Feature Suggestions

[mikelove]

sthubbar - you can already filter by numbers of days, just choose "within" or "not within" instead of before / after. Fields can be customized based on cards' scores but not yet based on categories, though that's a good idea for a future release. Categories are indeed saved with each profile, though, or should be unless there's a bug.

 

[sthubbar]

OK, great Mike thanks again. The "not within" will do exactly what I was searching for. Pleco just gets better and better the more I learn about it.

 

[radioman]

With regard to color schemes, I use Pleco a lot in the dark -(i.e., on the train, taxi, transcontinental air flights, whatever). For the Palm, I throw the color scheme to "Midnight" and it throws a lot less light (not sure that it saves power though...), and for the most part looks pretty cool. However, there are a few icons, and other things that come up looking not that great. Not sure if there has been a lot of thought on this, but if not, I am surprised how close the color scheme gets to being really quite good under the Midnight setting for Pleco with the Palm.

Anyway, having an optimized "night motif" would be something I would certainly use.

 

[mikelove]

sthubbar - great, thanks!

radioman - Interesting - at this point, most Palm-specific new features like this are going to be dependent on a) whether or not Pleco works on the Pre via Classic and b) whether Classic would support the feature in question, but if both of those things are true then this certainly might be a nice thing to add. And if not I suppose there's still an argument for doing it on WM, even though that doesn't officially even support color schemes (well not very well, anyway) we're pretty much drawing the entire UI with our own code anyway so we could easily add one ourselves.

 

[radioman]

While I do not see reference to the iPhone, I figure the "night motif" mode would be desirable there as well. Basically device agnostic, I have found running the night color scheme to be useful. Even now it is close to the point I can still use it under Palm. Anyway, something to think about.

 

[mikelove]

We're already using darker white-on-black instead of white-on-gray for another aspect of the UI, so having themes might interfere with that - we'll see what people think after it's released, though.

 

[sthubbar]

Mike, with the announcement of Palm Classic does that mean you might consider extending support for the Palm?

 

[mikelove]

It might - certainly the prospect of having a Chinese dictionary that would wipe the floor with anything specifically developed for webOS (at least until they open things up for native development, at which point we could consider supporting that) is very appealing, we get all of the benefits of supporting a hot new platform without doing much work. The question mainly is whether Classic will run 2.0, and how well (or how well it might with some modest optimizations on our end) - if it's not possible to deliver a good Pleco experience on webOS with Classic then there won't be much other reason to continue Palm development.

 

[mikelove]

For the sake of thread e-mail subscribers: a couple of suggestions from this thread have been integrated in the new 2.0.2 Beta 2 release now available in the Beta forum.

 

[johnh113]

Dear Reader,

Four minor suggestions.

1. The popup window from a link does not have an input line. The popup window from a stylus action does have an input line. This is more powerful. I think we should only use the more powerful popup window with the input line and retire the more restricted popup window that comes up from a link.

2. Under flashcard statistics, the score ranges are binary up to 12800 (or 128 days, approximately 4 months), and then everything over 128 days is lumped together. Now, of course I wish that I could master all my hanzi in 128 days, but my brain is not good enough. I think you should include at least 12801-256000, 256001-512000 and 512001-1024000. That takes us out beyond the two year mark. I find that while I remember most cards that make it to the two year mark, I don't remember all of them.

3. The flashcard statistics score ranges window does not honor the 5 button scroll up and down on the Palm.

4. At some point I don't want to see cards any more. For me, it would be after I have correctly recognized them after two years, or a score of approximately 720000. I think there should either be a check box for not showing anything above a certain score like there was in Pleco1, or we could use the "Learned if" number defined in flashcards/advanced/cards.

John

 

[caesartg]

Dear Mike

I asked for an 'undo' button or similar before for when an FC is added but you reckoned that this would have to be implemented across the board for all actions. My specific problem is I'm always creating flashcards by accident and I've juggled the toolbar around but still keep doing this and then have to open up FCs, go into Manage FCs, search on Uncategorized (or whatever is the default cetegory) scroll down and select the unwanted FC and then delete it, before closing it all to get back to the dictionary.

I agree that an undo across the board would be a major undertaking, likely not worth it and would perhaps be the result of a plethora of unwanted behaviour. However, would it be possible then to have either a contextual undo option appearing in the list of FC categories (the list of categories that appear when the FC button is held down), or perhaps an optional Gmail-style undo option on the "Card Added" window that pops up when a card is added? E.g. Instead of:

Card Added

it would be:

Card Added
undo

or similar. Obviously, the 'card added' would need to be sustained for 2-3 seconds rather than the 1 second or so and so perhaps it could be optional functionality that the user could switch on/off as they desire. I think that the latter option would be easiest to implement as it would be part of the existing 'add flashcard' button event code.

