (o.5 sec auto recognition, auto lookup), I find that I always have to wait an extra second or so to let the dictionary finish its lookup before I can begin writing the second character. It would be very nice if the program would realize that I am currently writing a character, and would refrain from performing a lookup (and messing up my input with the resulting delay) until I finish.

Currently I need to turn off auto-lookup (and use the manual button) in order to easily look up / add flashcardds to a list of multi-character words.

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, I think we've had one or two other people mention this - should be easy enough to fix, we'd just turn off the search timer once you start drawing a character. Thanks.

 

[wojas]

1) Future workload

Predict workload for the next say 10 days, like Mnemosyne does. Of course this prediction is dependent on the review sessions, but at least it will not surprise me with 300 flashcards on certain days. And if it does, it's nice to know it's a one time thing.

2) Extend the Unihan character data

One specific data source I would really like to have added is the frequency index from http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computin ... p?Which=MO which I also add to character definitions on http://shengci.wojas.nl/ . For example, a rating of 1500 tells me that there are 1499 more frequently used characters.

3) Example sentences

Option to add example sentences to flashcards with possibility to add custom user installable sentence sources.

4) Sync flashcards with web services

This could be accomplished by setting up a service yourself or creating a protocol other people can implement the server part of. I'm willing to assist on this one. Probably more like a 2.2 feature.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the suggestions. Workload prediction's been mentioned here a few times, yeah - we really need to expand on Statistics in general, actually.

Extending Unihan with better character frequency data is an interesting idea - certainly possible, we could also add HSK categories and such to them. We've sort of gotten stuck in the view that our databases are immutable / can't be expanded, but Unihan it seems like we're free licensing-wise to do whatever we like with, so it's probably silly to confine ourselves to just the fields the Unihan Consortium provides - if there's other useful character reference data to be had then we should be offering it.

Web-based flashcard synchronization would be rather tricky / 3.0-ish, yeah; we are planning to add some sort of simple online database backup capability (probably webDAV-based so people can use it with whatever backup / file-sharing service they like) in our first flashcard-equipped iPhone version, though, and that will almost certainly show up on Windows Mobile soon after too.

 

[goog1e]

Sentence Audio

I would be VERY willing to buy recordings of native speakers speaking intermediate or higher sentences including colloquial stuff.

I also like the ability to record audio for sentences and use them in the flashcards. I would like a very simple interface to make it as painless as possible. I imagine typing the transcript on the computer, uploading it to my iPAQ and importing it in, then get a friend or pay someone to read. Maybe we could share our field recordings here on the site and create a massive database. I would also like the ability to capture audio first and then typing in the transcript later (again, without having to spend much time). Another cool thing would be the ability to import sentences and audio from places like http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/welcome.html

Shuffle Flashcards when Loop during Review

I like to review cards that I miss in a flashcard session so I select the "loop" option. I would like to shuffle the order of those cards on each pass so I don't learn cards based on location alone.

Dictionary Examples with no pinyin and no tilde~

I like pinyin with the headword, but like others have said, I don't like the pinyin with examples. I would like an option to remove definition pinyin. Also, I would like an option to replace the tilde~ with the headword.

Option for undo button in flashcards
I often fly through my flashcards and make mistakes on grading. An undo button would be great.

 

[gato]

Would it be possible to add a search button to search for all entries that contains a particular character or character combination? For example, if I entered “思想” and tap on this button, it would display all entries that contains the word "思想." The same search can be done now by entering "$思想$". But since this might be fairly common search, it makes sense to provide a one-tap solution.

 

[ben_gb]

Some flashcard related requests (some may have been mentioned before on previous FR threads, but I guess no harm adding them here too):

1. An easy/quick way to force a card to come up in the next flashcard session (in a particular score file or profile). Maybe this could be done by adding a button to the card info screen (press I in the manage cards screen, or elsewhere) which would actually review the card there and then, and so it would become part of the unlearned queue. (The user would need to make sure the scorefile was set correctly on that screen too).

2. If the flashcard is set to just display the definitions, provide a key to quickly show (or toggle) the example sentances.

3. Relating to point 2, Flashcards which show the Tuttle dictionary entry, it would be useful if it could be set to just show the 'simple' english definition, and then show the extra examples by pressing another key

(The issues for points 2 and 3 are that I am finding that reducing the amount of info on a flashcard makes it MUCH easier and quicker to learn. The longer the definitions and examples, the less likely I am to remember the card accurately. This means I often end up using the CC or OX entries, as on the whole their entries are quite short, though of course these dictionaries are less complete. TL is probably the best dictionary to use for learning as the definitions are clear and focus on the most common usage, but the format isn't much use because it often 'gives away' the answer in the question, if you are doing english to chinese flashcards. AE is perhaps the poorest for initial learning in most cases, because it simply has too much on the screen. However, once I have learned a card well enough, I then I DO want to be able to bring up the examples to ensure I am learning the correct context and usage.)

Right now though, point 1 is THE most frustrating part of Pleco for me. I am currently on a mandarin course in Taiwan. I've already got all the text book words loaded in pleco, but important new vocabulary which I adding daily from the lessons is basically stuck at the back of the queue, and it's extremely time consuming and messy to get it into the front of the 'active' queue (messing around with various categories, profiles etc).

Cheers,
Ben