Feature Suggestions

[sthubbar]

Return to previous entry.

I'm hoping this feature is already implemented and I'm just missing it because it would be a huge help.

What I mean is that say I'm reading a definition and example sentence in the great Guifan dictionary. I highlight two charaters and copy them to the input and they are looked up and I understand them. Now it would be great to press one button or key and return to the entry I was just looking up so that I can now highlight the next couple of character I don't recognize and look them up.

Thanks.

 

[RichardSharpe]

I use my PDA with PlecoDict all the time. It is invaluable, however, I am also studying Cantonese at this time.

Does the product work with any Cantonese dictionaries and can we have a Cantonese dictionary added?

 

[sthubbar]

On the flashcards "Search Settings" page it would be great to have a "NOT" option, in addition to the "AND" and "OR" choices. For example, I'm trying to find all the cards that aren't User dictionary entries and I don't see an easy way to do that.

It would also be nice to be able to search by the "Last 10" percentage and/or the Remember/Forget Record, or some calculation of remember versus forget. This would especially be nice for example let's say I think things are too easy and I want to increase the difficulty of the cards I remember well, I could search for all cards with a remember percentage of 85% or more and increase their score by 30%, or the opposite could be done to decrease the difficulty of hard cards if I'm finding things too hard.

Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

sthubbar - that should just be a matter of pressing the Back button (blue arrow next to the dictionary-switch button) - if you want to get the old list of search results too, tap on the downward-pointing arrow next to the Input Field to select the previous search and you can go back to it that way. You might find that you prefer doing this with popup definitions, though, since then you don't have to wait for the software to fetch the entry / update the screen again.

RichardSharpe - we've tried very hard to license a Cantonese dictionary but haven't found one so far; not many of them in print, and those that are seem to be either extremely out-of-date or tied up in exclusive license agreements. We even approached the creator of the online CantoDict project but he wasn't interested in working with us.

sthubbar again - a NOT option would be nice, but a lot of work to implement since a lot of those queries can't be easily flipped around - for some searches we'd need to write a whole new algorithm for the NOT version. Searching for "last 10" would be a little tricky also, since there's not really a way to perform that comparison in SQL and hence we'd basically have to go through and check every card one-by-one - not impossible, in fact we already do it with a few other search types, but again a lot of work so not something that can happen for a couple of updates at least.

 

[glyntr]

What about having a "word of the day" appear as an item that you can select for the Today screen on Windows Mobile?
Every hour (or if clicked), it could display a different random word (from your flashcards or dictionary), and if activated it would jump directly to that word in Pleco, acting as a quick launch button.

 

[sthubbar]

The back buttons seems exactly what I was looking for, thanks.

Now on with the wish list...

1) Allow 5 way scroll to work if flashcards are longer than one screen. It wold be nice if the up and down scroll worked when viewing flashcards when the pinyin and definition are longer than one screen. Trying to press the small scroll bar to the right is difficult and takes away from the hands on the keyboard. If it's relatively easy to implement, otherwise not a huge deal.

2) I liked how in 1.0 there were two lines for Characters and two lines for pinyin when creating flashcards. I understand the logic that most people maybe only enter words or short phrases of 2-4 characters so 1 line is enough. I also appreciate all the things that are fitted onto that one screen. Just that I used the multiple lines in 1.0 since I'm inputting longer strings of characters and pinyin and then having to scroll the characters to see what is the next character I'm trying to type the pinyin for. Again, I can live with the current set, just a wish.

 

[johnh113]

Now on with the wish list...

1) Allow 5 way scroll to work if flashcards are longer than one screen. It wold be nice if the up and down scroll worked when viewing flashcards when the pinyin and definition are longer than one screen. Trying to press the small scroll bar to the right is difficult and takes away from the hands on the keyboard. If it's relatively easy to implement, otherwise not a huge deal.

Dear Sthubbar,

I just go to the flashcard preference screen, and in "buttons" I set the up of the 5 way to "Scroll Defn Up" and the down of the 5 way to "Scroll Defn Down."

(It would probably be good if it just defaulted to that instead of having to set it.)

John

 

[sthubbar]

John,

Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

glyntr - nice idea, but we'd need Pleco to be running in the background (and taking up a large amount of RAM) in order for that to display correctly - otherwise there'd be no way to reliably render Chinese characters. Creating a slimmed-down version of the Pleco application with Chinese font support and nothing else would be too much work just for this, I'm afraid. But certainly something we can consider in a few years as WM devices (hopefully) begin shipping with large enough amounts of RAM that everyone can quite comfortably leave Pleco running in the background all the time.

sthubbar - support for phrases / sentences is something we're going to need to attack more comprehensively in a future release, but since we haven't put much effort into that yet it seemed more important to have separate simplified / traditional character edit boxes (as we didn't in 1.0) in 2.0, and that's why we got rid of the multiple character lines.

johnh113 - good point about setting those scroll buttons by default, it's a bit difficult technically actually due to the way the flashcard system handles buttons (stores individual button codes instead of having general commands that cover all possible up / down commands as in the main dictionary) but something to try to get working in a future update.

 

[sthubbar]

Ability to read longer strings of characters.

