Dear Mike,
First let me say that I love the new Pleco. It makes Pleco 1 seem like a proof of concept. Pleco 2 is truly a joy to use, and if you never change anything, I will still love it. Nevertheless, I can't use it without thinking about things that would make it better for me. Here are some suggestions:
1. In flashcards, upon reveal, I currently hear the word once. I would like the “Maximum audio plays” to be able to set a variable number of plays. That is, if I set 3 as the Maximum Audio Plays, I would like to hear the word 3 times. I use repetition spaced free answer score immediately.
2. In flashcards, I would like to have a dictionary button like I have on the pop-up definition screen. This would allow me to know what dictionary the definition is pulled from, and would allow me to cycle through other dictionaries to see how another dictionary defines the same word. I know that I can activate a pop up window to do this, but it would be easier if I just had the dictionary button on the flashcard.
3. In flashcards, I would like one of my optional buttons to be a larger button like the correct or incorrect buttons that come up after the reveal.
4. In flashcards, I would like to be able to determine order/position of my optional buttons just like I can with the buttons at the top of the home/start page.
5. In pop up definitions, I would like to recursively bring up more pop up definitions. That is, in the pop up definition, I would like to pop up another pop up definition as sometimes I find a word I don’t know in the first pop up definition.
6. In pop up definitions, I would like the links to work.
7. In flashcards, I would like the [er2] to show up, or the [zi] to show up. In the definitions they show up, but in flashcards they are stripped off, even after the reveal.
8. I would like to have a flashcard list of all 30,000 words for which you have done audio. I would then like to import those that I don’t already have.
9. Even though you have recorded 30,000 words, I find a lot of words don’t have audio. I would like to have audio for all Chinese provinces, all major Chinese cities, all major Chinese geographic landmarks (mountains, rivers, etc.), major Chinese poets, politicians, generals, literary works, etc., all countries in the world, major cities of the world, major geographic landmarks of the world, major poets, writers, generals, leaders, etc. of the world, major literary works of the world, most common animals (zoo animals?), most common plants, common trademarks and company names.
10. I would like to allow duplicate flashcards in general, but when I’m adding a flashcard with the + button, sometimes it bounces and I get the flashcard twice, or I forget if I have added it and then add it again. So I would like to have a way to allow duplicates but not permit two of the same flashcards in a row.
11. In flashcards, I would like the links to work after the reveal.
12. In flashcards, I would like one of my optional buttons to be the stroke order (or char info). I know I can pull up the char info screen with the appropriate stylus input, but it would be nice to have a button in addition.
13. In flashcards, the reveal button bounces (now that I have the go back button it doesn’t matter so much), but the speaker button never bounces. I would like the reveal button to not bounce. And I would like to be able to hit the speaker button several times in a row and have the audio play several times in a row. Right now, if I hit the speaker button before the audio has completed, the button press is ignored. I have to wait until the audio has competed before Pleco will accept another button press. Maybe you could swap the input behavior so that the reveal never bounces and the audio button does.
14. I would like to have a volume slider that works something like the audio slider in pTunes. What I mean, is that base Pleco volume is set by the audio level established while I am actually on a phone call. In pTunes, the volume slider allows me to reduce that volume or to increase that volume. The only adjustment I have in Pleco is in the preferences, misc page, and this only increases the volume. It doesn’t allow me to bring the volume down from whatever volume I had left it on my last phone call. So this is a double request. 1) a volume adjustment button that brings up a volume control, available on the main page and also on the flashcard page, and 2) that the adjustment have the capability of lowering the volume in addition to increasing the volume. Incidentally, the side volume buttons do nothing.
15. I would like a separate control for the size and/or boldness of Chinese characters. I find that I can read the Roman characters very easily. They seem to be in bold compared to the Chinese characters. But the Chinese character strokes are very slight, and being Chinese, they can be lots of them. So it is extremely hard for me to read the Chinese characters in any of the dictionaries. I think they need to be a bigger font than the Roman characters. (I use a Treo 680.)
16. In flashcards, if after the reveal I accidentally hit the “don’t know” button rather than the “know” button, and then I go back to correct it, there is no way to restore my previous score. It has now been set to 50.
17. In flashcards, if after the reveal I accidentally hit the “know” button rather than the “don’t know” button, and then go back to fix it, I can use the available button to set it to 100, but I can’t set it to 50 like I would prefer. That button should be configurable somewhere.
18. It would be nice to have audio recordings for the sample sentences.
19. It would be nice to have the next increment of audio recordings as there are a lot of words in my flashcards, in addition to all the names mentioned in 9. above, that don't have recorded audio.
These suggestions are in random order, not priority order.
Again, just suggestions. You have created a wonderful product.
John
