2.1 Feature Requests

[mikelove]

goog1e - we could certainly think about recording some sentence audio at some point, sure; main question I suppose would be where we'd come up with a good list of sentences to use. I definitely like the idea of sharing recordings, though it does present some thorny copyright issues (we might have to collect a signed release form from every speaker who contributes a recording), so we might have to facilitate this in a less formal way, making it easy to package up audio to share with friends / post on a non-Pleco website.

Shuffle during loop has been frequently requested and should definitely be coming in 2.1. ~ replacement is already supported in the ACE dictionary database, so once we get ABC coded for it too it should be widely available. Undo in flashcards has also been requested a few times - it's a bit thorny, but if we back up the pre-score-change statistics from each card tested it probably wouldn't be too difficult to restore them.

gato - sure, that shouldn't be too hard; we'd probably just add a toolbar button to insert / remove those $es, actually.

ben_gb - good idea on the force-review button; definitely not difficult to add, might even be doable in the 2.0.4 update we're now contemplating (as a way of rapidly getting a couple of new non-platform-dependent iPhone features like audio sandhi transformations onto Palm/WM).

Toggling examples should be easy too, the main problem there is getting databases like Tuttle coded so that the examples are hide-able. Is ACE difficult to use in flashcards even with examples hidden?

 

[thph2006]

Would it be possible to add an optional handwriting guide grid to the background of the handwriting input box?

 

[ben_gb]

ben_gb - good idea on the force-review button; definitely not difficult to add, might even be doable in the 2.0.4 update we're now contemplating (as a way of rapidly getting a couple of new non-platform-dependent iPhone features like audio sandhi transformations onto Palm/WM).

Toggling examples should be easy too, the main problem there is getting databases like Tuttle coded so that the examples are hide-able. Is ACE difficult to use in flashcards even with examples hidden?

It would really be fantastic if you could add the force-review function in the 2.04 release!!

As for using ACE without the examples, this is often pretty good, especially with the entries where there are just one or two meanings, but there are a couple of areas where it's a bit weak:

1. It often doesn't show the grammar part (ie whether the word is SV, verb etc)
2. Often it has many entries for a word, but not necessarily in the 'most used at the top' order.

Overall, I feel the Tuttle dictionary really is the ideal 'learners dictionary' as a source for the flashcards, as it only focusses on the everyday, most frequently used meanings, and also I think just about every entry has the grammar description (at least when it's not obvious). I think having the short entries, in particular, helps speed up the learning (and of course you don't end up spending lots of time learning infrequently used or esoteric meanings as they are not shown).

I guess the problem is that these are two incompatible requirements. On the one hand you want the dictionary to be complete in terms of all meanings and usages for when people are looking up entries using the normal search; but on the other hand, when using flashcards, it's better not to have any excess information and esoteric meanings to help with the memorisation.

 

[mikelove]

thph2006 - yep, we've already done that on iPhone so it should definitely be on the list for WM in 2.1.

ben_gb - good points on ACE, though both of those are areas we're planning to improve on in future versions of that database. Perhaps we can get Tuttle example-tagged even if we're lagging in that on a few other databases - it's not all that big, after all.

 

[radioman]

@goog1e - I have been looking at the recording of sentences for a while now. Not sure that it is a direct Pleco thing, per se, but if you are interested in looking at this with specific regard to sentence creation and having some created, feel free to contact me through the board here (I think there is a way to email me) or through gtechwave.com

Sentence Audio

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

 

[Lurks]

This might be a bit of an odd request but...

I do about hours of flashcards a day on a HTC Touch HD. It's got to the stage now where my thumb is pretty sore and I have to press the correct/incorrect buttons with another hand. Why? Because these buttons are right at the bottom of the screen meaning I have to bend my thumb considerably to press one by holding the phone with one hand.

What would be immensely useful is moving the buttons half way up the screen some how. Obviously that's a bit of an odd fit in terms of content in the GUI but I would find it a massive ergonomic improvement.

 

[gato]

gato - sure, that shouldn't be too hard; we'd probably just add a toolbar button to insert / remove those $es, actually.

Thanks. Probably would makes sense to launch a search after you insert those "$"s (or whatever character the user has configure in the query options). Otherwise, it would be a two-click solution rather than a one-click one. Would it be possible to add this feature to the next update (2.0.4?)?

I thought of this when I was looking up the definition of 肖 in a classical Chinese text. 肖 the character has the meaning of "similar", and so one would think that the word "不肖" means "dissimilar", but actually "不肖" means "unworthy" or "untalented". This made me think that if a lookup of 肖 the character also listed all words containing 肖 including "不肖", then you would be able to avoid this potential trap. I thought of suggesting listing all words containing the character being looked up as a default, but the performance degradation might make that impractical.

