2.3 / User Interface Enhancements

[Entropy]

Re: 2.2 / User Interface Enhancements

A few random things.

When I enter a single character, I want to be able to go straight to the character info viewer, without first having to select the character in the definition panel.

That makes me think I want all the buttons to be available at all times, in the same places. I don't want to flip from mode to mode, that's really annoying.

(And, when I do copy that "mo" from ADS, which I should probably disable, I get "m'ochul'ai) which is certainly not what I want. Pasting a definition should return me to the very definition I pasted.)

And, why have both a zoom button and a character viewer? THe character viewer won't show me a multi-character selection, but that could be changed, at least on iPad.

 

[mikelove]

When I enter a single character, I want to be able to go straight to the character info viewer, without first having to select the character in the definition panel.

That makes me think I want all the buttons to be available at all times, in the same places. I don't want to flip from mode to mode, that's really annoying.

You can streamline the process a bit by setting "Head tap action" to "Char Info" in Settings / Dictionary / Entry Display - that'll reduce it from three taps to two by taking you directly to Char Info when you tap on a headword character in a dictionary entry screen. (or to just the one tap if you use your iPhone in landscape orientation or turn on "Show definition" under Settings / Dictionary / Overall Interface / Portrait Screen Layout)

(And, when I do copy that "mo" from ADS, which I should probably disable, I get "m'ochul'ai) which is certainly not what I want. Pasting a definition should return me to the very definition I pasted.)

Which entry is this?

And, why have both a zoom button and a character viewer? THe character viewer won't show me a multi-character selection, but that could be changed, at least on iPad.

That's why - also a bit quicker to get to (with Char Info you'd have to select the right tab), and it's an important function for that talking-to-the-chef scenario you mentioned; if there's a word you want to express for someone in unambiguous terms, flashing them a screen with that word and nothing else on it can be very helpful.

 

[Entropy]

You can streamline the process a bit by setting "Head tap action" to "Char Info" in Settings / Dictionary / Entry Display - that'll reduce it from three taps to two by taking you directly to Char Info when you tap on a headword character in a dictionary entry screen.

I'll play with this. But then how do I get the definition popup? :-/

(And, when I do copy that "mo" from ADS, which I should probably disable, I get "m'ochul'ai) which is certainly not what I want. Pasting a definition should return me to the very definition I pasted.)

Which entry is this?

"moyu". I thought that was clear, sorry. If I paste "mo" from "moyu" (konjac) in a way that gets me to an ADS entry, then paste that into the search field (I was experimenting with how to get the English text--see below) I get some entry I don't want to see. What I really want is to not be able to do something so stupid, but that's not the easiest thing for you to fix.

And, I forgot to mention that I can't figure out how to copy an English word from the body of the definition into the pasteboard. This would help me look up "amorphophallus rivieri" on Google. Sometimes, the dictionary definitions are relatively unhelpful. Can I build my own dictionary with pictures and recipes?

And, why have both a zoom button and a character viewer? THe character viewer won't show me a multi-character selection, but that could be changed, at least on iPad.

That's why - also a bit quicker to get to (with Char Info you'd have to select the right tab), and it's an important function for that talking-to-the-chef scenario you mentioned; if there's a word you want to express for someone in unambiguous terms, flashing them a screen with that word and nothing else on it can be very helpful.[/quote]

True. Of course I didn't bother to try that button until last night. But, it could send me to a modified character info screen that shows that text *and* lets me animate it, and then move to the other tabs.

I'm also thinking the SOD is too big on an iPad. I'd prefer to see that pane divided into quadrants, which could contain some of the other info, or contain more than one character.

BTW, if Pleco is written in Objective-C, why not build a version for the new mini MacBook Air?

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

 

[mikelove]

I'll play with this. But then how do I get the definition popup? :-/

From Char Info, with a few extra taps - go into the "Words" tab and tap on the first item listed.

"moyu". I thought that was clear, sorry. If I paste "mo" from "moyu" (konjac) in a way that gets me to an ADS entry, then paste that into the search field (I was experimenting with how to get the English text--see below) I get some entry I don't want to see. What I really want is to not be able to do something so stupid, but that's not the easiest thing for you to fix.

Wait, so you're tapping on the "mo" character, copying it, pasting it into the input field, and then it inserts the text "m'ochul'ai"? Sorry if I'm being obtuse here but I don't get it...

And, I forgot to mention that I can't figure out how to copy an English word from the body of the definition into the pasteboard. This would help me look up "amorphophallus rivieri" on Google. Sometimes, the dictionary definitions are relatively unhelpful. Can I build my own dictionary with pictures and recipes?

English text selection isn't supported yet but is coming in the already-submitted-to-Apple 2.2 update. Embedding pictures in user dictionary entries will hopefully be coming in a future release, along with the same capability for flashcards (and, in both places, for audio as well).