I'm also in support of the above suggestion for an input line on the pop-up (although I've never actually seen one on my WM2003 version - not sure where to find it).

Finally, timed flashcard quizzes would be nice, especially for 'multiple-choice's (someone else suggested 'review only's and the timing being the driver of moving to the next card). Perhaps the option could be in the 'Test Setup' tab so that a user could change the length of time quickly.

 

[stisev]

I came here to post a few features I thought would be useful, but it turns out 2 people JUST recently did.

I asked for an 'undo' button or similar before for when an FC is added but you reckoned that this would have to be implemented across the board for all actions. My specific problem is I'm always creating flashcards by accident and I've juggled the toolbar around but still keep doing this and then have to open up FCs, go into Manage FCs, search on Uncategorized (or whatever is the default cetegory) scroll down and select the unwanted FC and then delete it, before closing it all to get back to the dictionary.

I agree that an undo across the board would be a major undertaking, likely not worth it and would perhaps be the result of a plethora of unwanted behaviour. However, would it be possible then to have either a contextual undo option appearing in the list of FC categories (the list of categories that appear when the FC button is held down), or perhaps an optional Gmail-style undo option on the "Card Added" window that pops up when a card is added? E.g. Instead of:

I also think "Undo" feature would be useful.

Finally, timed flashcard quizzes would be nice, especially for 'multiple-choice's (someone else suggested 'review only's and the timing being the driver of moving to the next card). Perhaps the option could be in the 'Test Setup' tab so that a user could change the length of time quickly.

YES. I think timed flashcard quizzes would be VERY useful! Ideally, with sound.

One can enable it and "start" the timed cycle and the user can change the # of seconds that it takes to get to the next card. Even better, there would be a scroll down box ON THE FLASH BOX SCREEN specifying the # of seconds.

Let's say I start a flashcard session, timed. The dropdown box selected is 5 seconds, but I decide it's waaaay too fast. I can scroll down and select 10 seconds while i'm inside the session.

Does that make any sense? What do you guys think?

 

[mikelove]

johnh113 - I really prefer the popup window without a text input line, actually - much cleaner / less confusing for beginning users. Though I suppose for consistency it might make sense to have the input line in popup links once you've enabled it for everywhere else. Good point on #2, if we detect cards in those ranges we probably might as well break them out separately. You can already skip cards above a certain score using the "Card Filter" tab of the New Session screen - just check the box next to "Score filter" and set it to range from 0 to 720000. (the blank is just wide enough for 6 digits, I think)

caesartg - makes sense to add an Undo option for that, I suppose. Really it seems like we almost need a dedicated "New Card" dialog - something that pops up to let you immediately configure initial categories / score / difficulty, view a list of / decide whether to ignore or match to a list of potential duplicates, maybe even change which dictionary the card is created from without having to switch to a new dictionary in the main interface.

Timed auto-advance should be coming in a future release, just not sure when yet.

 

[sych]

Mike, I'd also love a quick way to get to the Edit screen of the last-added flashcard, I often find myself wanting to delete or tweak or check something related to the card I just added, and it's a long trip to the Edit dialog via Manage Flashcards.

Enquiry: Annotations for flashcards and/or entries - any idea when they're coming?

Feature request/suggestion: I often find that there's a group of 2 or sometimes 3 words that I mix up a lot, for e.g. I'm always mistaking 嘈杂 for 噪音, 折 for 拆, 赏 for 堂 or 常, 权 and 枚, etc etc. To help with this I've been making flashcards in SuperMemo that show me two characters, I try to read both and give the meaning, then I hit reveal. But making these is time-consuming, and whenever I come up with a new one I want to make I have to jump out of Pleco and into SM, enter the data manually, etc etc. It would be great if Pleco could somehow to allow me to put together groups of characters/words that I get mixed up a lot, and give me flashcard quizzes that ask me to distinguish between them, like I'm currently doing in SM.

 

[caesartg]

Hi Mike

Sometimes if I'm asked a multiple choice question and I haven't got a clue about the answer I then realise that I want the system to know that I got it wrong and then find I'm turning the test on its head to look for a wrong answer (!) and a couple of times I was doubly-wrong and selected the correct answer! Complete guesses would be fine if this was just a game/competition (in which case it's a bonus!) and there wasn't a scoring system controlling the appearance of the cards for learning.