 

[mikelove]

Lurks - interesting thought, though it is a bit tricky to figure out how we'd lay out the screen with that band of buttons in the middle... would having them all the way at the top of the screen be any better? Or maybe arranged along the side?

gato - possibly, but now we're starting to hang way too many features on 2.0.4 - it's already picking up a bunch of other little dictionary search improvements from iPhone, and getting those improvements available to our Palm/WM users ASAP is the main reason we're releasing 2.0.4 at all, so if we add anything else it'll probably be in flashcards since they really haven't gotten any new features for 2.0.4 yet. (undo button for most recent card / immediately mark cards for review / shuffle in review-incorrect being among the leading candidates at the moment)

 

[ewilc773]

Maybe this has been mentioned somewhere before, and maybe there's a way to do it and I just don't know it, but: I was wondering if there's a way to use flashcards to learn traditional characters after simplified have been learned. Something like... The dictionary shows the traditional character, and the revealed answer is the simplified version. Or vice versa.

 

[mikelove]

There's nothing like that supported yet, though a couple of other people have suggested doing something to facilitate reviewing both character sets (or learning one of them when already familiar with the other). It wouldn't be too difficult to create a new test mode that showed one initially and revealed the other (maybe we'd just add it as a field option in Self-Scored), though we'd probably also need some sort of filter to only test you on cards where they differed. (or not, maybe it's helpful to also learn explicitly which characters don't change between simplified/traditional)

 

[ewilc773]

For me, I wouldn't want to filter out the ones that are the same. I would want to learn which kinds of characters are the same, and which ones differ.

 

[jiacheng]

ewilc773:

You might want to check out the simplification table flashcards that I created:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1773

It involves setting up separate tests, which I explain in the original post.

A good method might be that when you learn a character that has a separate traditional form, you could find the applicable transformation pattern and pull that into your separate tests which are specifically for learning the other set. That way, if it happens to one of the many patterns that are repeated, you will not only learn how to convert that, but other characters that use that component as well.

 

[Lurks]

... would having them all the way at the top of the screen be any better? Or maybe arranged along the side?

Top of the screen isn't easily reachable with one hand. Basically if you hold any Winmo phone with a large screen and run pleco flashcards in the self scoring mode so you just have to press a tick or an x, you can see for yourself what sort of arc you can press with your thumb when holding the phone in your hand.

The buttons are currently positioned in a reachable but painful spot. I should say now that after weeks of use my thumb hurts all the time now, haha. So I'm pressing keys with my left hand, it's pretty serious ergonomic issue I think.

As for alternative locations, just about anywhere else is better, even the top of the screen which would be awkward but probably not painful.

One lame hack alternative would be to simply make the left and right of the screen optional invisible yes/no buttons. There's oodles of blank space ordinarily (because you're not being shown the definition yet), so who even needs a button... Although if the buttons were being done up it would be really nice not to have such tiny arrows for forward/back too - just to be finger sensitive.

The other thing which I've mentioned before is the whole process of clicking on characters or words to trigger popups. We didn't really get anywhere with that, you said it's configurable and it is - I had a play. The reality is though that it's exceedingly hard to actually get a single character to pop up by tapping on it. You tap it nothing happens, tap it and it unselects. You can get it to work but it's always messing around. LIkewise clicking on pinyin words, this can often take me ten seconds to get a popup happening. It's just sluggish and clumsy like it is and I'm not sure why. It's made better by using a stylus and precisely tapping on a word and holding until the pop up appears but that's inconvienient. And I really ought to be able to simply whack my thumb on the head character (huge font) with my thumb and see the character lookup but again it often takes me ten seconds to actually make work with constant stabs.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong

P.S. Mike I still get annoyed by how much clicking it is to dump out of a flash card session just to get back to the dictionary. This has gotta be doable doesn't it? I know tabs are a ways off but crumbs, I often need my dictionary NOW and end up using a crap one on my ipod... Well actually pleco beta right now so not so crap I don't think needing to carry two pleco devices around is really what we're after here though

 

[mikelove]

Hmm, that's true - tappable screen areas sound like they might be a good fix, on iPhone too actually. Ergonomic-friendly hardware buttons can no longer be relied upon in newer WM designs (even if we got them working perfectly).

The character selection UI we've introduced on iPhone is what we're planning to do on Windows Mobile soon too - that should hopefully make it a good bit easier to target individual characters. As for why it's not responding to taps, have you tried assigning multiple commands to that same popup? Say, tap char and highlight char both? That should get it to trigger more consistently.

There should only be two taps involved to get out a flashcard session, the same number as would actually be involved on iPhone (tap button to open menu, then tap tab to change) - tap on the exit button and then tap on Yes in the prompt about saving your session. There'd only be a third tap if you enabled the "allow edits during sessions" feature, in which case you get dumped to the main flashcards screen so that you can make whatever edits you want to make.

 

[caesartg]

Dear Mike

It's a minor GUI thing but how about a simple way to undo the addition of a flashcard to a category in the main dictionary browsing screen? After a year or so since I brought up this chestnut, I'm still plagued by adding cards to my Default FC category or clicking the wrong category in the pull-down list of addition categories - then have to go through several screens to remove or rectify the booger. Okay, 'plagued' is an exaggeration - slightly miffed or peeved would be more correct.

