2.1 Feature Requests

[caesartg]

An option to have as one of the running flashcard session buttons an 'Open/Close Sketchbox' that will redraw the flashcard screen with or without the sketchbox. At the moment, you have to set this per profile in the advanced settings but often I'd like to scribble the characters and still get maximum screen space for the flashcard text. The button would override the advanced setting within any flashcard session. How about it, Mike?

 

[mikelove]

Workable, I guess, though it'd get rather silly if we added any more buttons to the existing total - I think some of this stuff has to start getting buried in menus / popup lists.

 

[Lurks]

There should only be two taps involved to get out a flashcard 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.

First popup is about whether you want to save the session. This is probably the most useless popup since I can't really see why you wouldn't just start a new session. The second popup is a flashcard review, got to cancel that. Now there's a popup with session statistics erm... which is a setting I should turn off . Now we're on the flashcards front page and need to close that.

This is a total of four/five clicks to get to the dictionary. Having just lost my stylus somewhere in the last hour, I can tell you those OK gadgets top right are exceedingly difficult to click with a finger

Awesome about screen area clicks, you may save my thumb yet!

Mat.

 

[mikelove]

The save session option is extremely popular, actually - I suppose we could add an option to turn it off, but it's definitely not something a lot of people would consider useless. However, for now, answering "Yes" in that popup would avoid having to deal with the next two, and unless you've turned "allow edits" would drop you directly back to the main dictionary screen, so try tapping Yes instead of No on saving the session and see if that helps.

 

[Lurks]

... so try tapping Yes instead of No on saving the session and see if that helps.

Stone me Mike... It's two clicks and no silly little x boxes to click! Well now I see why resuming the session is popular lol, same with going back to flashcards it's straight in.

 

[llammamama]

When using the auto-recognize and auto-insert-first-recognized-character feature, I get different behavior in the 'input' screen and on the main dictionary screen.

On the main dictionary screen, it will recognize and input the character I draw, and then place the cursor to the right of the input character regardless of whether I tap on anything else. Tapping on a different choice (a different recognized character) will of course delete the input character and replace it with the character I tapped on. This allows me to rapidly input several characters in a row without doing any tapping or selecting whatsoever so long as I am able to draw them well enough to be recognized properly.

On the seperate 'input' screen, however, once I input a character it remains highlighted. If I draw a new character it ends up replacing the one I just drew. This means I need to draw - tap - draw - tap - draw - tap, regardless of whether or not the dictionary was able to recognize my character correctly the first time.

It would be great if you could get these two screens consistent. The way the main dictionary screen handles auto-input is much more convenient than the dedicated input screen, and unfortunately when writing flashcards (usually medium to long sentences), I can only use the dedicated input screen.

There might be a setting somewhere but I was not able to find one. Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

That sounds like a bug, actually - should be fixable in 2.0.4, I can't really think of any reason why we'd want the system to work the way it's working in the Input panel.

 

[johnh113]

Dear Mike,
1. I'd like the pop-up windows to always allow an input line, not be a dead end. For instance, in flashcards, I have long2 (mu4 zi pang de long2, also number 12 definition of long2 in ABC, drowsy). I use ACED, not ABC, for my pop-up window. It says see meng2long2 (both mu4 zi pang) so I tap on the link and go to meng2long2 (I love it when I can just tap on the link). Unfortunately, this definition says "same as meng2long2" where the first character doesn't have a mu4 zi pang. Well, I'd still like to know what the word means, not just that it is the same as something else as I'm a beginner and don't know what that other word means. But now, when I tap on this link nothing happens. And there is no entry line so I can't select the text and put it on the input line because this is a dead-end pop-up window, not the pop-up window I love with the input line. So I'm stuck. I have to exit the pop-up window, exit the flashcards, and type or draw the two character word in the dictionary in order to find out what it means. All this could be avoided if the pop-up window had an input line instead of being a dead-end pop-up window. I've asked for this before and you explained that somehow the pop-up window without the input line was really much much better than the one with the input line, but I never really got it. I still want all my pop-up windows to have an input line.

2. I'd like the ACED ordered like ABC. I like ACED dictionary. My primary complaint is the dictionary ordering. For instance there are many single character homonyms in Chinese. Often I like to go through the homonyms one-by-one from most used to least used until they become too arcane. In ABC they seem to be in the order of most used to least used. In ACED they seem to be in some much less useful order with very arcane usages near the top of the list. It would be nice if ACED used the same ordering as ABC. Obviously very minor as I can just switch over to ABC for looking at homonyms.

3. Speaking of homonyms, two character homonyms are also a problem for me. I don't have any idea how you would implement this, but in flashcards, it would be nice to have some sort of preference setting which would bring up any two character homonyms of the current flashcard word.

