Feature Suggestions

F

fplanjer

秀才
I'm using the new "Limit unlearned cards to" option, which is great to limit the number of cards in the "pool of cards to study".

I sometimes run into cards however that I do not find interesting enough to learn at this time. It would be a great option if an extra control button could be added to remove the card from the "pool of cards to study". That way I have a little extra control over the cards that I want to learn.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Great idea - it would definitely be nice to have some flexibility on that, though it's interface-intensive enough that it may have to wait for 2.1. Thanks.
 
B

ben_gb

探花
It would be useful if you could add a feature which allows you to show the breakdown of a character into its components.

For example, if you look up 當，it would bring up 田 and 尚 (so it would not only show the radical, but also other components).

Additionally, it would also be useful if you could look up other characters which use a selected character as a component.

For example if you look up 重, then it would bring up a list of: 偅 動 尰 畽 衝 and so on.

This is a bit like looking up by radicals, but allowing you to use other components as the starting point.

Thanks.

Ben
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
This is already in the works for 2.1, actually - we've licensed the necessary data set for it and it's just a matter of putting that into a database and adding code to retrieve / search for those lists of components.
 
B

ben_gb

探花
That's good news about the character component thing!

Another suggestion I've got is whether you could add an option on the flashcards to have a gap between the fields. This would mean the headword, pinyin and meaning could each be presented on separate lines, with some whitespace between， eg:

順利

shun4li4

s.v. smooth; successful; without a hitch
Click to expand...


Instead of how it currently appears:
順利 shun4li4 s.v. smooth;
successful; without a hitch
Click to expand...


With larger screens and higher resolutions becoming the norm, it seems unnecessary to have everything cramped up at the top of the screen in one block. Splitting them out would make them clearer for learning too, especially when using 'review ony' mode.

Cheers,
Ben
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
This is actually coming in 2.0.2, I think - now that the first iPhone version isn't going to include flashcards, we're focusing on non-flashcard-related UI improvements like this for 2.0.2 (in order to have them on iPhone from the very first release). I don't know if we'll include whitespace between them, though, just newlines, along with perhaps an option to shrink the headword to fit on one line, though that would only be on WM / iPhone since Palm doesn't have scalable fonts - maybe we could offer an option to display longer headwords with normal-sized characters when they're > than a certain length on Palm, though.
 
radioman

radioman

状元
I know this is an unsophisticated presentation of my question, but, with regard to flashcards and "limit unlearned cards", if I had 500 cards, 200 learned, with limiting to 20 unlearned, then I would expect to run the deck of 220 cards during a review (I know there are a multitude of settings that could affect this but bear with me here...) So if I learn nothing, then rerun a review of the the deck again, will it provide the exact same 20 new unlearned cards? (i.e., not some new 20 unlearned cards?

Then if I learned two new cards, I would on the next run get the same 18 yet to be learned cards, along with an additional 2 new "unlearned"?
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yep, that's the idea - it'll keep showing you the same pool of unlearned cards until you learn them. Though we really need to present it more nicely interface-wise (with, for example, a way to view a list of all of your active unlearned cards).
 
F

flameproof

探花
I haven't read all 29 pages, this may has been already suggested:

A Wubi trainer

Something that allows, or trains, input based on the 5 Wubi keys that are on all Asian cell phones.

Don't get me wrong, the Pinyin input is great, and so is the handwriting module. But I think a Wubi module isn't too difficult and certainly a good option.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Wubi hasn't been mentioned in this thread at least, but it's an interesting idea - one of those ancillary Chinese-related things a lot of people might like to learn if they had an easy way to do it.
 
B

ben_gb

探花
Hi,

One other Flashcard-related suggestions...

It would be useful if there was a way to have parts of the "headword" and "pinyin" fields which were ignored (for colouring or adding the tone number).

For example, if I have the following in my flashcards (I tend to use my own definitions in the flashcards):

忽 A 忽 B hu1 A hu1 B one minute A, the next minute B

It gets displayed as

忽 A 忽 B hu1 A5 hu1 B5 one minute A, the next minute B
(and the A and B in the headword field are display in the colour for 5th tone).

