gary said:
iBooks: tap and hold to select a word (character in this case), as you move your thumb around, a loupe appears showing what's selected, and the selection changes as you move around, and then release when something is selected. In this case, selection mode appears letting you choose that one character or more, a menu appears: copy, lookup, ... Mis-taps should be ok. There's always the back button.
It's a lot harder to aim at a single character accurately, though - that's why we've stuck with our tap-lookup + arrow system, makes it considerably easier to zero in on a specific character than with Apple's loupe thing. The most likely thing at this point is that we'll let you tap-hold to get the selection loupe if you prefer, but once you let go you'll get the full Pleco popup reader interface with the addition of draggable handles and a copy button wedged in there somewhere - tough to find a way to accommodate all of that without it getting a bit overwhelming, though.
gary said:
yes, instead of a definition popup, go to the definition itself, like you were lookup up that character. Prehaps a preference popup or not.
You can use Apple-style text selection to highlight a word, then tap on the "Search" button in the menu popup to search for it in the main dictionary. Or you can tap on a character to bring up the popup reader, then tap on the > button to bring up the full-screen definition. But I'm a little wary of going directly to the definition because if it turns out that you tapped on the wrong character it's going to be very annoying to have to go back.
gary said:
Backward/forward swipes could be active only when viewing a definition or at the search screen. If one choose to handwrite something to recognize, the mode would be different without swipes. Seems ok? Another app, Notebooks (Alfons Schmid) lets you swipe between notes. very nice though its swipe sensitivity is greater than SpringBoard for app pages, a bit too much I think. If you were also concerned about mis-swipes, does that ever happen with SpringBoard, seems not.
Springboard doesn't have to also accommodate people scrolling down, though. I'm also a little worried because of the iPhone's less-than-stellar Chinese text rendering speed - to get a swipe like that to look nice and smooth, you have to have the next / previous entries rendered and ready to go more-or-less as soon as the user starts swiping (so that the user can see the new screen sliding in as they drag). I'm also not wild about mixing up the left/right and up/down interface metaphors on iPhone - left/right in most iPhone apps including ours is very clearly an "increasing level of detail" move, going left / right to move through a list of search results which are on the same "level" seems like it might be rather confusing.
gary said:
Overall, it seems usability could be greatly increased. Much like Mac OS, many features are hidden and don't get in the way, but if you know them. Like Cmd-W to close a window, cmd-option to close all windows, or option-click your desktop to hide the current app. doesn't interfere if you don't know it's there. With iOS, other features are much less developed; they're still figuring all of it out. Like some new things they're thinking about.
That's part of the reason why we have so many settings, actually - we've got a limited number of places to put stuff and there's a lot of functionality that we have to give people
some way to access.
gary said:
Sorry to say, Pleco seems to be a bit complicated. At least the preferences. I feel many could be removed to make the app simpler for those new to it, or that don't want to figure things out. Those good at IT forget about complications. Word or Excel, few know all the features and its design, so much included that many basic things take too many steps. So Apple makes apps like Pages and Numbers, careful to introduce new features without making what's there more difficult to use. Back to preferences. things like toolbar color. really? If iOS or Mac OS Preferences included such things; it'd be as bad as Windows. I suppose letting one choose a color is simpler than the hard work of trying things out and seeing what is a good toolbar color. Mac OS took so many years to go to gray, a neutral color that interferes less with content. But iOS, not bad so far Safari with a blue toolbar, fairly neutral though I think a bit shiny as it is now, also looks ok in inverse mode (double tap home button). Or if many preferences will stay there for now, a search for preferences. like Mac OS X system preferences (or how you can search an app menu thru help). Mac OS hasn't added that yet to app preferences but they will someday.
Indeed it is, which is why we've actually hired an outside UI design firm to help us for the next big update. As far as preferences specifically, the next major update should organize them a lot more neatly and bury a lot of the less useful ones in an "Advanced" screen - searching is a good idea too, though, we'll see if we can add something like that.
But I don't think making these things customizable is a bad idea in general; 99% of the work in making toolbar colors customizable was required simply to be able to offer a "night mode," which has actually proven quite popular (people often do intensive Chinese study in dark places - on an overnight bus / train, say), so once we'd done that, and once we had a color picker anyway (needed for tone coloring, which we
definitely needed to make customizable given the many dueling schemes out there), we figured we might as well go all the way with it and let people pick arbitrary colors. Which quite a lot of people do (though perhaps fewer would if we'd chosen a less glaring shade of blue for the default).
gato said:
I agree that Pleco should strongly consider dropping some of the preferences and err on the side having fewer user-configurable options rather than more. It's nice to have options, but when there are so many options, it become hard for users to learn about them and find the ones they are actually interested in. This would be a problem even if there is an expert menu to hide some of the less used options. If you have too options in the expert menu, for all effective purposes, those options will be hidden from or impossible to learn for the average user. User configurable color, for example, is very important for the reader, which the user might spend a lot of time staring at, but configurable color is probably less needed for the dictionary itself. There are also many other more technical options that very few users will want to change.
It actually is important for the dictionary too - I myself have carried on quite a few Pleco-assisted conversations with Chinese strangers on overnight trains where a glaring white screen could be somewhat annoying. And it's only going to get more important if Apple switches to OLED screens (which use up significantly less power for black pixels than white ones) in a year or two. We actually could use more customizability in some areas - there's a
lot of interest in user-reconfigurable toolbars, e.g., which are very likely to show up in 2.3.
I agree that the number of options can seem overwhelming, but I'm not sure which ones we'd take away - there are a few that are kind of cumbersome, the "entry commands" stuff ought to be integrated into a simpler custom toolbar / command menu system for example, and a few that may not be as important on iOS as they were on Palm/WM - customizable wildcard characters, for example, which aren't really necessary on an OS where everybody's stuck with the same set of IMEs - but even if we really cut aggressively we could maybe reduce the number of options by 20%... not sure if that's enough to make a difference.
gary said:
yes yes yes. Reader color is good. Toolbar? With such long scrolling pref screens, maybe the problem is not enough UI elements. iOS is still figuring them out. Invent some of your own. Or toolbar color, and maybe other things could be hidden, and active when let's say one is in preferences and swipes the toolbar.
More hierarchy in the preferences screens would definitely be good, yes - makes it seem less overwhelming even when it isn't. Toolbar color goes hand-in-hand with reader color for that "night mode" scenario at least.
Linking to its full definition so I can just browse around and just read the dictionary. 