Feature Suggestions

[mikelove]

sinoreen / mfcb - per the 2.0.1 suggestion thread I'm starting to think adding that button (along with Card Info) might make sense after all, though we'd also have that regular button prompt - once we're doing that, there's an easy option for users who don't want to have to delve into editing cards and it's trivial to add that additional button too.

F_Kal - I see the point about changing screen settings - still tricky to squeeze that into the interface but it certainly might be handy. And yes, might as well have a separate left-handed option for the reader. We skipped decimals in those jump fields due to programmer laziness but that should definitely get fixed at some point.

 

[sinoreen]

wow, thanks. it would really be great to have that "edit card button" feature already in 2.0.1.

on another topic:

Maybe somebody has suggested it before, but there is one thing that I find very very useful in wenlin and there is not in pleco: It gives you a way to judge if the that a word or the character you are reviewing is "useful" or not: Gives you a number saying how often this word appears in a typical text. In that way you know which words you should focus on studying and what to ignore!(I think it would really make a difference, displaying this information and sorting the results by this!)

Mike, I read your answer saying you haven't found the right data set yet. I think it was in this forum that someone mentioned the site Chinese text computing (http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/). I don't know about its suitability/usability though. However, I don't know how Wenlin managed to get this data, but there obviously must be a way, right? and even if it is not perfect (as statistics often are but an approximation), this feature would just be extremely useful. The "Compounds" feature in "Char Info" could also list words according to their frequency of usage (like in wenlin, though unfortunately Wenlin's frequency data is also far from comprehensive).

 

[thph2006]

It'd be great if the user could add a picture and audio (or video) clip to a flashcard. I have lots of mp3 clips of words and phrases and also have .jpg pictures to go with them and would love to import them into Pleco. At least for me it's order of magnitude easier to remember new words/phrases with a picture association.

It should work something like Byki or Rosetta Stone.

Thx, tom

 

[mikelove]

sinoreen - those unfortunately only seem to be for characters; character frequency data is easy to find, but words are really tough; just getting a computer to reliably parse Chinese text into words is kind of tricky, and getting it to do it reliably on a mass scale is harder still.

thph2006 - we'd love to add something like this, but it's tricky on the devices we're running on right now - Palms don't get along well with flashcard databases that big and on Windows Mobile our flashcard system doesn't even work reliably on SD cards yet (making big databases almost impossible). Certainly an option once we improve the database system, though.

 

[gato]

thph2006 - we'd love to add something like this, but it's tricky on the devices we're running on right now - Palms don't get along well with flashcard databases that big and on Windows Mobile our flashcard system doesn't even work reliably on SD cards yet (making big databases almost impossible). Certainly an option once we improve the database system, though.

Can you just store the filename of the mp3/image in the database and open the file as needed?

 

[mikelove]

Sure, but that presents a ton of new tech support issues - the files could be moved, renamed, accidentally erased, the directory structure could be reconfigured in some odd way that makes Pleco unable to find them, and Windows Mobile's SD card drivers being as terrible as they are the files could also just intermittently disappear / fail to load correctly, not to mention all of the potential new issues with backups / exports and the like.

So really not something I'd want to tackle, especially when if we just wait a year or two we can hopefully get to a point where the files can just be embedded in the database (also allowing us to gain some performance improvements by shrinking images, resampling audio and the like) - SQLite will quite happily insert enormous blocks of binary data into records, it's just a matter of getting it working well enough with SD cards that we can add all of that extra data without eating up people's internal memory.

 

[estudiando]

Since the current PY keyboard is sort of redundant, how about a copy of the English Keyboard with the numbers 5-9 replaced with: @ (wild card), # (full text), erase input line, > (move cursor to next word in input line), < (move cursor to previous word in input line)

Also, can we split this thread into "flash card suggestions" and "non-flash card suggestions"

 

[mikelove]

Not sure about that - having both numbers and tone marks is helpful for people who are only familiar with one system (as many people are, at least judging by the e-mail we get).

Once we've settled on / announced (or made obvious via a beta version) the feature set for 2.0.1 I was planning to start a new Feature Suggestions thread, so splitting it into two then makes sense - right now it would be tough to untangle this one since a lot of posts have both flashcard and non-flashcard components.

 

[sinoreen]

Does the Reader really not find documents in any SUBfolders on SD-Cards or is this only a problem on my PalmTX/Kingston 1GB SD Card combination? I love the Reader and have A LOT of documents on my SD-Cards. I think it would really be necessary to allow a folder search in the Reader Start Page (something Explorer-like). Now the Results Window shows all of my Documents at once and it takes me a while to find a specific one. Furthermore the Results Window in the Reader Start Page is too small. Why can't the Start page be shown in full screen mode? this way the result window would be a lot bigger. thanx...

 

[mikelove]

It searches subfolders, but only of folders which are included in Pleco's Search Paths (configurable through Preferences) - I agree we need a longer / more organized file list for the reader, though things like that tend to be a lot of work programming-wise so it's not necessarily something we can do right away. (fullscreen interfaces are really hard, so we only code those up for screens that are very heavily used)

 

[Alexis]

A few flashcard suggestions:

1) In the category selection screen: If a category has only some of it's sub-categories checked, it should display a faded checkbox to indicate that only some of the sub-categories are selected

2) If repeat cards are allowed in a session and I am wrong both times, the same card shows up twice in the "review incorrect" cards at the end of the session. Should probably only show up once.