4. I'd like a back arrow in the pop-up definition screen. I'm not good enough to use the Chinese-Chinese dictionary, but I sometimes like to look at the definition there, always in a pop-up definition from the flashcard screen. So from flashcards, I call the pop-up dictionary and cycle over to the Chinese-Chinese dictionary. Invariable there are characters/words that I don't understand. So I highlight them and enter them into the input line to find out what they mean, usually cycling back to ABC to read the definition. Now I want to go back one level to the word I was reading in the Chinese dictionary but the pop-up window doesn't have a back arrow. So I have to exit the pop-up window back to the flashcards, retap on the flashcard entry to get back into the pop-up, and cycle back to the Chinese-Chinese dictionary and continue reading the definition until I get to the next word that I don't know, enter that into the entry line and repeat afore described behavior. At my primitive level of Chinese, I may need to do this 4 or 5 times to read the definition. A back arrow would make this much easier. (Or should I be reading the Chinese-Chinese definition in the reader? Should there be a preference setting to always put the Chinese-Chinese definition in the reader? Just speculating as I've never used the reader. I'm in flashcards 99.99% of the time I use Pleco.)

5. By the way, I also have dozens of scraps of paper with words that seem to be mispronounced, but no easy way to input them to send them to you. I was thinking it would be nice if when I heard what I think is a mispronounced audio recording while doing flashcards, I could just add it to a list of mispronounced words. Unfortunately, I often add words to my regular flashcards while doing flashcards, so there would have to be a so-easy-as-to-be-trivial way of adding the mispronunciation to its own list as I don't want it to get in the way of my main lists. Like, a second "add to flashcard list" button that I use just for mispronounced audio would be really easy for me. Of course, I would want it to test for duplicates against just that list, not all lists. Probably not worth bothering about. Maybe in 20 years when I retire I'll have time to input my mispronounced audio lists.

John

 

[mfcb]

5. By the way, I also have dozens of scraps of paper with words that seem to be mispronounced, but no easy way to input them to send them to you. I was thinking it would be nice if when I heard what I think is a mispronounced audio recording while doing flashcards, I could just add it to a list of mispronounced words. Unfortunately, I often add words to my regular flashcards while doing flashcards, so there would have to be a so-easy-as-to-be-trivial way of adding the mispronunciation to its own list as I don't want it to get in the way of my main lists. Like, a second "add to flashcard list" button that I use just for mispronounced audio would be really easy for me. Of course, I would want it to test for duplicates against just that list, not all lists. Probably not worth bothering about. Maybe in 20 years when I retire I'll have time to input my mispronounced audio lists.

hi, this one you could do by adding a category "wrong audio" and enable the "toggle category" button for flashcards. this way you could throw all cards with wrong audio into that category.

 

[mikelove]

1) Does that other definition also have a link? If so, is that still tappable? There's no practical reason we couldn't add an input field to that screen in links mode, I just really hate those extra input fields design-wise; they make the interface more cluttered/confusing, they either muddle or render incomplete the recent search history (at the moment it's the latter, those extra searches aren't recorded in the history), and they mean we're stuck supporting / debugging / adding features to two different search interfaces instead of just one; I'd rather move towards something like a tab-based interface where you have multiple independent instances of the root dictionary window, but on mobiles adding a tab bar makes things rather cluttered.

2) Yeah, their character ordering seems to be more related to the characters' strokes / radicals - the big problem with the ABC sort of single-character ordering is that it can really only be done by hand, a frequency database isn't good enough since a character might be very common with one pronunciation but quite obscure with another.

3) Adding a specific function for this to flashcards seems a bit too obscure, but adding options to a) suspend the current flashcard session and search for the current flashcard word in the main dictionary interface, and b) easily search for homonyms of a word in the main dictionary are both good ideas.

4) That pretty much ties into #1 - rather than dumping any more functionality into the popup screen I'd prefer to keep it a separate, very simple thing (perhaps with some reader highlight-moving arrows, also a thing we do on iPhone) but then have the option to spawn it off into another instance of the main/full dictionary window if you want to do more stuff with it.

5) Are you hearing this mistaken audio with both voices, or only the female one? We thought we'd fixed most of the bugs in the male audio at least.

 

[johnh113]

1) Does that other definition also have a link? If so, is that still tappable? There's no practical reason we couldn't add an input field to that screen in links mode, I just really hate those extra input fields design-wise; they make the interface more cluttered/confusing, they either muddle or render incomplete the recent search history (at the moment it's the latter, those extra searches aren't recorded in the history), and they mean we're stuck supporting / debugging / adding features to two different search interfaces instead of just one; I'd rather move towards something like a tab-based interface where you have multiple independent instances of the root dictionary window, but on mobiles adding a tab bar makes things rather cluttered.

Dear Mike,

Yes, it appears to be a link but when I tap on it nothing happens.
I don't care about keeping the search history past my current usage. While I'm looking things up in the dictionary it's nice to have the search history, but I never go back to it after looking something else up. For me, search history is only useful right now while I'm using it. I don't go back tomorrow.
I don't like supporting two search interfaces either. Can't we just have one powerful search interface? The simple one is too simple to be effective most of the time.

2) Yeah, their character ordering seems to be more related to the characters' strokes / radicals - the big problem with the ABC sort of single-character ordering is that it can really only be done by hand, a frequency database isn't good enough since a character might be very common with one pronunciation but quite obscure with another.