I remember you saying you could do this but would have to implement it as a general 'Undo' option and then it would become implementationally tricky. I think the simple solution would be to contextualise as much as possible the function in the GUI, so how about this? - when you hold the pointer over the 'add flashcard' button and get the pull-down list of flashcards, how about tagged on to the beginning or the end of the list an 'Undo last' option (or similar) and then simply have a yes/no confirm pop-up when it's selected, in case someone accidentally clicked it instead of one of the flashcard categories? When there is no 'add to category' event to undo, you could either ghost the option or have it not appear. You would only need to retain the last addition - no need to keep a history - as it is the kind of user error that would be recognised immediately by the user upon a single happening.

Cheers

Ben

 

[caesartg]

Dear Mike

Over the years, folk have been talking about using the example sentences in dictionaries for flashcarding and the trickiness of compiling this themselves within Pleco using copy/paste and custom flashcards (I tried myself at various stages and found the resultant flashcarding to be very very useful but it just took too much fiddling to set up).

Maybe someone has mentioned before but I was wondering - why not simply compile a custom flashcard set (containing entries for the Chinese sentence, pronunciation and English meaning) from those dictionaries that you can do this for and then have this as a already-paid-for downloadable option on the orders page for users who have purchased the respective dictionary? (I'm assuming that the implementation of this is trickier for some dictionaries, especially as each one has it's structure, idiosyncracies and there may be restrictions in the licence on what you can do with them).

Except for the correction of spelling mistakes and the like, because it would be a useful resource in its own right, there would be no need to keep it in synch with any later modification of the source dictionaries. In other words, after the work of the initial compilation, it could be a fire-and-forget solution until you change the flashcarding system again.

Obviously, it would be much easier to compile this for some dictionaries than others (for example, the Tuttle would probably be the simplest, whereas I can imagine ABC taking some work, ACE being tricky [although bountiful if you could work it] and Oxford maybe not even allowed, no idea about the E-C dictionaries).

Thinking about it now, this would definitely be a selling point for the Tuttle, as its main feature has to be its bank of example sentences. Maybe you intend a more elaborate or elegant solution for sentence practice, but I think this would be immediately useful and useable to many users. Once you have the compiled data, perhaps it would also be something you could simply make available as a sentence practice bolt-on (and hence simple way to market the Tuttle) on the iPhone.

Best wishes

Ben

 

[mikelove]

Interesting thought, but I'd rather not have two different approaches to example sentences that we're stuck having to support - better to wait until we implement our long-awaited sentence database feature and implement this sort of functionality through that.

ACE and ABC would actually be the easiest databases for this, though, since they have the cleanest / best-tagged data - Tuttle's a bit harder since its entries are basically just blobs of formatted text at the moment (though its small size means that coding it wouldn't take that long).

 

[llammamama]

It would be very nice to have a "input new custom flashcard" button or option from the main dictionary screen.

Currently in order to add a custom flashcard from the main dictionary screen I need to click Open Flashcards -> Manage Flashcards -> Add new flashcard button -> then I can finally input the flashcard. When reading through my textbook, I often look up words (to check tones etc) and add custom sentence flashcards (based on example sentences) as I go along and at the moment the usability in this situation is a little lacking.

That said, Pleco is still awesome and I love it. Don't take all our criticism too hard - if the rest of the people are like me then they're posting in this thread because Pleco is so incredibly useful that we probably can't live without it =)

Good job making such a great product! I almost want to give you a hug (sort of.. )

 

[daniel123]

I have some wishes for small but convenient handling improvements...

1) In "Manage Flashcard" screen I often want to switch between "pron" or "headword" drop down field on the one hand and "category" drop down field on the other hand. When going back to "category" I always have to start from "Uncategorized" instead of my last category. To get back again to the last opened category I have to scroll down many different categories to find it again. I could save much time if Pleco could recognize the last one and switch directly to this category.

2) While openening and looking to a selected category in "Manage Flashcard" ("category" drop down) I often want to add new flashcards entries via "+" directly to this category. It would be great if adding new cards would automatically choose this actual category for the new card.

Maybe this could also make sense for somebody else.

THX

Daniel

 

[mikelove]

llammamama - good thought. We're actually planning a more interactive add to flashcard function in general, one that lets you customize things like initial categories / score, check for / decide how you want to handle duplicates, etc, so it seems like it would be easy to add a button to make your new card a new custom one instead.

And thanks! I'm not bothered at all by all the usability comments - a big part of why the flashcard system is so powerful / flexible is because of all of the great feedback we get on it / the constant pressure to keep improving things.

daniel123 - good note on #1 - it would make sense to save out the last value selected in common fields like that rather than resetting them every time you switch. For #2, the + button in Organize Flashcards actually already does that, though I suppose it might make sense to do it in Manage too. (the role of Manage needs to be rethought / reinvented a bit in general now that we have Organize for quick category-related stuff)