Feature Suggestions

[stephanhodges]

I also don't like that in "automatic" scoring mode that it resets all the way back to zero, and wish I could change that to decrease. I haven't tried the manual scoring setup, and I was wondering if you had? (see screen shot)

I think the reason it does not copy the entire word into a user dictionary is to allow Mike to license the dictionaries in the first place, since it would be much easier to export the whole copyrighted dictionary, which wouldn't please the publishers. That said, I think it would be helpful to have it for any non-copyrighted dictionary.

Also, I too would like to be able to copy the tilde marks.

 

[douglasmccarroll]

Hi Mike,

I'd like to see a Card Selection mode that does the following:
a. Simply show the cards with the lowest score first
b. Within cards that have the same score, present in random order

(a) is easy to do in Pleco 1.0. That's how I like to study, and I suspect that a fair number of other users take this approach as well.

You've obviously put a lot of work into creating some rather sophisticated options but I personally prefer this very simple approach.

For now I'll be using 1.0 for flash cards and 2.0 for the reader. It's nice to at least have this option but, obviously, it would be preferable to only use 2.0.

Thanks,

Douglas

 

[mikelove]

stephanhodges - the problem isn't the character itself, it's making it part of the name - adding any sort of a symbol character to the name (or even a word like "(partial)") is going to suggest that there's something inherently different about that category, rather than something specific about which categories are selected in the current list.

HW60 - that should work, yes. But if you're only using the user dictionary for flashcards, why store definitions in there at all?

weight - #1 is exactly what SuperMemo does, actually, though we're thinking about adding an option to change it in 2.0.1. #2 we're also thinking about, though it's kind of tricky to make that sort of UI change since it means a whole bunch of changes to the user interface (and would only apply in self-scored anyway, not in any other test mode).

The Guifan headword-in-definition issue is actually how that dictionary's designed - when a character has a modern meaning only as part of a word, they list that word under the same entry, and we haven't gotten around to correcting / fixing all of those yet. (it'll be kind of tricky for various reasons) Not sure what's happening with those ~s, we'll take a look.

douglasmccaroll - how were you doing this in 1.0? I can't think of any combination of options that would allow it - you could set a session to use a particular rank or range of ranks, but you can do the same thing with score ranges in 2.0. We are working on a new card selection mode (which may or may not appear in 2.0.1) that tries to more intelligently mix in cards you've learned well with cards you haven't learned yet, but I guess this is another approach we could consider too - not that difficult programming-wise, I'm just not sure how many other people would study this way (since you're going to tend to see a lot of cards in the same order, given how fine-grained scores in 2.0 are).

 

[ipsi]

What I would like to see at some point (3.0, maybe) is the ability to write our own algorithms in, saym Java or Javascript or Python or Basic or what have you, then have it compiled and made available in Pleco. I'd definitely make use of that to customise the scoring to my tastes, and would make it easier to please everyone .

 

[estudiando]

ipsi,

Wow, a pleco SDK! By that time you will be fluent in Chinese and will not need the self customized scoring

 

[gato]

I'd like to see a Card Selection mode that does the following:
a. Simply show the cards with the lowest score first
b. Within cards that have the same score, present in random order

You can do this with the following settings:
In the Flashcard->Advanced->Scoring, change the settings to:
Raise by 100 pts after 3 correct in a row
Lower by 100 pts after 1 correct in a row
Min score = 100

In the Flashcard->Advanced->General screen, change "Card Selection" to "Random".

In Flashcard->New Flashcard Session->Card Filter, setting Score filter to "100 to 199" will exclude cards with scores 200 and above (i.e. cards you have gotten right three times in a row).

See this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1513&p=10764#p10764

 

[estudiando]

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).

OK. How about making the keys on the keyboards one pixel narrower and adding a column of navigation/search keys? The reason I ask is to avoid moving the stylus top to bottom several times (this is just a usability enhancement)

Alternatively, how about allowing the wild card and full-text characters to be mapped to numbers 7,8,9 (don't know if this would cause some other problems). This is again a usability enhancement.

