Feature Suggestions

[sthubbar]

For technical, I would be most interested in computer related terminology.

The 21st century does seem to have many medical terms and drugs, which is great. Seems like there are some things that maybe the translations are slightly different than I encounter here in Beijing.

I'm just wishing out loud. I don't know what the options are for dictionaries and what is involved, just giving input.

 

[HW60]

Mikelove wrote:

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.[/quote]

I started learning Chinese in October, and all my cards are custom cards. My Chinese book has all vocabulary - words and characters - included. I enter them into Pleco with the definiton from the book and include the definition of characters from dictionaries in case the book only wants me to learn the word, not the single 汉字. The Japanese book I am going to study Japanese with starting in next October (Minna no nihongo) also has all vocabulary included. Therefore I would not need a Pleco dictionary for the beginning - only the flashcards ...

Without a Japanese Pleco flashcard version I could - and would - use JFC from http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/f_file.html, but the two programs cannot be compared - of course I very much prefer Pleco, as JFC is a software dinosaur. Is it possible to use the dictionaries from JWP at http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~grosenth/f ... html#JWPCE? I promise this is my last try!

 

[mikelove]

sthubbar - OK, thanks.

HW60 - There are a couple of free Japanese dictionary databases out there, actually, like Jim Breen's EDICT, so it certainly wouldn't be impossible for us to get some sort of a decent Japanese dictionary for Pleco, but there's still the question of what exactly we'd be selling if the dictionary were free and open-source - I guess a software-only "Pleco for Japanese" which included a handwriting recognizer and a selection of free dictionaries, but I don't know if the sales for that would even be enough to cover the license fees for the handwriting recognizer plus the salary of the Japanese-speaking programmer I'd have to hire to design the thing.

If we drop the handwriting recognition requirement, however, Pleco's font files already support hiragana/katakana (and Japan-only kanji), and it would be easy enough to tweak the flashcard database system to have Kanji / kana / Romaji fields instead of SC/TC/Pron, so that could be a possibility in a future release I suppose - wouldn't even need to speak Japanese for that. Handwriting could always be added through a third-party product, I'm sure those exist on Palm/WM at least.

 

[HW60]

HW60...
If we drop the handwriting recognition requirement, however, Pleco's font files already support hiragana/katakana (and Japan-only kanji), and it would be easy enough to tweak the flashcard database system to have Kanji / kana / Romaji fields instead of SC/TC/Pron, so that could be a possibility in a future release I suppose - wouldn't even need to speak Japanese for that. Handwriting could always be added through a third-party product, I'm sure those exist on Palm/WM at least.

That was a very good idea: I made my first Japanese flashcard:
大きい
おおきい
o'okii
big

with a handwriting recognition from http://www.mobem.com/products/CE-Star.php. There are some problems left, however: romaji looks a bit strange with the pinyin vowel-seperator (o'okii), and the second part of the romaji is visible on the "Edit card" screen, but not ready for flashcard sessions. That also holds for the kanji-kana combination. Actually it does not seem much to be done to complete this kind of minimum solution ...

 

[mfcb]

although i dont need the japanese edition, my impression on that topic is that it would need some option "other", where we normally select "c-e,e-c" because that option could switch off several things that are for chinese only, like interpreting the "pinyin" field and reading it aloud, ...

 

[mikelove]

Yes, it would really take little more than an extra database flag (or a change to the Language field) to add minimal Japanese support. Even more trivial than that, to the point where we could consider adding it in 2.0.2, would be to have some sort of option to not interptet the PY field as Pinyin - maybe just by inserting a special character at the start of it or something like that, though that could have enough consequences in areas like multi-choice tests and import/export that it would probably be better saved for 2.1. It'd also help people studying Cantonese / Hakka / etc, so there'd be a lot of potential benefit in there.

 

[HW60]

I would like some minor changes:

- in flashcard writing test I first enter the character, then hit 字 for handwriting recognition - my input is gone! If I don't find the character in the box to the left,I do not know if I made a mistake, because I can no longer compare with my input. I suggest to keep the input until the correct character in the box was chosen.

- Is there a way in Manage Flashcards to select all cards which are "not learned" (last x answers correct)? Is there a way to get this information in the Edit Card Screen for a single card (a record of 6-0 is easy, but what about 6-1?). Is it possible to select the "not learned" cards with the Card Filter?

- I changed part of my flashcards to custom cards, because User Dictionary entries cannot be modified. Is there a way to change the others by the batch function?

 

[mikelove]

If you set the handwriting auto-rec setting to "Instant" (in the Input panel of Preferences, but only available in 2.0.1), that saves you from needing to hit 字 and hence lets you keep the character around in the box until you've tapped on the correct match.

