2.1 Feature Requests
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
The difference between taps and short strokes is too murky to depend on, unfortunately, particularly given the variable properties of resistive touchscreens - the exact same motion could be interpreted as a tap on one device and a dot on another, even with two devices of the exact same model.
Oo fresh android hate 
Sorry Mike, still zero faith in WM7 being a contender. Google Phone instead me thinks... But then if you have Pleco running on an iPod with flash cards in the new I couldn't care less. So it's all groovy1
Also caught mention of license transfers which sounds fab, i hope that's not time limited because I wont want to jump until you have flash cards...
Sorry Mike, still zero faith in WM7 being a contender. Google Phone instead me thinks... But then if you have Pleco running on an iPod with flash cards in the new I couldn't care less. So it's all groovy1
Also caught mention of license transfers which sounds fab, i hope that's not time limited because I wont want to jump until you have flash cards...
Well I'm not sure about WM7 either, depends on when they actually finish the thing. But given the ease of porting WM software to desktop Windows (which, Apple's and Google's efforts notwithstanding, doesn't seem to be in danger of going away anytime soon), the continued existence of / support for a Windows Mobile version of Pleco can be justified pretty much on that basis alone, so really all WM7 does is determine how much time we want to spend finger-friendlying the WM user interface and what methods we use to do it.
No current plans to time-limit license transfers (unless Apple were to, say, change their minds about allowing them in a future release, which seems pretty unlikely), but if we somehow do end up doing so I think we'd certainly want to wait until after the flashcard version was ready.
No current plans to time-limit license transfers (unless Apple were to, say, change their minds about allowing them in a future release, which seems pretty unlikely), but if we somehow do end up doing so I think we'd certainly want to wait until after the flashcard version was ready.
From Dec 1st:
Perhaps a way for people who own ACED to submit ordering for a (smallish) subset of words? A "crowd" approach. Lots of people can make this work fairly fast. It could be a closed group, and check in changes and get new subsets, etc. You could easily schedule 1 or 2 week cycles where people would send in changes and get a new update and new "assignment", etc.
mikelove said:
Perhaps a way for people who own ACED to submit ordering for a (smallish) subset of words? A "crowd" approach. Lots of people can make this work fairly fast. It could be a closed group, and check in changes and get new subsets, etc. You could easily schedule 1 or 2 week cycles where people would send in changes and get a new update and new "assignment", etc.
character - heh, yeah. I suppose it's not really necessary that I keep dissing Android, I can just politely say we're not planning to develop for it, but I feel a strange compulsion to win other people over to the anti-Android cause.
radioman - actually it turns out we wouldn't need to do it by hand; we found a list that provides frequencies for single characters and factors in Pinyin (different frequencies for different pronunciations). So we can use that to sort them automatically. Hand-tweaking would be required to combine all of those oft-unintelligently-ordered 1/2/3 entries, though.
radioman - actually it turns out we wouldn't need to do it by hand; we found a list that provides frequencies for single characters and factors in Pinyin (different frequencies for different pronunciations). So we can use that to sort them automatically. Hand-tweaking would be required to combine all of those oft-unintelligently-ordered 1/2/3 entries, though.
I use Pleco as a reference tool rather than a learning aid, so I've got absolutely zero interest in flashcards -- though I guess that puts me in the minority here. My big request is custom dictionaries -- at the very least just a converter from the StarDict format, but ideally something that'd allow for a higher degree of control over definition / data fields.
My big request is custom dictionaries -- at the very least just a converter from the StarDict format, but ideally something that'd allow for a higher degree of control over definition / data fields.READER Enhancements
One thing I've been wanting is to be able to assign dictionaries to individual books in the reader. So, I could select, for example, only 3 dictionaries to search for a Harry Potter book, and (again an example), select my personal HP_Names dictionary as the first one in priority, etc.
A second thing, again for reader, would be a hierarchy for books, so that I could put them into categories. This is partly because the screen is so small that there's a lot of scrolling to get to the book I want. I also OCR textbooks, and put those on at the same time.
I've mentioned (a while ago), about wanting to highlight characters (perhaps a person's name), and be able to generate a dictionary entry right there on the spot, or at least put into a deferred list for later processing.
