Beta 4 Feedback Thread

[mikelove]

Nope, there's a "Profile" menu right at the top of the Flashcard Central screen.

There's no way to edit flashcards in the middle of a session, unfortunately - it's very challenging to keep all of that stuff synchronized. However, you could mark the flashcards you wanted to update with a special category and then search for / edit them in the Manage Cards screen after the session, or could just do a search in Manage Cards for all of the cards that you'd reviewed recently and pick out the ones you needed to edit.

 

[llammamama]

Another quick question about a detail of the flashcard system:

Will there be a way to review missed flashcards at the end of a session? The ability to start a "Review Only" session sorted by most recently missed cards would be almost as good (so long as the review only section had no impact on repition spacings etc). This feature could probably wait untill 2.1, but over the long term I'm afraid not having a final drill would have a pretty large negative impact on my learning.

Of those who are familiar with Supermemo, I think most would agree that the 'final drill' is important. You probably know about it, but at any rate the final drill is just another chance to immediately review the flashcards you missed without further impacting the card spacing.

Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

Yes, you're automatically prompted to do this at the end of each session, and as in SuperMemo it doesn't further affect the spacings of those cards.

 

[Hartville]

Looking at a character and being able to see its radical would be great. It would be
beneficial to everybody if you outlined the radicals of each character in red.

 

[daniu]

Hi!

Hartville: I think this wish is fulfilled in the info screen already - if I understand correctly what you mean ...

Another thing: it would be great to be able to count the number of characters in flashcards that do not belong to category 1 any more - that means basically known characters. I mean: characters - not words. Should be doable ... but I agree - it rather sounds like a 2.1 feature - or maybe even 2.2 ...

best regards
Daniel

 

[Alexis]

Will there be a way to review missed flashcards at the end of a session? The ability to start a "Review Only" session sorted by most recently missed cards would be almost as good (so long as the review only section had no impact on repition spacings etc)... I think most would agree that the 'final drill' is important. You probably know about it, but at any rate the final drill is just another chance to immediately review the flashcards you missed without further impacting the card spacing.

This would be a great feature! A "Review Today's Incorrect" or "Review Only" button which would not affect the rankings or repetition spacing would be very, very useful!

 

[mikelove]

daniu - there's actually something like this in the Statistics screen; it'll give you a count of all of the cards that have been answered correctly the last 3 times you reviewed them (seemed like a reasonable threshhold, though we can certainly tweak it if people find it's too aggressive / not aggressive enough - you'll be able to see the count for your 1.0 flashcards as soon as you import them).

Alexis - something like that will have to wait for 2.1, but you can review the incorrect cards immediately after a session at least.

 

[qubus]

Hello

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to post for this, but I've searched the forum for answers but couldn't find any. I wanted to try the Beta4 since I'm really looking forward to the 2.0 and who knows, maybe I can help a little as well, since I have a lot of free time and will be brushing up my chinese (actually re-learning it =) ) with the help of plecodict.

anyhow, to my question: I have the 1.0 running well on my HTC 3500 (Artemis) WM 6.1 (no touchflo). But for some reason many things of the Beta don't work. I might have installed it incorrectly, I'd be pleased if someone could point me to a post I've missed in my searches or just give me a hint.

I've put all the extracted files in one folder (Pleco) on my storage card, NO SUBFOLDERS! And that DLL plus the exe into my phone memory program files/Pleco. I did unlock it and got the message announcing that. For now, the stroke order and the audio part doesn't work. How do I get that to work?

Now, when I lookup a character, let's say "hào":
- when I click on Modules > Character Info... nothing happens, but when I click on the character in the dictionary AFTER clicking on that character info option, the character info comes up
- in the character info "detail" tab, I only see the character on the upper left corner in a box and have 3 EMPTY dropdown menus (2 in the upper right corner and 1 below the character box, below the middle of the screen there is a "show selected details"-button, and on the right side there is scrollbar, that is overlapped 3 times by white bars. These bars seem to be between those dropdown menus and the button. Therefore, always on the hight of a button or dropdown menu to the left of the scrollbar, the scrollbar is visible. There is a scrollbutton in it that can be moved, also behind those white stripes.
- in the character info "Stroke Order" tab, I only see something in the right 1/3 of the screen. In the first column there are 5 buttons (from top to bottom: 'skip to beginning', back, play, forward, 'skip to end'). To the right of that, at about the same hight as those 5 buttons it sais "Radical:", empty box, "0/0", "Speed:", empty dropdown, checkbox "outline", checkbox "digits". The rest of the screen is blank, no boxes or anything.
- in the character info "Compounds" everything seems to work fine. Two boxes with words in it, titled with "Words starting with this character:" and "Other words containing this character:"

Flashcard section:
I imported my lists that I exported from plecodict 1.0, those get a little messed up, which I saw was discussed somewhere in this thread. Pleco dict exports from ZDT altough seem to work fine (if anyone would care for any, I can upload some, but you'll find those online).
Well, with the good import all works fine. I just don't get the stroke order to work and audio of course. But I still have some questions:

- Doing "Self-scored" with reading and writing enabled, there is a small field on the bottom one can freewrite into. But it is rather small, about half the height of the "exit" and "show" buttons and the field's upper line is thicker (4 pixels, the other lines are all 1pxl) with two white, 2 pixel wide dents in the center, those are 12pixels apart and 3 pixels deep (leaving a boxline of 1 pixel with). Don't know if that's supposed to be like that. (I just found out that one can enlarge that box by dragging that line upwards, "not a bug, a feature" I guess ;-) )
- Doing "Free answer" with reading, it doesn't score right, does not recognize a correct answer, actually never got a correct one, even though I did it right. Also, clicking on a field one has already put an answer in, and trying to correct it (say I had a 2 and think it was a 4, it does not replace but adds it, I get 24. Didn't figure out how to correct/delete an entry.
- Doing "Tone practice", which I guess does about the same, it does correct as it should.