BTW, if Pleco is written in Objective-C, why not build a version for the new mini MacBook Air?

Different user interface APIs and uncertain market prospects - we're thinking about it, though, it'll depend on how well our quick-and-dirty Android-to-desktops port does. No way we're putting it in the Mac App Store, though.

 

[Entropy]

I'll play with this. But then how do I get the definition popup? :-/

From Char Info, with a few extra taps - go into the "Words" tab and tap on the first item listed.

So it sounds like I lose the extremely useful popup--one reason it's useful is that it's immediate. In fact, I may have played with this and turned it back to showing the popup.

Wait, so you're tapping on the "mo" character, copying it, pasting it into the input field, and then it inserts the text "m'ochul'ai"? Sorry if I'm being obtuse here but I don't get it...

I can't duplicate this now. Strange. But yes--that's what I was doing, but I was copying the ADS definition using the clipboard button.

BTW, if Pleco is written in Objective-C, why not build a version for the new mini MacBook Air?

Different user interface APIs and uncertain market prospects - we're thinking about it, though, it'll depend on how well our quick-and-dirty Android-to-desktops port does. No way we're putting it in the Mac App Store, though.

Well, i'm thinking ahead to the possibility that Apple will provide tools to let you run iOS apps in Lion, or port them, *and* the possibility that the 11.6" MBA will be a runaway hit. I'm certainly planning to buy one and use it next to my iPad to show the text I'm trying to translate, and it certainly seems that having Pleco on a much faster machine with a keyboard would be useful.

What kind of competition is there on the desktop on the Mac side? Can you rule that roost? If so, I'd be inclined to suggest that over Android. How long is the Android port going to take, anyway?

~ Kiran

 

[mikelove]

So it sounds like I lose the extremely useful popup--one reason it's useful is that it's immediate. In fact, I may have played with this and turned it back to showing the popup.

Yes, you do lose the popup in that case - not much we can do about that, it's an either-or thing.

I can't duplicate this now. Strange. But yes--that's what I was doing, but I was copying the ADS definition using the clipboard button.

Well let me know if it resurfaces anyway.

Well, i'm thinking ahead to the possibility that Apple will provide tools to let you run iOS apps in Lion, or port them, *and* the possibility that the 11.6" MBA will be a runaway hit. I'm certainly planning to buy one and use it next to my iPad to show the text I'm trying to translate, and it certainly seems that having Pleco on a much faster machine with a keyboard would be useful.

What kind of competition is there on the desktop on the Mac side? Can you rule that roost? If so, I'd be inclined to suggest that over Android. How long is the Android port going to take, anyway?

Given Jobs' comments about touchscreen interfaces on laptops, I have a feeling that cross-development tools won't be happening anytime soon - at least not until 10.8 or 10.9.

It'd be considerably easier to port to Mac than to port to Android, and I think we'd do well as Mac Chinese dictionaries go, but it's a much smaller market and fundamentally it's just not what we're known for - part of the reason the desktop version keeps getting pushed back is that new mobile platforms keep coming along that we have to support; if we don't service Android then somebody else will, whereas after a decade or so of OS X there are still hardly any Chinese dictionary applications for it.

 

[Entropy]

You can streamline the process a bit by setting "Head tap action" to "Char Info" in Settings / Dictionary / Entry Display - that'll reduce it from three taps to two by taking you directly to Char Info when you tap on a headword character in a dictionary entry screen.

So it sounds like I lose the extremely useful popup--one reason it's useful is that it's immediate. In fact, I may have played with this and turned it back to showing the popup.

Yes, you do lose the popup in that case - not much we can do about that, it's an either-or thing.

Or I could switch to Pleco HWR and long-tap to get to the character info screen. :lol:

After finding this, I have to wonder why I can't long-tap everywhere else in the interface, for example, to pop up a definition while editing in the document viewer. The reason I suggested a dual-pane interface was to avoid trying to figure out how to distinguish an editing click from a definition-requesting click, but this provides an obvious solution. But an abstracted dual-pane interface element could solve other problems--for example, displaying an image on which OCR has been performed, while editing the resulting text, or displaying the same text in simplified and trad.

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

 

[YoshiCookie]

One more request.

I study bits and pieces of characters (and the radicals and various sundry parts of the hanzi). However, I am sometimes unable to add these pieces to my flashcards easily... As I'll explain.

Oftentimes I'll be looking at a character. Then I'll go the "chars" section where it breaks it down for me. Then I will click on an interesting component... which even has a listed definition. However, after I click on that component, I have no way of adding it to my flashcards because it does NOT have a single word entry (like you were mentioning previously to "just click on the first word that pops up" etc.).

I actually CAN add these little pieces to my flashcard list if I back all the way out and go waaaaaay back to the primary dictionary screen, and then figure out some sort of way to input the character component (whether I choose it from the pinyin list or I hand-write it in) ... and then I can see a definition screen and add it to my flashcards.