The whole "learned' idea is kind of new, so we haven't carried it over to other parts of the flashcard system yet - certainly doable in a future release, though. There's no batch command to turn user dictionary entries into cards, only one to turn cards into user dictionary entries, though I suppose since we have that one it might make sense to have one that works the other way.

 

[HW60]

The auto-rec setting is a great improvement for such a small increment of the version number!

I darkly remember from Pleco 1.0 that the results of flashcard sessions were saved bit for bit: 1 if the answer was OK, 0 otherwise. This information must still be there in Pleco 2.0 - the statistics about "learned" cards would not work otherwise. But where is it?

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, it's a lovely little improvement - still have to get it working with auto-enter (in 2.0.2 I suspect), but it was really surprisingly easy to implement, and since there won't even be a Recognize button on iPhone it seemed about time to bring that particular innovation to Palm/WM as well

The "learned" information is in there, but it requires some actual processing to determine whether a card is "learned" or not - it's not just a simple yes / no value. This means we either have to process the search results line-by-line (very slow, and awkward when combining results from multiple tables as we usually do) or write a custom SQL function, which we can't do until we drop Palm support (as it requires the use of a programming concept called a "function pointer," which doesn't work correctly in ARM-based code on Palm).

 

[zhongwenhaizi]

Mike, Have you tried licensing the Eijiro and Waeijiro Japanese dictionary? Here is the J-E version info: http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/docs/Eijiro.html It seems like this gentleman didn't have any trouble licensing it. It has an excellent reputation. I also think we can get by with a JPN handwriting system; we can just use CE star if you could get us the dic. your flash card system is what makes it really worth it.

 

[mikelove]

Heh, I'm not even sure if our database system would scale up easily to 2 million entries actually - it'd run us up into the Palm OS 64k record limit in a couple of places, so we could only consider it after we drop Palm support. Handwriting's still a little worrying since there's no Japanese handwriting support built-in on iPhone - it's kana or romaji only, apparently - and hence there'd really be no good way at all to input Japanese for most users.

Once we've gotten 2.1 and the (flashcard-enabled) iPhone version out, though, we'll finally be able to take a bit of a breather and at that point we can go in and evaluate the situation for Japanese in more detail - take another run at publishers, find out exactly what a handwriting license would cost, etc; it's been a couple of years since we last looked at it and certainly it's not beyond the realm of possibility that things might have improved since then. But until then we don't have the time to do anything but the bare minimum for Japanese support.

 

[HW60]

I would like to suggest some ideas for Pleco 2.0.2:

(1) In Manage Flashcards, can you save the value between "pron" and the input field ("=", "!=" or "~") as the default value for future use (for any of the search methods)? I will probably never use "=", but this is the default value, and therefore I must change it every time.

(2) The way Pleco 2.0.0 searched for "pron" input in Manage Flashcards does no longer exist. Can you add ">=" for searching for words that begin with the input value (finding "zhongwen" with input "zhongw")? That is the same method as in 2.0.0. You can find "zhongwen" of course using "~" "zhongw", but if you look for words which include "shi" or "ji" you normally get too many records as a result.

(3) The search button in Manage Flashcards blinks when the input method is changed (e.g. from category to headword). It is not too important, but it would be consistent, if the search button would also blink when the input field is changed (and not the method).

(4) In free-answer mode of New Flashcard Session I tend to make mistakes answering even if I know the words very well (my favourite is 快: I enter it in the input field, but very often choose 怏 when it is in first position of the hwr output box). Sometimes I hit the 答 button without making an input.Therefore I have several words in my flashcard fund which I perfectly know, but which I see in almost every flaschcard session because the have a very low score. It would help very much, if I could change my wrong answer after Pleco signalled red. I can avoid part of those mistakes if I prompt for answer quality, but that would be a lot of additional work for every card to prevent mistakes with one or two.

(5) After about 26000 Total repetitions and meanwhile the second statistic file I am still sometimes disappointed by Plecos choice of flashcards. Therefore I suggested a simple method to tell Pleco either to ask for a special flashcard during the next session or to wait for a certain time (maybe 4 weeks) until this flashcard is presented again (that may also help against the problems arising from (4)). Instead of using two buttons to tell Pleco I could even better use a bar: tapping on the bottom of the bar indicates zero days of delay or immediate repetition, clicking on top means a delay of days set in preferences (e.g. 28 days), clicking "in beween" means "in between" zero and 28 days.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Hey Mike,

I have no intention of poking a stick in your eye, but just as a reminder, I am still willing to purchase Japanese dictionaries the instant you can make them available :wink: And, I know from the various forums about the topic on this site, that others will too.

Of course, I am willing to wait until after you get the iPhone version of Pleco out for my phone :lol:

BTW, I love 2.0.1 (final)! Seems much more responsive to me (PDA details on the footer of my post).

Cheers mate!