Able to export notes, and able to generate a note that includes highlighted text.
One thing I've been wanting is to be able to assign dictionaries to individual books in the reader. So, I could select, for example, only 3 dictionaries to search for a Harry Potter book, and (again an example), select my personal HP_Names dictionary as the first one in priority, etc.
A second thing, again for reader, would be a hierarchy for books, so that I could put them into categories. This is partly because the screen is so small that there's a lot of scrolling to get to the book I want. I also OCR textbooks, and put those on at the same time.
I've mentioned (a while ago), about wanting to highlight characters (perhaps a person's name), and be able to generate a dictionary entry right there on the spot, or at least put into a deferred list for later processing.
Able to export notes, and able to generate a note that includes highlighted text.
bokane - thanks. Our top priority with custom dictionaries at the moment is actually performance - faster startups (there's one specific thing we've traced most of the custom dictionary startup time hit to, so once we fix that it should be much much faster) and faster searches (using a new and better index). But better control would be nice too. StarDict I'm hesitant about since a lot of the dictionaries in that format are copyrighted / probably not legally available and I wouldn't want to do anything to encourage people to use that content in Pleco.
stephanhodges - great idea about assigning individual dictionaries to reader files. Though actually that'd be a lot easier to implement on iPhone than on Palm/WM at the moment since the current Palm/WM bookmark data format is pretty terrible; we'll be upgrading that to the newer iPhone one (or something like it) probably in 2.1 and at that point we could certainly add this feature. Hierarchical sorting would also come with that - we're probably just going to implement a real file browser (not just a stick-all-the-files-in-one-list thing) and then you can organize your documents in the regular file system.
Making dictionary entries on-the-spot from unknown words is certainly something we'd like to add. And once we add a notes feature it'd make sense to make those exportable; this is another bookmark format upgrade thing, basically we want to go from having one big bookmark database to having an individual bookmark file alongside each text file; that way, they can be moved around together (no possibility of the system losing track of them) and can easily grow to whatever length we want.
stephanhodges - great idea about assigning individual dictionaries to reader files. Though actually that'd be a lot easier to implement on iPhone than on Palm/WM at the moment since the current Palm/WM bookmark data format is pretty terrible; we'll be upgrading that to the newer iPhone one (or something like it) probably in 2.1 and at that point we could certainly add this feature. Hierarchical sorting would also come with that - we're probably just going to implement a real file browser (not just a stick-all-the-files-in-one-list thing) and then you can organize your documents in the regular file system.
Making dictionary entries on-the-spot from unknown words is certainly something we'd like to add. And once we add a notes feature it'd make sense to make those exportable; this is another bookmark format upgrade thing, basically we want to go from having one big bookmark database to having an individual bookmark file alongside each text file; that way, they can be moved around together (no possibility of the system losing track of them) and can easily grow to whatever length we want.
For the latest generation of WM 6.5 touch phones (capacitative screens without stylus), it would be great if the drop-down menus and radio buttons in the options menus could be re-engineered so that they will work with finger touch. I guess you will have fixed that on the iPhone version. At present all you can do is call up a virtual keyboard and use navigation arrows ply 'enter'.
We'd actually been waiting for some guidance from Microsoft on that - we'd really not have to re-engineer Pleco on WM for touch twice, and since we don't yet know what sorts of programming interfaces they're going to be using for their official finger-driven UI scheme on Windows Mobile 7 we're not sure what to do about them in our current software.
To be honest, thanks to HTC's jumping the gun on capacitive touchscreen support (not officially even in WM6.5) we're probably going to have to put a note up on our hardware purchase page specifically discouraging people from getting HD2s - at least until we do retool the interface it seems like people are better off with stylus-driven devices.
To be honest, thanks to HTC's jumping the gun on capacitive touchscreen support (not officially even in WM6.5) we're probably going to have to put a note up on our hardware purchase page specifically discouraging people from getting HD2s - at least until we do retool the interface it seems like people are better off with stylus-driven devices.
mikelove said:
Ah, well hang on there. Actually Pleco on the HD2 is a 90% good experience. The issues that I mention are inherent to all apps. For example, ticking the box to tell the system to install an app on the SD card instead of the main memory is also a pain.