It appears that the current setup is limited to reading 8 pinyin syllables. I don't know how memory intensive this is or the other reasons for selecting this limit. It would be great to have the limit something like 32. That should cover most all sentences that users would need. (By "users" I mean me) :twisted:

 

[mikelove]

Audio playback is extremely memory-intensive, unfortunately - we can easily increase the syllable limit once we stop supporting Palm OS, but not until then.

 

[sthubbar]

Thanks. I think you know how I feel about stopping PalmOS support. :roll: [Don't do it. :mrgreen: ]

 

[renovator]

I would like to see another option available in the flashcard program. I know ugg! another option. I would like to be able to set show: to Headword only but when I am being tested on cards be able to click on an option in an individual card to see defn as well only for that card. On most characters, headword is enough and showing +defn is too much information and makes the card easier to remember correctly. Certain cards, however, the headword character has multiple pinyin or pinyin tones and the definition is needed to input the preper pinyin. For those cards, the only way to input the proper pinyin is to see the headword+defn.

 

[mikelove]

renovator - Have you tried the "Self-scored reveal separately" option yet? It's in the "Tests" panel of Advanced Settings - gives you separate reveal buttons for the Pinyin and definition so you can reveal one without revealing the other.

 

[renovator]

renovator - Have you tried the "Self-scored reveal separately" option yet? It's in the "Tests" panel of Advanced Settings - gives you separate reveal buttons for the Pinyin and definition so you can reveal one without revealing the other.

Yes, I have tried this option but does not seem to make a difference. I must have something else checked that is not allowing this function to work or else something I don't understand here or I have not made my post clear. If I select Show:Headword, it always shows me headword only. If I select Show: Headword +Defn, it always shows me both. I would like to be able to select show:Headword and only the headword is shown. Then if the character that comes up in the flashcard has multiple pinyin possibilities, then I would be able to press a button to reveal the +Defn before entering pinyin.

 

[mikelove]

Oh, sorry, missed the bit about entering Pinyin - this only works in self-scored mode at the moment, though adding it as an option in free-answer as well is an interesting idea. (multi-choice already makes sure that no two choices have the same characters or Pinyin, so this wouldn't be needed in that)

 

[sthubbar]

Might be asking too much or licensing is too expensive, though just in case nobody has asked, I'd like

Technical dictionary
Medical dictionary

 

[daniel123]

Audio playback is extremely memory-intensive, unfortunately - we can easily increase the syllable limit once we stop supporting Palm OS, but not until then.

I thought a little bit about this topic and would like to discuss a new idea.

At the monent just the first 7 syllables of a longer sentence are played. When learning long sentence flashcards I can learn the first 7 syllables really very fast because while trying to remember the card I can hear the voice in my mind and this helps a lot. But I have much more problems to learn the next words of the sentence because I miss the sound. I think you can keep the actual behaviour for the autoplay or the normal sound playing and maybe you can add another button to play the next 7 syllables of the sentence that are missed before. Pushing the button again also plays the next 7 syllables if there are still ones missing and so on. After reaching the end of the long sentecnce the next push starts again at its beginning or so. Maybe this could be handled already with less memory usage because you always just have to handle 7 syllables at once.

Even if there won't be the memory issue I would prefer this behaviour because of two reasons:

1) My memory can well remember the sound. But if the sentence that is played is too long the benefit will be reduced because I just can learn a small amount of words at a time.
2) I like to use the autoplay feature. But it takes already some time to play 7 syllables. I don't always want to wait for a longer time when for example use 14 syllable sentences.

So in my opinion splitting the sound would be a good idea.

What do you think?

 

[HW60]

I would like very much a very tiny Japanese version of the flashcard-system:
- Japanese font and character recognition (including kana)
- only custom flashcards - no japanese dictionary necessary
- The entries for the flashcards could be
Simp -> Kanji
Trad -> hiragana/katakana
Pron -> Romaji
Definition

 

[mikelove]

sthubbar - a medical dictionary has been requested before, but the 21st Century dictionary should actually be pretty good on the English-Chinese side of that at least - do you find that a lot of medical terms aren't in there? And what do you mean by a "technical dictionary" - industrial / chemical type stuff, or computer terms, or some other area of technology?

daniel123 - interesting idea, but I think it's unlikely we'll be making any significant changes to audio playback until we stop supporting Palm OS and eliminate that 8-syllable limit anyway; at that point we'd probably also add a "Stop" button (since we'll then be running in nice friendly fully-multithreaded environments only), which would take care of benefit #2 at least. Though it still might have sense to have some sort of a "playback in stages" option for audio flashcards, or perhaps simply an option to select a particular portion of a long sentence card that would actually be played when the card comes up.

HW60 - it'd be very tough to justify that without also adding Japanese dictionaries; some people may be willing to go to the trouble to create custom cards, but most would probably like / prefer to create them from dictionary entries. And anyway there'd be a big license fee for a Japanese handwriting recognizer (different due to the kana, Japanese-only kanji, and not-quite-the-same-as-Chinese stroke order) so the only way we could afford that would be if we were also selling a separate Japanese product with dictionaries included. And as I've said before, the licensing situation for Japanese dictionaries is rather bleak - not really many titles available for a small and non-Japanese company like Pleco.