Darrol :mrgreen:

 

[mikelove]

HW60 - thanks for the suggestions. #1 might be surprisingly difficult architecturally thanks to the way we store those search settings, but it'd certainly make things feel more polished, so if not in 2.0.2 maybe it'll happen in 2.1 at least. #2 should be easy enough to roll back - has to do with a change we made in user dictionary searches I think (they share much of the same code with flashcards). Good point on #3, probably should be consistent there, though I'm a little worried someone might want to be looking at the list of results while they enter a new search term, so fixing this might actually make things worse for some people.

#4 you can already do if you enable the "Skip Card" button in the "Controls" panel of Advanced Settings - tap that instead of the -> Next button and the card's score will be left unchanged. #5 is an interesting thought, though you can already achieve almost the same thing with the Score button (also in the Controls panel) - a way to set that interval more precisely might be nice, though, something to factor in when we're planning the newly-revised scoring system. (which will now likely take a bit longer since we're skipping flashcards in the first iPhone release)

hairyleprechaun - oh I know there's some demand, I'm just not sure how much; I think many of the people for whom Pleco's the best option for Chinese would already be well-served by existing Japanese products like the Canon Wordtank handhelds. Glad to hear 2.0.1's working well, we got rid of a few unnecessary screen redraws on WM so that might explain why it feels more responsive - still room for more progress on that front too, it takes way too long to flip between Preferences screens on a VGA phone now for example.

 

[HW60]

Thank you for your help (I should have read the manual...): with "Skip Card" I can prevent the score file from becoming worse and therefore becoming better in the long run, and with "Score set to ... points" I can even repair the score file. Maybe "Score set to AVG point", the average of all or selected flashcards, would be more comfortable, but that can be done manually and therefore is not really important. So I'll be waiting for #2 - keeping the search criteria "~" in 2.02 ...

 

[grabolus]

There were some requests for Pleco to work as an "chinese input" tool. Your answers was that there are more specialised applications that do this.
I would like to tell you about some ways on how I use pleco and how I would like to use it:
1. When I transfer a chinese text from a book into a digital document, then very often I use pleco in addition to my windows pc. There are many cases when I do not know the chinese letter and even the handwriting rec in windows doesn't find the letter. With the great pleco HWR I nearly always find the correct letter. Disadvantage: I need two computers...
2. When I input chinese text that I create myself, then I need the possibility to a) check, if the word I have written has really the meaning that I thought of and b) to look up a word from english in case I don't have an idea about the chinese. With both requirements pleco is very helpful, but it doesn't help me to input the text and store it. Usually I use dim sum for this.
3. When I transfer larger texts from a book or newsletter into a digital document, I use OCR. But often the OCR makes mistakes. When I read the text in pleco reader, from time to time I would like to correct some letters...

Therefore: Pleco is extremely helpful when writing chinese texts into a digital document.
And: If it was possible to (simply) input texts and store them, then it would be perfect.

If it was possible to look up a word (this is already possible in pleco) and then have a functionality "add to input stream" and if this input stream could be easily opened in the reader, then this could be nearly the solution...

Good Bye

 

[mikelove]

HW60 - no problem! We'll see what we can do on that for 2.0.2.

grabolous - thanks for your thoughts on this. We'd been contemplating some sort of a text-composition system for the desktop version of Pleco, but we could certainly consider adding it to the handheld version as well - heck, definitions in our E-C dictionaries are usually segmented well enough that we could also have an option to insert Chinese words directly from those, though you'd need to carefully double-check them in that case.

 

[johnh113]

Dear Mike,

Some very minor suggestions. I study with your flashcard program several hours a day and the program is a joy to use. I don't use any of your new scoring algorithms. I just use manual scoring with the score doubling after one right in a row and the score resetting to 50 after one wrong. It works great for me. I use a Palm 680.

1. In a popup window, my stylus actions don't work. It would be nice if they did.

2. In a popup window, I can't affect the type size. I "Magnify characters in headword", "Use large font in definition" and "Use large font in Entry List." I also set "Large font" and "Magnify head" in flashcards. But I can't find a way to use large font in the popup window. The roman type is fine, but the hanzi is hard for me to read in the popup window. It would be nice to have large font in the popup window. The large font in the dictionary and the flashcards is fine for both roman and hanzi.

3. In the popups I can't go back like I can in the flashcards. It would be nice to be able to go back through my popup history. Alternatively, if every popup was a new popup window that stacked on top of the last window, I could just close popup windows to go backwards.

4. In flashcards I have a green check for correct and a red X for wrong. Sometimes I hit the wrong button. If I hit the green check by mistake, I can go back and fix it. I would like to fix it by hitting a red X but the red X isn't there when I go back. So I have to use the "Score set to 50 pts" button to do the same thing as a red X. I would prefer the red X for consistancy.

