2.3 / User Interface Enhancements
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
i'm sorry to say that i'm a bit disappointed by this attitude. i mean the fact that you feel that you dont want to release versions just because people wouldnt notice how much work u put into it.
of course it's easy for me to say it as i'm not working on it and have no clue in project managing and how all of this affects sales and how much does it put more effort on testing cycles and all of that.
i was just saying how i as a customer feel about this huge update that i've been hearing but just waiting for a long time. even a friend of mine whom also has pleco, asked me, "so what up with the big update, i've been hearing about it since last year" or some other version of that.
maybe it's just me, but i think people would b happy to get more smaller but frequent updates. i mean we r already customers, some or all with a potential for upgrading.
for a lot of people version numbers mean nothing, they dont fully realize that going from x.y to x.(y+1) is such a huge difference than x.y.z to x.y.(z+1), probably cause there is no real standard in this (i'm talking generally not about pleco). i think the majority of ppl, would have just updated it and accepted it as it is.
i've just realized that if i wouldnt b in this forum i wouldnt b aware of a new version anyway and i wouldnt b waiting...guess i was spoiled by you with all the new things that r supposed to change that i kept hearing/reading of.
anyways...these were just my personal thoughts about it, in any other way, i'm super pleased with your product and support.
so...keep up the great work.
of course it's easy for me to say it as i'm not working on it and have no clue in project managing and how all of this affects sales and how much does it put more effort on testing cycles and all of that.
i was just saying how i as a customer feel about this huge update that i've been hearing but just waiting for a long time. even a friend of mine whom also has pleco, asked me, "so what up with the big update, i've been hearing about it since last year" or some other version of that.
maybe it's just me, but i think people would b happy to get more smaller but frequent updates. i mean we r already customers, some or all with a potential for upgrading.
for a lot of people version numbers mean nothing, they dont fully realize that going from x.y to x.(y+1) is such a huge difference than x.y.z to x.y.(z+1), probably cause there is no real standard in this (i'm talking generally not about pleco). i think the majority of ppl, would have just updated it and accepted it as it is.
i've just realized that if i wouldnt b in this forum i wouldnt b aware of a new version anyway and i wouldnt b waiting...guess i was spoiled by you with all the new things that r supposed to change that i kept hearing/reading of.
anyways...these were just my personal thoughts about it, in any other way, i'm super pleased with your product and support.
so...keep up the great work.
But the release with this many features is very likely to bring a heavier impact. It can be remembered as the update that has changed Pleco forever. Yeah, I'm getting pretty impatient too after such a long wait, but hey, perfection takes a lot of time and effort to achieve!
I think the subsequent updates might be released more often, or at least I hope they do.
I think the subsequent updates might be released more often, or at least I hope they do.
yuvalcho said:
It's not that at all - sorry if you understood it that way. It's that people wouldn't think it is a big update without a UI change; that itself is a much-requested feature - easily the most requested one / the one that people are most expecting when we ask them what exactly they're looking forward to seeing in our next update - and for a lot of people, a major new release that doesn't do that is going to be a huge disappointment. So it's not about getting credit, it's about making sure that this update simply meets people's expectations - we're fine with people not noticing a lot of the stuff we've done, but the UI / typography changes are probably the biggest reason people are interested in this update at all.
yuvalcho said:
Well to be honest an awful lot of that has to do with Android; more than half of the time since our last major update on iOS (in early 2011) has been spent on Android-specific stuff. And that's kind of a future-of-Pleco thing - if the smartphone / tablet industry develops like the PC industry and becomes increasingly commoditized, as seems fairly probable, then Android is almost certainly the OS that those commodity devices will be running, so Pleco not having a strong presence on Android (and even the opportunity to have one was starting to slip away by that point) was a serious threat to our future success. It also has all sorts of ancillary benefits for iOS users in that supporting both major smartphones has made it easier to license new dictionaries / beta-test new code / etc. (not to mention all of the iOS users who've now switched to Android, or started using an Android tablet/smartphone alongside their iOS smartphone/tablet)
But pointing everything at a "big update" in general was a big mistake - both the development decision of not releasing new stuff in smaller updates and the marketing decision of telling people we were working on a major update. I can't promise we'll never decide to do the former again, but we definitely won't be repeating the latter - after this "big update" we're going to be much less release-oriented in describing our future plans, we'll certainly tell people what features are coming but we won't pin everything on a particular release.
So the wait for prettier typography is sort of a remedy for that earlier mistake of promising a "big update" - since we've gotten ourselves into this situation of everyone having high expectations for that release, we now need to make sure we do enough in the release to satisfy them, so that we can then carry on quietly improving bit by bit and never promising another "big update" again.
yuvalcho said:
That's definitely the plan after this - even the "major flashcard revamp" we plan to start in early 2013 is quite fungible and can easily come out a few features at a time (custom fields in one release, timed auto-advance in the next, etc) rather than all at once.
scykei said:
Well that's the goal, at least on the dictionary side of things.
scykei said:
Oh yes, as I said we're not going to make the mistake of pinning everything to a big update again.