Basically I wish to do all english and chinese searches (including the very useful full text and wildcard) with the English keyboard and avoid moving around the screen or invoking menus.

 

[estudiando]

Full text search is exact search

I noticed that the Full Text Search feature is an exact word search. Is there any benefit to enable include search? For example, (again this is just a usability enhancement) If I search for "new zealand" by just entering "new zea" or "french fries" by just entering "fre fri" or longer words like "san francisco" by just entering "san fran"

 

[renovator]

When doing repetition-spaced cards an option to have all cards come up during a session. If I get lets say 400 cards to do today, by the time I have finished the 400 cards, I start again and it tells me that I have 76 more to do. I do the 76 and it tells me I have 8 left to do. I do the 8 and it tells me I have one left to do. If I understand this correctly everytime I get to the end of the stack of cards to do, some more time has gone by (probably 24 hours since I last finished the additional cards) and a few additional cards come up. The option could either come up so that I would see the first x cards to do with 400 total and then as I move forward on the cards it would tell me a few moments later out of 426, then 432 etc whatever the number total is left to do as of that moment. An alternative would be to have the option allow based on last 24 hours plus let's say the next 2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16, hours in a drop down box so I would get all 485 cards up front. Getting surprised during the day as to how many cards will come up within the next few hours is a lot harder to schedule time to go through cards than to be able to force them out or at least get a count in advance.

 

[mikelove]

ipsi - lovely idea, but we'd need at least 3x as many programmers as we have now to even think about something like a full-fledged scripting language. A rudimentary rule-based system might be possible, though, as I think I've mentioned before - you define a chain of conditions/actions that get executed every time a card is reviewed.

douglasmccarroll - I completely forgot that there actually is a "Sort by rank" option in 1.0 - strange how you put these things in and then don't think about them. Anyway that's an excellent argument for adding score-based card sorting as an option in 2.0.x (probably as a checkbox or poplist under Fixed card selection mode).

estudiando - what sort of navigation/search keys did you mean? Adding wildcard/full-text characters somewhere on the keyboard definitely makes sense, just have to be careful we don't drop any other characters people are using (or make the keys too small on some displays).

Partially-completed full-text search is an impossibility because of the way the full-text search system is designed; the data's certainly there in the indexes, but the performance would be so slow as to make it effectively useless. We can think about something like that on the desktop version, though.

renovator - If you select "Calendar" as your "day type" in the General tab of Advanced settings (and "Start" to whatever your bedtime is), that will make the cutoffs between days more clearly defined, so that unless you spread a single session out over multiple days you shouldn't see additional cards come up. (and you won't have a few more coming up right after you finish a session)

 

[ipsi]

Ahh well. It was a nice hope. Could have been combined with XML files to lay out each screen, or determine what fields shoud appear on the flashcards and where (to pixel precision!), etc. Basically being ultra-customisable. But that's getting awfully complex.

A rule-based system would be fine, and probably not too far off what I'm wanting.

 

[renovator]

renovator - If you select "Calendar" as your "day type" in the General tab of Advanced settings (and "Start" to whatever your bedtime is), that will make the cutoffs between days more clearly defined, so that unless you spread a single session out over multiple days you shouldn't see additional cards come up. (and you won't have a few more coming up right after you finish a session)

You are a genius but of course you know that. By adding this setting I got one huge benefit. I still see additional cards at the end of a session, but just the cards I really need to see. I use manual scoring increase 100 after 3 correct in a row and decrease 100 after 1 incorrect in a row. Also points per day set at 100. The few words I really screw up drop down to a score of 10. Then at the end of each session, these few cards with score of 10 keep coming up 3 times until I get them right 3 times in a row to get back them back to the 100 point minimum. This is the way it worked in 1.0 which was great for my way of learning and am now very happy to see I have the same in 2.0.