Is there anyway that this could be simplified? Again, I'm talking about components of characters.

For example

油漆 ＝ paint.

I take a look at 漆, and then dissect it into 三点水 and 桼.

I click on 桼. It even has a definition to read, but since it has no "words" ... I cannot easily save it to my flashcards with backing up all the way like I described previously.

 

[mikelove]

Or I could switch to Pleco HWR and long-tap to get to the character info screen.

Ah yes, popular feature among those few who know of its existence - it was actually the subject of one of the critical bugs the combination of which forced us to pull / re-submit our OCR update last week. (another late-breaking bug fix had completely broken it)

After finding this, I have to wonder why I can't long-tap everywhere else in the interface, for example, to pop up a definition while editing in the document viewer. The reason I suggested a dual-pane interface was to avoid trying to figure out how to distinguish an editing click from a definition-requesting click, but this provides an obvious solution. But an abstracted dual-pane interface element could solve other problems--for example, displaying an image on which OCR has been performed, while editing the resulting text, or displaying the same text in simplified and trad.

The only reason you can't do that stuff while editing now is that we're still relying on Apple's built-in text editing UI control while using our own UI control for document viewing; once we add editing support to our system it'll be quite easy to add support for simultaneous editing and reading, but right now there'd be no way to grab those tap-holds from their system and respond to them with a word lookup.

For example

油漆 ＝ paint.

I take a look at 漆, and then dissect it into 三点水 and 桼.

I click on 桼. It even has a definition to read, but since it has no "words" ... I cannot easily save it to my flashcards with backing up all the way like I described previously.

This looks like a bug, actually - "Words" is supposed to bring up the Unihan entry (from which the definition in "Chars" is taken) in that case. Too late to fix this for 2.2.0 but we'll get on it for 2.2.1 - thanks!

 

[dcarpent]

Here's a small change that I think would be helpful. In the flashcard window the speaker icon for playing the audio is in the upper right corner, but if you select a character to pop up the dictionary entry for a character on the flashcard the speaker icon moves to the top middle of the screen. Would it be possible to keep it at the same place on both screens, either in the corner or in the middle?

 

[mikelove]

Here's a small change that I think would be helpful. In the flashcard window the speaker icon for playing the audio is in the upper right corner, but if you select a character to pop up the dictionary entry for a character on the flashcard the speaker icon moves to the top middle of the screen. Would it be possible to keep it at the same place on both screens, either in the corner or in the middle?

That should be possible once we add support for custom toolbars - I'm not sure if you'll be able to customize the bar at the top of the flashcard screen but you should definitely be able to customize the black popup reader bar to put the audio button in the rightmost slot.

 

[YoshiCookie]

I've already expressed these concerns via e-mail but I'll post them here to see how others feel. I would like:

A simple system to conduct searches within a specific flashcard category, or simple search all flashcards. There technically is a way to search now, but it is very cumbersome.

There should be audio recordings for all erhuayun variants, so that erhunyun is rendered properly, without the annoying little "r" as a final syllable.

Let me view flashcards directly in the dictionary with pop-up dictionary. At least let me do this somehow.

More dictionaries. Classical Chinese dictionary....

It would be great to have a phonetic system that can quilt together sounds more naturally for words that don't have their own recording.

Update/expand search function/handwriting/radical lookup to include Unicode Extension B and all of that jazz.

Custom audio recordings would be PHENOMENAL.

Sorting files would be cool, but I did figure out a work-around.

Updated/improved matches for historical variant characters across ALL dictionaries. (simple example 纔 is only cross-listed with 才 in a single dictionary. Cross-searches DON'T work. Example 纔能 doesn't bring up any matches (but 才能 works fine).

Please add different fonts, calligraphy ones, etc. Like 行書、草書、隸書、（大／小）篆書、甲骨文、等等。

Some people want added Cantonese, Tang Dynasty, Middle Chinese, Japanese, Korean support... At least add ability to deal with extra data. Yellowbridge, for example, has tang, middle Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese readings.

OCE isn't out yet, so I'm not sure about it, but it would be very nice to be able to scan large sections of text, or paragraphs, and then save them to the reader.

Let me transfer words from one user dictionary to another.

Fix Simplified to Traditional Conversion errors. Or at least let me edit the core dictionary entry on my system.

Add online user-content sharing abilities, and built in Q & A boards into the app. Also start developing continual content, like nciku.com.

I know it's a lot to ask for, but even covering some of these will make me very happy.

 

[Entropy]

Copying text from flashcards

Since Mike (Hi, Mike!) suggested that word lists would be better stored as flashcards, I converted mine to flashcards. But, when I bring up a flashcard, I can't copy the Chinese text without going all the way to "change dictionary/entry."