So, is there an option hidden anywhere to simply tell the system that I was wrong and avoid correct complete guesses? If not, how about having an option to have one (E.g. Just a space-conserving discrete square box on one side with an 'X' on it would probably be all that's needed).

I've had this problem with two quizzes in particular - a multiple choice of the audio being given and then selecting the definition. I listen to the audio and avoid looking at the choices until I've got an inkling of the meaning so that I can use the multiple choice as a guide rather than a crutch when I have absolutely no idea - if I have absolutely no idea I'd just like to let the system know that. Also, a multiple choice of character being given and selecting meaning. However, it would apply to any multiple choice question where I'm asked and I don't have a clue about whether any of the answers are either definitely correct or definitely incorrect and would also save wasting a little time when I can find an incorrect answer.

Thanks

Ben

 

[mikelove]

sych - a button to get to the last card added might work, though I think I prefer something a bit more comprehensive like a dialog (directly accessible from the main screen) that shows you a list of the last, say, 20 cards created or modified. Possibly just a modified version of Manage Flashcards that always defaulted to that search.

No idea about annotations- ask me again once the iPhone version's out. Interesting thought about commonly-confused cards - I'm not sure how much this would get used if people needed to generate those pairs of cards manually, though, and I don't know how we could do it automatically without a lot of clever AI.

caesartg - if you enable "Show score buttons" in the Scoring tab of Advanced Settings, and set the button configuration to "123456," "654321," or "alternating", that will give you a way to mark any card as correct / incorrect after revealing the answer. You could also use the "skip card" button option to mark the card as neither correct nor incorrect. I suppose we could add an option for "skip card" to instead always mark the card as incorrect, though.

 

[jiacheng]

Feature suggestion: Prioritize by overdue ratio

So, when using repetition spaced algorithm, I find that it is not always possible to complete the number of cards that you may have been given on that particular day. Often times, I try to use the filters on the test to try and knock out the lowest score words first because I feel that those memories are the most volatile and most in need of reinforcement. I was thinking that if there was a feature to expand on this idea nd try to place the words that are most likely to be forgotten at the highest priority. The idea i had would be to calculate a priority based on the ratio on the score and the number of days overdue to be tested.
so a card with a score of 400 that is 2 days overdue would have a priority of 0.5, where as a card with a score of 1000 and 2 days overdue would have a priority of 0.2. Based on this model, we would estimate that the first card is more in danger of being forgotten than the second one, and therefore should be shown first.

My hope is that by using this, it lessens the likelihood of a words being forgotten if your time to study is limited, and also reduce your workload over time.

 

[caesartg]

Thanks for the suggestion Mike - I did try using the response quality scoring buttons before with multiple choice quizzing but found the extra clicking and thought-process (how GOOD/BAD was my answer?) a distraction as I just want the system to know "right, wrong, wrong, right, right, wrong, etc" and I like how the quiz system is streamlined for this. I've found it preferable to simply look for a wrong answer when I don't have a clue, even if I occasionally unluckily get lucky and select the right answer. I didn't know about the 'skip card option' so I'll check it out but it would mean the scoring system not recording my negative and so arguably defeats the purpose of the quiz.

 

[mikelove]

jiacheng - we've actually been considering rolling out a card-selection system that's entirely based on a priority list; not only does it show you the most urgent cards first, but it keeps going down the list for as long as you feel like studying, rather than cutting you off after you've reviewed all of the cards that are currently due. We get almost as many complaints about the latter problem (running out of cards to study when you still feel like putting more time in) as we do about the former, so it makes sense to address both with the same system.

caesartg - fair point. I suppose we could offer an option on that screen to show only correct and incorrect but show them on every test type - this would also address people's occasional complaints about getting unfairly marked incorrect on free-answer tests (accidentally tapped on the wrong character, hit the wrong Pinyin letter, etc). If "Skip Card" doesn't help you could also use the "Score" button option to manually lower the card's score - wouldn't factor in to the Automated algorithm, though, so it might not be as useful as a real Incorrect button.

 

[renovator]

I really, really miss not being able to do flashcards that have more than 4 characters. I can review them, but can not enter pinyin of more than 4 characters. Anything on the horizon to take care of this issue? Even 6 or 8 pinyin input boxes would be a great improvement over the 4 boxes now available.