3) In self-scored mode: To make it clear that the "review incorrect" cards at the end of the session don't count towards the scored, suggest that the "right arrow" button is shown after revealing the answer instead of the "correct/incorrect" buttons.

 

[mikelove]

1) Good idea, but difficult programming both on Palm and on WM - have to hack the table / tree view control to display more checkboxes than it's designed to. Certainly something we'll try to do eventually though.

2) Right, actually more of a bug I suppose.

3) We actually need those correct/incorrect buttons if repeat incorrect is running in "Loop" mode (since otherwise the software has no way to know if you remembered the card correctly this time), but it probably should be just an arrow if it's not looping.

 

[delectric]

I'd really like to be able to bounce the audio down to an mp3 file. At them moment I use supermemo for my flashcards it's annoying having to record a new word through an external MP3 player.

Also when searching within the definitions for sentences with a word would it be possible to have some mode where it can just produce a list of all the sentences?

 

[weight]

Apologies if this has already been suggested:

the document reader would rock even harder if we could assign "switch dictionary" and "add flash card" to buttons; also, having the option of being able to both "navigate the cursor" and "page up/down" wouldn't be too shabby.

Keep up the good work Mike.

 

[mikelove]

delectric - MP3 support of any kind is a no-go as long as we keep supporting Palm OS, since Palm doesn't have an MP3 encoder/decoder built in and we can't put one in Pleco without paying hefty patent royalties to Fraunhofer. Returning just example sentences isn't possible at the moment since most of our dictionaries don't yet have coding to tell Pleco which parts of each entry are example sentences and which parts are definitions / cross-references / etc, though this is definitely an area we're looking to improve on in future versions.

weight - thanks! More customizable hardware button control in the reader would be nice, yeah - ultimately we'd like to make the toolbars / button commands in the dictionary / flashcards / reader equally customizable (and using the same interface).

 

[stephanhodges]

Regarding showing a greyed "partial" checkbox... Since that's going to be difficult, could you change the displayed text to prefix a "*" or something similar to show that it was a partial? I agree with Alexis that it would be useful for me also.

1) Good idea, but difficult programming both on Palm and on WM - have to hack the table / tree view control to display more checkboxes than it's designed to. Certainly something we'll try to do eventually though.

On the subject of the tree control, etc. Would it be easy to change the current "default category" selection combo box to open up the full category edit window, so that we could take advantage of the folding tree control? Perhaps the same dialog window could serve double purpose. And, to anticipate one possible response, I'd also suggest that the appearance change to show you're selecting a category only, not doing the full edit. I'd like ALL the places we select categories to be able to use this, actually, including the front "Add Card" to category (when button held down).

It's already quite unwieldy to use the system, and I've got less than 50 categories so far (cards by class, by chapter, by semester)

I'd also like to see at least one more level supported. I;m planning on using one level to divide up cards per class since I usually have 100-150 total and need do different things with them at different times. Of course, I take a really long time to memorize cards, but I'm probably not the only one - haha.

 

[mikelove]

I'm not wild about using a * since making the symbol a part of the category name suggests that there's something more permanent that's different about that category - say, that it's the default one for a card. But we'll get the checkboxes working eventually, we just haven't managed to do so yet.

We're actually thinking about allowing multiple default categories at some point, so that would require popping up the category tree regardless. (the current truncated-name popup list is less-than-ideal I agree) It might be tough to get this working in other areas, though - maybe eventually it'll show up in, say, Manage Cards to let you select a bunch of categories to search for instead of just one, but not right away.

Adding another level won't happen at least until we stop supporting Palm - right now, because of the way category trees are implemented on Palm every level needs a little chunk of screen width just for its open/close indicator, so adding a fourth level is going to start to severely truncate those category names.

 

[stephanhodges]

The "*" was just an example, any character would be OK, and you just put it in the manual

It's just that changing the text is already part of the API, and would be a small change.

 

[HW60]

HW60 Erasing duplicate entries without affecting flashcards would be really hard - I guess we could put up a prompt to fix flashcards that link to it, though.

I use the user dictionary only for flashcard entries. Is ist possible to erase duplicate entries by
- exporting all flashcards
- deleting the flashcard file and the user dictionary file
- importing the exported flashcards again with "store imported definitions in user dict"?

HW60

 

[weight]

Hi Mike,

Here are two reasons why I'm not using "Prompt for answer quality" despite having waited with bated breath for it:

1. The behavior of wrong answers is confusing to me. If I'm understanding Pleco correctly, it will show you any wrong answer tomorrow regardless if you score it high or low. For cards that I've already done reps on for several months the problem is the following: just reviewing and getting that card wrong, I've already gotten it back in my long term memory, and so I probably won't need to see it again for a couple of weeks, maybe a month. So my wish is that wrong answers would decrease the score by a percentage, the more wrong you score it the bigger the percentage.

2. Having to click twice to score a card is too much work for me; I would hope that all six scores could be put on buttons at some point (or if there are not enough buttons cut it down to only five scores). I guess there are a lot of people out there whose PDA's aren't blessed with the TX's 9 buttons, so maybe it isn't practical.

Some other custom card suggestions:
I would like a button that copies all of a dictionary entry into a custom card so that I can edit it easily.
Some entries in Guifan seem not to be edited correctly so that headword is shown in the definition - this means that I'm given the answer when I go to test with them. Additionally those "~" that do such a great job of hiding the headword don't show up at all when I try to paste them into a custom card, as well as some other punctuation from Guifan.

Thank you Mike.