 

[goog1e]

My wish is to test flashcards based on flashcard properties in addition to scores. I would be able to test for these cards within the already existing score-based SRS/frequency adjust system. For example, if I get a flashcard of length 1 (single characters) that comes up, it could give me at least a definition or definition + audio. However, for length 2-4 flashcards, they would be tested with just audio or whatever I wanted (a separate score-based testing dialog like we have now for each individual search property would be cool). For long flashcards (phrases) that don't have audio, I would always show the headword just for a review. For cards that have a "first review" within the last N days, I would display all fields and not record a score (and maybe reset "# reviewed" before each review in that time). This would be extremely powerful but I'm not sure if this is possible or even if anyone else is interested in it....

A smaller wish would be the ability to instantiate a configurable flashcard session based on search results in "manage flashcards". Maybe that could become the eventual core backend of the flashcard sessions as they are and categories would become more like tags.

 

[estudiando]

estudiando - what sort of navigation/search keys did you mean? Adding wildcard/full-text characters somewhere on the keyboard definitely makes sense, just have to be careful we don't drop any other characters people are using (or make the keys too small on some displays).

Navigation keys I was thinking are: erase entry line, move back one word/char, move forward one word/char. This is useful because the search keys are used in those positions. Of course I can just tap on those locations, but the up and down motion with the stylus seems unnatural.

 

[mikelove]

renovator - great! We should probably make that the default, actually.

goog1e - interesting idea about property-based field selection, but probably only possible as part of the rules-based system I mentioned to ipsi, i.e. something that's a long way off. Starting a session based on results in Manage Flashcards wouldn't be too difficult technically, but I don't think we'd want to make it the default way of starting sessions, and we'd need a separate core for New Session because there are some aspects to the card selection systems that would create serious problems if we tried to combine them with a Manage Cards search (including some very big performance issues) - we only finally got Manage Cards searches working reasonably reliably in the last beta or so so it's not something I'm eager to reopen / heavily overhaul again (aside from adding a couple of minor new test fields).

estudiando - makes sense, though fitting a total of 6 more keys onto that keyboard panel would be tricky to say the least (particularly in its main-screen-embedded version).

 

[renovator]

Would it be possible to have a button to send a copy of all duplicate cards (Any 2 cards with the same character(s) in headword and same pinyin(s)) to a duplicate card list?
Then:
A) A way to modify or merge the scores and definitions of these 2 identical cards.
B) A way to modify the 2 definitions, if required.
C) A way to send the cards back to where they came from and update all the categories accordingly so any of the categories that had either of the duplicate card now only has the remaining card.
I saw a few threads on possible duplicate card improvement in 2.0.1 but could not find information on what was planned.

 

[mikelove]

Certainly possible, but this is getting pretty elaborate - I'm not convinced duplicate card handling is important to a significant enough number of Pleco users to justify spending the time it would take to implement a whole new duplicate card manager interface, at least not until a big new update like 3.0.

 

[stephanhodges]

Duplicate card processing, etc could be more easily handled on the desktop. So, perhaps some small improvements might be needed to the export/import mechanism, to allow more direct exporting/importing to an SQL database on the desktop? From there, it's more "open" to manipulation, duplicate finding, edits, etc.

I haven't used the XML format much yet, but it seems an extra step when what I would really want is a way to directly access the SQL database within Pleco.

 

[mikelove]

The best way to do that might actually just be to copy the whole database to the desktop, make any necessary changes, and then copy it back (or for small changes just submit a list of SQL commands to apply on the handheld), something we're thinking about even for our own sync system - the XML is really more of a way to back up / share data than to synchronize it, exporting to / importing from that imposes a pretty big performance penalty on a handheld at least.

But yes, some advanced card organization features might be best implemented on the desktop side only - the handheld version interface is already much too cluttered really.

 

[stephanhodges]

Yes, that's what I meant. Also, getting just the export/import (copy to desktop and back) working early will open things up for others to develop solutions, even without a desktop version of Pleco. So, I would advocate doing it in steps.

The best way to do that might actually just be to copy the whole database to the desktop, make any necessary changes, and then copy it back (or for small changes just submit a list of SQL commands to apply on the handheld), something we're thinking about even for our own sync system - the XML is really more of a way to back up / share data than to synchronize it, exporting to / importing from that imposes a pretty big performance penalty on a handheld at least.