Maybe you could add a feature so that anything surrounded by [] or <> is skipped over as far as adding tone numbers or colours are concerned.

EG you could have

忽 <A> 忽 <B> hu1 <A> hu1 <B>

Regards,
Ben
 
I

ipsi

状元
That would actually be very handy - there are a few Wubi programs for the desktop around, but they're all in Chinese, and some of them cost money but can only be purchased from inside China... That's something that would go extremely well with the desktop version. Possibly less useful on a handheld, though if you can already touch-type I don't imagine translating your Pleco-Wubi skills from your phone to a regular keyboard would be terribly hard. Yeah, that would be very nice to have.

Oh, and I just noticed flameproof is talking about Wubihua, whereas I'm talking about Wubizixing above - they both abbreviate to Wubi, but they're extremely different.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
ben_gb - we've had a couple of requests for a way to handle non-Pinyin in the pronunciation field, actually, but I like this idea better than mine (which was to simply let people flag the whole thing as not being Pinyin) - the main problem would be filtering out that extra text when reviewing the card on a free-answer / multi-choice test or converting it to a user dictionary entry. We may end up just changing the flashcard database to have separate "display" and "internal" versions of the headword / pinyin fields - might actually make sense in the user dictionary too, in fact. And now that we're using SQLite it's quite easy to change our database schema in a version update - no converter program required, just a little progress dialog when you first start up the new version as it switches everything over.

ipsi - well both Wubis could potentially be useful, I think, and once we were adding a character input trainer function we'd probably want to support as many of them as we can (Changjie et al too). I like this because it's another area where we can bring the sorts of things that are normally confined to the Chinese market to advanced learners - that's been a big reason for our success, I think.
 
I

ipsi

状元
Yes, definitely a Changjie trainer and others. Possibly even, if you're feeling particularly hardcore, an English-language Simplified/Traditional Wubi (hua/zixing) IME for Windows (ideally with the ability to export the codes so Linux people could generate a SCIM version). This is actually quite important, because as far as I'm aware, there aren't any English-language Wubi IMEs around, and it's one thing to be able to use Wubi to type, but quite another to be able to understand all the preferences and options in a Chinese application...

And of course, it could be combined with flashcards, potentially, as another test option: Enter this character/word/etc's code. Or as a method of answering free-answer questions, you could have an option that forces you to use Wubi to enter the answer. And lots more, I'm sure.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Tons of possibilities, yeah - with the likelihood of a massive overhaul of Windows Mobile in another year or two I'd rather not go to the trouble to design a soon-to-be-outdated IME at this point, but less OS-dependent things like flashcard test modes are certainly a possibility.
 
R

RobRedbeard

进士
Make pressing the 入 button toggle the handwriting at bottom/

I would like to be able to press ru and be able to toggle the display of the handwriting input box at the bottom of the screen.

This could be implemented by changing a choice for Layout
Input Palette location:
Left
Right
Bottom
Modal

Input Palette initial state:
displayed
hidden

Then you could make the RU botton on the toolbar toggle whether or not it's displayed in its currently configured position. With this WVGA screen, I've got screen height for it and the list, but I'd like to turn it on and off with a simple click.

Rob
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That's already possible, actually, though it's a bit fiddly - basically you have to tap-hold on the 入 button and select "Bottom" from the menu that pops up. You may have to do that twice to get it to stick, but after that just tapping on the button should toggle it between visible and hidden. (the reasons it works that way have to do with some legacy functionality from 1.0 - the whole thing is likely going to get redesigned in 2.1, though)
 
R

renovator

榜眼
Really need to find a solution for the screen bounce or whatever it is called when the pinyin in the flash cards fills in by itself and then turns the box(es) red and counts the card incorrect after going from one card to the next (in the next card). There needs to be an option that can be activated so that there must be pinyin in a box before it turns red. I have looked for options in my mobile to make the input screen less sensitive to see if that helps but there is no such option. This problem happens enough, about 1 in 75 cards to really drive me nuts!!!!!
 
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