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

 

[mikelove]

Since Mike (Hi, Mike!) suggested that word lists would be better stored as flashcards, I converted mine to flashcards. But, when I bring up a flashcard, I can't copy the Chinese text without going all the way to "change dictionary/entry."

No way around this at the moment, but the Card Info screen is overdue for getting an improvement to its text-handling code - hopefully in one of the 2.2.x updates we'll get it supporting the same features you get from the dedicated definition screen as far as text-selection / cross-referencing / etc.

 

[mikeo]

I only read a few pages of the thread, so apologies if this has already been mentioned:

The insertion point is reset if you switch between HWR and Pinyin during dictionary search input, leading to additional taps in what is a kind of finicky (at least on my iphone 4) insertion-point setting.

So, for example, if I'm entering a two-character phrase, and I enter the first as a character in HWR, then I position the insertion point to before that character I just entered, and switch to Pinyin, the insertion point is reset instead of preserved. Same if I happen to tap an entry by mistake, then hit "back" - the insertion point has been reset.

Is there a reason the insertion point can't be preserved until I deliberately reset it with a "clear field" or some other similar action?

 

[mikelove]

Is there a reason the insertion point can't be preserved until I deliberately reset it with a "clear field" or some other similar action?

Yes - basically, when you're in HWR or Rad mode you're actually using a Pleco-developed text editing field that's designed to mimic Apple's built-in one; if you stare at it very carefully switching between HWR/Rad and Key you might notice a few pixels changing. Apple for some inscrutable reason doesn't provide a way for third-party apps to retrieve or set the position of the insertion point in their text edit fields, so we have no way to preserve the location of the insertion point when switching between their field and ours.

In OS 4 they've finally made it possible to connect a proprietary text edit field like ours to the built-in iOS keyboards, which eliminates the only reason why we don't use our field all the time, so once we feel like we can safely drop support for OS 3 (maybe next summer?) we may be able to fix this problem by no longer using the Apple one even in Key mode, but until then there's not much we can do to fix this unfortunately.

 

[gato]

I'd like the top and bottom bars in the Reader to disappear while reading and only appear when the screen is tapped. See Stanza for an example. On the small screen of the iPhone/iPod, getting rid of the bars would probably give the reader 20% more reading space.

I know the Pleco Reader has quite a few more icons because of the dictionary function. You could have a two-line icon bar at the bottom (similar to Stanza) so that you can fit all the icons in.

 

[character]

In OS 4 they've finally made it possible to connect a proprietary text edit field like ours to the built-in iOS keyboards, which eliminates the only reason why we don't use our field all the time, so once we feel like we can safely drop support for OS 3 (maybe next summer?) we may be able to fix this problem by no longer using the Apple one even in Key mode, but until then there's not much we can do to fix this unfortunately.

I'd appreciate it if you would go ahead and work that in, and just default to using Apple's on OS 3 devices.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ ... using.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20002000-SW6

Right now it's a UX pain point and makes your app look buggy. Since you can solve the problem for a large and growing number of customers (OS 4.x users), it's worth doing IMO.

 

[mikelove]

I'd like the top and bottom bars in the Reader to disappear while reading and only appear when the screen is tapped. See Stanza for an example. On the small screen of the iPhone/iPod, getting rid of the bars would probably give the reader 20% more reading space.

I know the Pleco Reader has quite a few more icons because of the dictionary function. You could have a two-line icon bar at the bottom (similar to Stanza) so that you can fit all the icons in.

Much-requested, yes - I prefer one bar on the top and one on the bottom when the bars do appear, though, I continue to have serious problems with vertically stacked buttons on capacitive-screen devices (really really hard to hit accurately). But basically the reader UI needs to be prettier / more minimalist, the dictionary UI needs to be more customizable, and the flashcard UI needs to be less confusing.

Right now it's a UX pain point and makes your app look buggy. Since you can solve the problem for a large and growing number of customers (OS 4.x users), it's worth doing IMO.

It'll be a lot easier if we switch to our input field exclusively than if we have to juggle alternatives for both OSes at the same time; most of the code relating to opening / closing input is due for a rewrite anyway (dates back to a very early development build), so I'd rather not further spaghetti-ify what we have now when if we wait 6 months we can fix it properly and cleanly.

We have far more things to do than we have time to do them in, so it's not really worth implementing one improvement in a highly inefficient manner in order to release it a little earlier when there are other equally high-priority ones that are as easy to do now as they'll ever be.

 

[Fleminator]

This is VERY minor (and silly), but in flashcards, when you reveal answer parts separately, it says "reveal definition" and "reveal pron". I understand that spelling out "pronunciation" might be a long word, but when my wife first saw it, she thought it said "reveal porn" I don't think it would look too bad to squeeze in the full word, or at least more letters "reveal pronunc." Or even "reveal pinyin"