Feature Suggestions

[mikelove]

For that batch-delete suggestion we'd probably be just as well off adding a search option to look for cards that were "only in" a specific category (add an in / not in / only in list for category searches).

Case-insensitive category names would require a schema change, so that can't happen for a quite a while, though we could certainly consider it in the future.

 

[stephanhodges]

How about this for names...

Keep a small list while processing, and whenever you get a new "starting line", process it to match cases with the 1st one encountered, but by section.

So,

//radicals/Top 25
//radicals/26-50
//Radicals/51-75

would automagically be changed by your software to just match "radicals".

Of course, a warning afterwards that multiple variations on the group name were found would be good. Of course, basically the same for actual category name.

You could prefetch all category names by 1st letter upper and first letter lower also to match against preexisting.

Same problem probably occurs when manually creating or renaming a category, right?

In all three places, time/performance to do the above isn't as important as avoiding the potential duplicates, etc.

I think it wouldn't be necessary to have a remedial program to fix up existing stuff, since people can export the list and look for matches, etc.

 

[mikelove]

That would be a lot of work for such a minor change - better to wait and change the actual database schema in 2.1 or somesuch, for right now we'll just say category names are officially case-sensitive.

 

[Stump]

I just bought and installed v2.0 the [char info] function seems pretty interesting to get extra knowledge, especially in order to link hanzi and korean hanja - since nobody uses them anymore it is impossible to learn for a foreigner (you learn hanzi and kanji when learning chinese/japanese but korean have decided to get completely rid of it)
however the hangul doesnt display, is this normal? it is annoying because the korean romanization seems very weird to me

 

[mfcb]

would be nice, if the "duplicate card" flash-popup could show the score of the card (from actual score file) and the categories where it is in already... if its an performance impact, how about deciding via options if the user wants it, or not...

 

[mikelove]

Stump - supporting Hangul would be really tough, unfortunately, because we'd need a bunch of very large new font files to support all of those characters, and would likely also need to shell out some hefty licensing fees for those font files. The "Korean" field in the database uses the Yale romanization field, I think - Wikipedia has some discussion of that here.

mfcb - yeah, a couple of people have mentioned displaying the new category it was added to - that might be doable as soon as 2.0.1. Displaying the current categories too would create a bit of a performance slowdown, though it certainly might be something we could add with a preferences option.

 

[anchan42]

I would like to be able to delete dictionay in manage dict. page.

 

[mfcb]

I would like to be able to delete dictionay in manage dict. page.

i dont!!! if somebody really (for what reason???) wants to delete a dictionary, he should exit pleco, and delete(or move) the file from the pleco data directory... if its available from the program, you can be sure some people testing it and then they wonder why the dict is not available anymore...

 

[westmeadboy]

Maybe the Manage Dicts page could include "type" info for each dictionary - "paid", "free", "demo"??

 

[mikelove]

anchan42 / mfcb - not sure about that one; perhaps a separate Pleco file / package manager utility would make sense, that way people wouldn't delete things by accident but would have an easy way to remove specific dictionaries they no longer wanted.

westmeadboy - good idea; we probably should have a separate "Dictionary Info" page too, actually, to list numbers of entries, modified dates, and such (particularly useful with user-created ones).

 

[anchan42]

Thanks for the reply, Mike. The request is purely out of laziness.
I want to delete some of the demo dict and find it a hard work to locate the right file to delete.
The "type info idea" is great.


:idea: Another request, when we add duplicate card, can the pleco keep record of how many times the cards have been added.
This way we can sort the flash card out by frequency and probably choose to review only high frequency words.

 

[mfcb]

as i am starting to use the reader more frequently... can you add a preference to limit the open dialog to one folder, compared to the actual behaviour of searching the whole system ?
if you have a lot of non-chinese text files on your system its quite painful to go through the list... also a "recently used files" list would be nice, lets say in case you read a book (for a longer time), but need to check other documents from time to time...

 

[mikelove]

anchan42 - interesting idea about keeping a record of those; even better would be if we kept a count of the number of times words were looked up in the dictionary in general, that could not only help you figure out which flashcards to emphasize but help you find new words to start including in your flashcard lists.

mfcb - good idea about the recent files list. With limiting the open dialog, can't you already pick a specific folder from the "Folder" menu, or does that still give you too many files?

 

[mfcb]

With limiting the open dialog, can't you already pick a specific folder from the "Folder" menu, or does that still give you too many files?

i can, but i always again have to... would be nice, if pleco would remember the directory. also the list of directories is quite big in my case :roll:

 

[Alexis]

Hi Mike,

I have been using the free-answer sketchbox flashcard mode to test my character writing (show pronunciation+definition).

I thought of something that I think would make this a much more useful:.

Could we have a "character" sketchbox" with optional "light" lines to separate the 4 quadrants? Then when you check your answer the character would be underlayered in a light color (perhaps green) over yours to help you see how well you drew it. This would bring some objectivity to a character writing test as you could now see how well symmetric and balanced the character that you drew was.

If there was some way to check if you did the stroke order correctly, that would be even cooler.

Thanks!
Alexis

 

[mikelove]

mfcb - good idea about remembering the last directory, though I'm not 100% sure WM actually allows you to configure what directory that box opens onto. (probably some way to do it, though)

Alexis - interesting idea; we could even expand this in the eventual desktop version to do calligraphic pen strokes (since desktop graphic tablets can track the rotation of the pen), so you could have a character writing practice box just like the sheets you have to go through in calligraphy classes.

 

[PeterP]

I'd really love to be able to see the Windows status line (at the top of the screen) while in a flashcard session - you know, the clock, volume control, etc. Perhaps this is already possible and I just haven't explored far enough yet.
Peter

 

[PeterP]

Found it .
Dict/Preferences/Choose Panel/External/Don't hide menu bars in flash/reader.
(RTFM!)
Peter

 

[Alexis]

This came up in a different thread, but I thought it might be worth mentioning here:

The demo entries don't really show the power of the 21c and other dictionaries as well as they could, especially the 21c which starts with a lot of abbreviations.
Suggest instead choosing the top 100 most common chinese words (which are likely to be in all dictionaries AND have audio), and limiting the demo to those 100 words. This may give prospective buyers/upgraders a better idea of what is inside pleco2

 

[mikelove]

The problem with doing this is that then people need a way to find those words - putting them at the start of the dictionary they're quite easy to find, but spreading them out they're not so easy. And showing just the non-demo entries in the Entry List would require some major changes to our database formats. If we really want a useful demo version we're going to have to come up with a time-limited one, and that's a very challenging thing licensing-wise; for right now we're pretty well resigned to the fact that people aren't going to get that good a sense of how Pleco works from the demo.