5. In flashcards I enable the "back" button. Then when I go back, the screen automatically brings up another back button so now I have two back buttons. I don't really need two back buttons. (Would rather have the red X, see #4.)

6. The flashcard button that after going back through several cards will jump me forward to the current card is a card that I rarely use and could easily do without. I can pretty easily use the forward button to get back to my current location.

7. As you know, if I hit the red X button by mistake, I can't go back and fix it. I accept this but I just include it for completeness. It really doesn't much bother me that a card will be reviewed a few more times than is hypothetically necessary.

8. The popup window has a red stop sign to signify done and the flashcards use a red stop sign to signify done. The "char info" uses a "done" button to signify done. No big deal but you might want to standardize the buttons for things that do almost the same thing.

9. On the main flashcard screen, I use time as one of my top displays. If I display as 24 clock everything is fine. If I use am or pm, then there is slightly not enough room, and the display is slightly cut off.

10. The underline that signifies a link is set at the same horizontal level as the bottom of the g so that I can't tell if it is a g or a q.

11. I believe that the bug with flashcards from Tuttle showing the wrong definition for a hanzi/pinyin combination is fixed. I didn't go back and check all the ones that were wrong, but in my regular flashcard usage, I noticed 4 or 5 that used to give the wrong definition and are now correctly not calling the (wrong) definition from Tuttle and instead are moving on to the next dictionary.

12. When I highlight and call up a character in the popup window, it doesn't call up the character/pinyin combination of the original word. It allows me to cycle through all words that use that character regardless of their pinyin. I like this and prefer that you retain this behavior.

13. I'm still not getting the complete ABC definition after the reveal in flashcards. You said that you might be able to fix this but I haven't seen it yet. So just a reminder that I would like to see the [r] if it's there.

14. By the way, as you mentioned that you are trying to limit the number of buttons in the iPhone version, on my main screen I only use: language, dictionary, back, forward, add to flashcard, start flashcard session, and traditional/simplified on the first line, and I don't really need the traditional/simplified button as I show both in the headword. On the second line I use the eraser and the copy to input field. I use stylus actions for "Popup Defn" and "Char Info."

Thanks again for helping make the study of Chinese a very enjoyable experience.

John

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for these! #1 is tricky to fix, unfortunately, since most of those actions involve some sort of extra bit of user interface (a window or an Input Field or whatever) which doesn't work the same way in that popup definition screen - we may eventually revise the user interface (per #3) to let you have multiple popups etc on top of each other, but that probably won't happen until 2.1 or 3.0, so for now the popup window has to be somewhat more limited than the main dictionary.

Good point about type sizes in #2, that's certainly something people should be able to change. #4 is difficult because we'd have to keep a record of every flashcard's previous score in order to be able to restore it / alter it differently if you go back and change it - also creates some other issues, like what we do with cards that appear in a session more than once, so not an easy thing to add.

The two back buttons in #5 are there because we want to have a back button right next to the forward button (and the go-back-to-current-card button) - I suppose it might be a cleaner interface to put back/forward alone on the right and change the back button go the go-back-to-the-current-card button, but then you'd be in the odd situation of tapping on a button once to go back and then tapping on it again to go forward, so I'm not sure if that would actually be an improvement over the current interface. Dedicated back and forward buttons might help but that creates some space problems if you've got a lot of other buttons.

The text "Done" button in Char Info is there for consistency with other dialogs - it's also a bit clearer than the stop sign, we use that in the popup definition / flashcard windows mainly due to space constraints. (which is why there's a regular text "Done" button in the popup if you haven't added an input field to it) The cutoff clock in #9 has been a problem for a while, but to fix it we'd have to resize those three top fields based on the size of the text in them, so it's the sort of bug that's not really worth the effort to fix. Good point on #10, seems to only affect large fonts (which is probably why it wasn't reported before) but should be easy to fix.

That's great news about the Tuttle flashcards in #11 - if we'd had the idea for that fix earlier we would have put it in 2.0.0, but at least it's working correctly now. #12 would be very difficult to change so I'm glad you prefer it this way The (r)s in #13 certainly could be restored if we add that use-all-text-from-dictionary-definition option I mentioned in an earlier post - that option would also have partially fixed the Tuttle definition issue, actually, since the headword / Pinyin would then have matched the definition, so probably a good idea anyway.

On #14, the current iPhone design has 9 buttons, language and "history" on top next to the search field and either dictionary / charset / edit entry / list mode / menu or dictionary / charset / add to flash / audio / menu on the bottom (depending on whether you're looking at a list or an entry) - add to flash and edit entry won't be in the initial, flashcard-free iPhone release but they'll be added with the later flashcard-enabling update. So mostly the same ones you listed - eraser is replaced by the clear button built into iPhone text input fields, copy-to-input works a little differently due to the lack of normal text selection, and the start-session screen should be reachable in one tap after you tap on the menu button.