Actually, I wasn't asking for a new ordering. I just wanted the current ABC ordering applied to the ACED. Just resort ACED to make it conform to ABC.

3) Adding a specific function for this to flashcards seems a bit too obscure, but adding options to a) suspend the current flashcard session and search for the current flashcard word in the main dictionary interface, and b) easily search for homonyms of a word in the main dictionary are both good ideas.

The problem is that I don't know that there are homonyms. When I look at flashcard A I often guess the meaning for the homonym B rather than the current characters. So I mark it incorrect. And then later when the homonym B comes up, I remember the meaning for A and get it wrong again. This goes on for months if not years until I realize that the two flashcards are homonyms. I don't have a solution, but it would be nice if after the reveal, there was some indication that there are homonyms for this character or word.

4) That pretty much ties into #1 - rather than dumping any more functionality into the popup screen I'd prefer to keep it a separate, very simple thing (perhaps with some reader highlight-moving arrows, also a thing we do on iPhone) but then have the option to spawn it off into another instance of the main/full dictionary window if you want to do more stuff with it.

Again, I'd rather get rid of the very simple popup screen and use the full function search.

5) Are you hearing this mistaken audio with both voices, or only the female one? We thought we'd fixed most of the bugs in the male audio at least.

Yes, I'm hearing bugs in both. The flashcard add button with the toggle is nice, I've now turned it on and it helps. I should be able to send you a flashcard of suspect audio in a few months. What I was really hoping for was to have both buttons. My regular flashcard add button and that nice toggle flashcard add button that turns red and green. I know, more clutter.

John

 

[mikelove]

One search interface is the basic idea, yeah. The main question is whether it would make sense to do it as tabs or whether we'd just want a fullscreen (or nearly fullscreen) version of the mainscreen interface as a popup / overlay like the current popup definition screen.

Applying ABC ordering to the ACED is what I was talking about too - that's tricky since it has to be done by hand.

So your flashcard homonym issue is primarily with Pinyin-to-character/definition tests where you see a string of Pinyin and think of the wrong characters / definition? That's been a tricky problem for a while - I suppose one approach might be for us to automatically seek out those matches and show / match correctly on them, but the question is how we'd work this into our statistics / repetition-spacing system. We could mark the correctly-matching card as tested / correct and ignore the other one, but then the intended card would continue being untested / keep coming up. Or we could add homonym numbers a la ABC to all of our dictionaries and make sure to display them in flashcards, but then it seems like you're going to the trouble to memorize information you don't actually need. So the best bet might simply be for users to include definitions in Pinyin-to-characters tests and include characters in Pinyin-to-definition ones.

What sorts of bugs are you finding in male audio? Minor tone issues or complete mismatches? These are definitely with whole-word recordings and not syllable-by-syllable, right? (syllable-by-syllable doesn't currently do sandhi transformations properly, though it does on iPhone and will on Palm/WM in 2.0.4) How long ago did you download / install the male audio files?

 

[anchan42]

I find myself swicthing on and off the full screen HWR all the time.
Is it possible to reserve the first collumn for word seletion? and leave the rest for HWR.

 

[mikelove]

Interesting idea, though I think we might need a little more than the first column dedicated to word selection in order to make sure people can consistently select words.

 

[anchan42]

Maybe we can use tap and hold for word seletion?

 

[mikelove]

That could work, yeah. Would also make sense on iPhone once we get its transparent-background handwriting recognizer mode to be fast enough to be widely-usable. (it's kind of laggy in the initial release, hence the opaque default background seen in the demo video which makes stroke drawing both beautiful and super-smooth)

 

[stisev]

Mike,
It seems that all WM 6.x 7.x phones are going the way of capacitive (e.g. Acer F1, HD2, etc). I can't wait until Pleco is finger friendly! Love to see what the flashcard design will be on WM

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, I'd really like to get some guidance from Microsoft on how this will work in WM7 - hate to have to redesign the interface twice, but it seems like manufacturers are essentially deciding they're going to make WM6.5 a finger-driven OS whether Microsoft intends it to be that way or not.

Of course another option would be for us to just replace the couple of UI controls we haven't already developed our own versions of with our own versions; then if we ever decide to port another OS like, say, Android, we'd have less work to do since we wouldn't need to do so much with their UI framework.

 

[stisev]

It will take Microsoft years to get its act together. I suggest you just design your own interface independently and port it to Android.

 

[mikelove]

From the leaked WM7 screenshots I'm not so sure about that. And we don't need a finished version, just some information about the APIs / how one will go about programming finger-driven interfaces in WM7 so that we can plan around that.

Having our own UI framework wouldn't make an Android port easy by any means, it would just be a bit less work we had to do in Java-land. But it'd take more time to develop that framework than we'd save Android-porting, so that wouldn't be enough to justify it by itself. And of course that's assuming we wanted to do an Android port anyway, which at the moment we really don't - personally I'd like to fly back in time in a converted DeLorean and seduce Android's mom to prevent Android from ever being born.