Bendy-Ren said:
Yes on PDF; on Dropbox, probably yes, since it looks like it would only take a few hours to integrate (the API is quite straightforward and we already have all of the necessary UI from our file manager anyway), but as we haven't actually attempted it yet we can't make any promises until we do.
anchan42 said:Just a question on a lot of people minds.
Hopefully not too long after we take delivery of the awesome new Chinese font that's the centerpiece of the new design. (they say they're getting close, but I don't want to make any more specific promises than that)
pprendeville
探花
Would like to see an improvement of the menu system when using OCR. When I use OCR it is rather a slow awkward process of going in and out of menus to find the file I want to paste into. I'll just give a quick description of how I do it at the moment.
I use Pleco on iPad mainly as i like the bigger screen. When I'm in edit mode in a .txt file I have to:
1. Save the file on exit (which is probably a good thing just in case of a crash)
2. Go back four times (due to my filing system) to get to OCR
3. OCR>Block Recogniser>Photo Library>Camera Roll>Select Pic>>Clip/Close<OCR<Reader<Document File Reader<followed by another 4 clicks to get into the file I'm currently working on and then paste in the text that I clipped. I know I could capture the text and edit it but I don't likes doing it this way as usually real life text is spread out over a number of pages it will still result it copying and pasting to put it in the same file. I prefer to work from the mother file.
Process seems a bit long winded. Would love to see the option of having an OCR button within a .txt file so I can just click it and it brings me straight into photos and I select the one I'm looking for. Then when I'm finished clipping the text it remembers thelast file I was in a gives me an option of returning straight back into it.
I use Pleco on iPad mainly as i like the bigger screen. When I'm in edit mode in a .txt file I have to:
1. Save the file on exit (which is probably a good thing just in case of a crash)
2. Go back four times (due to my filing system) to get to OCR
3. OCR>Block Recogniser>Photo Library>Camera Roll>Select Pic>>Clip/Close<OCR<Reader<Document File Reader<followed by another 4 clicks to get into the file I'm currently working on and then paste in the text that I clipped. I know I could capture the text and edit it but I don't likes doing it this way as usually real life text is spread out over a number of pages it will still result it copying and pasting to put it in the same file. I prefer to work from the mother file.
Process seems a bit long winded. Would love to see the option of having an OCR button within a .txt file so I can just click it and it brings me straight into photos and I select the one I'm looking for. Then when I'm finished clipping the text it remembers thelast file I was in a gives me an option of returning straight back into it.
pprendeville said:
It seems like you're basically looking for something to let you clip bits of text from various images into a document - correct? (perhaps as an iPad-exclusive feature where you could bring this up in some sort of split-screen view?) We've had a few other people pushing for something like this (radioman has written several essay-length posts extolling the virtues of such an idea
) and we think we'd like to do it eventually, but it'll probably be a while before we do since we've already got another major update's worth of high-priority features to add after we finish the current one.
character
状元
As helpful as OCR in Pleco is, perhaps a desktop or online OCR would be better for turning lots of images into Chinese text, which could then be pulled into Pleco for reading. Has anyone tried AABBYY FineReader Online or Google Docs for this? http://freenuts.com/top-10-free-online-ocr-tools/ http://cnedelcu.blogspot.com/2012/01/ch ... ed-or.html
Mike, do you know which other products use the OCR engine used by Pleco?
Mike, do you know which other products use the OCR engine used by Pleco?
character said:
I would think so, but a lot of users seem to disagree with me on that. And for precise scrolling / panning around an image to select the characters you want (seems like that's a more common scenario than OCRing whole pages) I suppose there is something to be said for a touchscreen over a mouse-driven interface. There's also a sizable contingent of translators who'd like to be able to compose a translation in one window while looking up the characters they don't know in the other, so they'd be well-served by this too.
character said:
Not aware of any specific ones, actually - they generally have very low requirements in terms of copyright acknowledgements etc, so I think a lot of them don't tell anyone they're using it.
goldyn chyld
状元
Any update on 2.3?
goldyn chyld said:
Still waiting on the type design (though we've got part of it and may be able to get to a point we're reasonably happy with based on that), plus personally, we're at DEFCON 2 on the baby and any day now I'm going to more-or-less disappear for a couple of weeks.
But hopefully soon after I get back we'll have a beta good enough to share.
Hi Mike,
In Pleco´s dictionary (and in the flashcards created using it), the different pronunciations of polyphonic characters are shown at the end of the entry together with a link. If the entry is short, the user can see the different pronunciations at a glance; but if it is long, one has to scroll all the way down to see them (supposing he or she already knows that the character is polyphonic). That is why I think it would be better to put the different pronunciations (without the links would also do) at the top of the entry.
In Pleco´s dictionary (and in the flashcards created using it), the different pronunciations of polyphonic characters are shown at the end of the entry together with a link. If the entry is short, the user can see the different pronunciations at a glance; but if it is long, one has to scroll all the way down to see them (supposing he or she already knows that the character is polyphonic). That is why I think it would be better to put the different pronunciations (without the links would also do) at the top of the entry.