Well, I gotta say, this flashcard application is just awesome! Great job, very well done!! Can't wait for the final version. But since so much is working already, I guess I'll rather use the Beta than the 1.03 =D. I really wonder how the audio works and would like to get that running as well.

So I guess back to my main problems: Getting stroke order and audio to work. Did I miss a post while searching? Something about buying/unlocking was mentioned somewhere. How/where can I do that?

Thanks a lot, I guess I wrote a lot more than I wanted. Keep it up! I'll be telling everybody in my class to look into this! =)

Edit: I guess I found how to order the stroke order and audio addon. So that will work with the final version too?

 

[mikelove]

This is a fine place to put it, thanks for the detailed feedback.

The issues on Char Info sound like they might have something to do with the UniHan data file being missing - should be in the "encodings" folder in the Beta 4 distribution. Stroke order and audio are indeed dependent on those add-on modules so buying/installing those should enable them. (and yes, they'll work in the final version too)

Flashcards will convert much better with the new 1.0-to-2.0 exporter program we're releasing with Beta 5, so since the Beta 4 ones will stop working anyway you'll probably want to run through them again with that. That drawing field is indeed a feature and not a bug but it's disabled by default in B5 (with a handy little checkbox in the Modes section of Advanced settings to re-enable it).

With free answer, are you sure you put tone numbers in along with the Pinyin? At the moment those are required, though we're probably going to give in and re-enable the "ignore tones" option in Beta 5 (pedagogically I'm not wild about it, but there are some words/characters for which different dictionaries actually do list different tones so it's something even people studying tones like they're supposed to might still find a useful option).

And thanks! Hopefully with a little more polish it'll be even better - I really love the free answer / tone practice stuff, personally, it can be absolutely teeth-grindingly brutal (characters especially - even though the recognizer is forgiving of minor mistakes it's a lot easier to read a character than to write it in) but I think it's a far more effective memorization tool than the passive recall of self-scored cards.

 

[Ajo]

Hello,
I downloaded Pleco 2.0 beta 4 last week. And I wish to give some feed back. As numerous feedback posts have already been published on this forum and as I do not have the energy to read and understand all of them, I may look stupid by coming back on already closed discussions. I fully understand that this is a beta version. I write only to help so that the final product reaches my expectations as much as possible.

I have Palm TX.
I use Pleco Dict 1.0.3 since early 2006. Use for personal interests only. With the Oxford dictionary.
For Pleco Dict 2.0 I downloaded the package and bought the Sound and Stroke order package.
I use mainly traditional characters big5.


First impressions.
1. The main screen is grey and not white. It give an impression of unfinished. This impression can be seen in every window.
2. In the input window the image "Done" Button is in the middle of the page. Actually, it is just above the input line of the PDA but if the input line is hidden, the button stays at the middle and a new one is created at the bottom of the screen. I wrote that it is the image of the button and not the full working button as when I click this image noting happens.When I close the input window and come back to the main screen by clicking the "done" button. The main screen is not "refreshed" and at the bottom of the screen (PDA input line hidden) the input window is still visible. Has the screen for the software been defined for a 460*320 screen?
3. I paid only for the Oxford Dictionary and I wished to remove the other dictionaries in DEMO version. So I removed the files from the SD card. If I do that, I can not launch Pleco Engine (pleco Dict 2). If I click on Pleco Engine, the screen goes blank and I need to perform a soft reset. In some cases, the soft reset is automatic.
4. For the Voice. If I try to listen the voice too often. I mean by ''often'' : listening - repeat - listening - repeat - 3 or four times. Then the sound is replaced by a noise similar to the noise of the TV when you remove the cable or antenna. Some time it can be a succession of CLICKS. I any case the only solution to stop that is to soft reset.

Now some questions:
1/ How can I have the HWR at the bottom of the screen? Or similarly as on version 1.0.3, how can I use the main screen as a place to trace the strokes (with a ON/OFF button at the bottom)?
2/ Where can I change the sound level (volume)?

General Comments.
Nice work. Thank you for that.

Bye
Alexandre

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the feedback. #s 1, 2, and 4 are all known problems that are fixed in the latest builds (soon to be released as Beta 5), #3 I'm not so sure about - are you certain that you only removed the extra dictionaries and not any other files?

The handwriting palette doesn't work that well in Beta 4 but can be brought out using the Layout Preferences panel (in Beta 5 we've re-enable the popup menus too) - to get it to fullscreen mode just drag the resize handle until it's half an inch or so from the bottom of the screen. (also replaced by a button control in Beta 5) The sound level can be changed in your Palm's Preferences panel, there's no separate setting for Pleco since it basically just plays at whatever the system volume is.

 

[Ajo]

Thanks for accepting this late feedback.
#1, #2, #4 this is taken care of.
#3 I removed the files : 21cn.pdb; abc.pdb; ctbiz.pdb; guifan.pdb and nwp.pdb from the SD card directory PALM\launcher
If I do so, I can not launch Pleco Engine. Instead the Palm TX reset (soft reset). If I put them back it works again.

Thanks for answering my questions.
Alexandre

 

[mikelove]

OK, we'll do some testing and hopefully get this found/fixed soon.