The reader on the other hand is excellent. It's almost as good as using the 'Chinese Text Project'. I suggest that you advise HD2 users to fall back on the soft keyboard navigation arrows and the 'enter' key for navigating set-up and options. The rest basically works fine.
Just a cosmetic issue, but it should be mentioned nonetheless...
Yesterday I gave myself a Christmas Present in the form of Samsung Omnia PRO B7610, a device which features an AMOLED display instead of a TFT one. This (among other advantages) means a completely new approach to backlighting and can save a lot of battery power, when it does not need to backlight big parts of the screen (i.e. they are in dark colours or completely black). Using a dark or black theme for WM suddenly makes a lot of sense (currently using the one provided by Samsung and experimenting whether I can get used to it). It works quite well with Pleco (basically, the black and white colours of the interface are inverted), except for for the Chinese characters icons on the toolbar, which look kind of ugly (unfortunately, I was not able to take o good screenshot of that, but I'll try to provide one). Turning off Chinese icons in Preferences is a partial remedy to this (only the icon of the C-E language switcher still looks garbled, others are looking okay this way). Again, just a minor issue but maybe something to consider for some future version (my take is AMOLED displays are going to be more popular in the future)
Yesterday I gave myself a Christmas Present in the form of Samsung Omnia PRO B7610, a device which features an AMOLED display instead of a TFT one. This (among other advantages) means a completely new approach to backlighting and can save a lot of battery power, when it does not need to backlight big parts of the screen (i.e. they are in dark colours or completely black). Using a dark or black theme for WM suddenly makes a lot of sense (currently using the one provided by Samsung and experimenting whether I can get used to it). It works quite well with Pleco (basically, the black and white colours of the interface are inverted), except for for the Chinese characters icons on the toolbar, which look kind of ugly (unfortunately, I was not able to take o good screenshot of that, but I'll try to provide one). Turning off Chinese icons in Preferences is a partial remedy to this (only the icon of the C-E language switcher still looks garbled, others are looking okay this way). Again, just a minor issue but maybe something to consider for some future version (my take is AMOLED displays are going to be more popular in the future)
We've had a couple of emails about this, actually - it should be easy enough for us to detect an inverted color scheme and use an alternate set of icons in that case, but there's still the problem of designing those icons, and since we're not particularly happy with the current icon set on WM in general I'd be more inclined to do this in the context of rolling out new icons for both light and dark color schemes. But certainly doable in a future release.
HW60
状元
In character info, the compounds list is usually very long. For people learning the language maybe it is too long - I just bought a book with 4500 words made out of 2000 of the most frequently used characters, and I like the compound lists of this book because they are short. My suggestion: allow in preferences to select compound lists consisting of 500, 1000, 1500, 2000 or "all" of the most frequently used characters (http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computin ... p?Which=MO).
I'm not sure about the efficacy of filtering compounds by the frequency of the characters they contain - the correlation between character frequency and word frequency isn't really strong enough to rely upon, there are quite a number of very common words containing very obscure characters (or vice versa).
Perhaps a similar suggestion would be to be able to limit the list based on word frequency. Thus, only top "10000" words would end up on the list, etc. I'm not sure if I personally would use this, but it might be close to HW60's intent.
More interesting to me would be for each word in the dictionary to show it's approximate frequency value, or perhaps, frequency range. "Top 100,500,1000,2000,..."
More interesting to me would be for each word in the dictionary to show it's approximate frequency value, or perhaps, frequency range. "Top 100,500,1000,2000,..."
HW60
状元
mikelove said:
Maybe I misunderstood the way the statistic was made - I think they just checked lots of text and counted the appearance of all characters. If you have an example of a very common word with "very obscure characters" (which probably means not very often counted character) we could look for this obscure character in the frequency table - to me it sounds like a contradiction that a "common word" (e.g. often appearing in written text) consists of obscure (e.g. uncommen, not often appearing in written text) characters.
I actually (should) know about 1.000 characters, and I almost never look at the compound list, because I find lots of words there which I do not know yet - I would like to have an easy way to repeat some words I know and to see some new words which I do not know. Of course stephanhodges' idea to limit the number of words would do the same job.