Feature Suggestions

[jiacheng]

hi mike, the new priority system sounds really cool. Would it be an algorithm separate from the repetition spaced algorithm? I kind of like the idea of being 'assigned' a certain amount to do every day, because it gives me a goal, so hopefully that behavior would still be accessible with the new system.
One thing I have observed about the repetition spaced algorithm is that the scoring seems to provide a good model of how well an item is ingrained in your long term memory, the downside being you can't study more when your assigned cards are completed. The frequency adjust algorithm doesn't limit the number of cards you can review, but seems to provide a better model for short term memory than it does long term. Would this new system would be a hybrid of those two models.

 

[caesartg]

Dear Mike

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean. If you mean some kind of 'force a correct answer'/'force an incorrect answer' option following answering that would overrule the system's initial response to the user's input, although not what I was thinking, I guess it would do the same job and would potentially solve other peoples' problems too. There have been times, maybe once or twice a day, when I didn't select the character in the free answer tests and ended up with the system marking me wrong for a card I had no problems with. Whatever way you use though, I'd just like to put my oar in and suggest the fewer extra clicks/screens the better. For example, if you could integrate the overrule into the existing flashcard submission response screen and perhaps had it also advance to the next question as per the " --> " button.

 

[caesartg]

Hi Mike

SENTENCE-BASED FC TESTING

You said you were thinking of having more sentence-based flash-carding and/or testing for a future version of Pleco. I've just been playing with setting up some sentence-based flashcards and seeing how the FC testing system handles them.

I was wondering - currently the limit for 'free answer' testing is 4 character headwords. A simple way to allow more sentence-based testing would be gained through extending the 'free answer' user interface to incorporate longer headwords? Perhaps with 8 or 12 characters. For example, on the character-writing 'free answer' screen, perhaps you could have a line of the 8 character boxes from left-to-right above the character entry box (and plus the 4 below, making 12 characters). Similarly for the pronunciation 'free answer' screen, 2 or 3 levels of the pinyin boxes (or maybe just smaller boxes).

I imagine though you'll be considering something even more flexible, allowing for even longer sentences to be written but just a thought for the short-term.

ALTERNATING TEST SELECTION

You also mentioned somewhere that you were considering making significant changes to flash-carding, especially with developing for the iPhone and the web (I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth again!). The current system is highly flexible and likely to satisfy most people that take the time to get their teeth stuck in to it. However, what I was wondering is, although you have 'alternating subject selection', why not have 'alternating testing' too? In other words, the system takes upon itself the creation of multiple score-files for each testing type of every card (E.g. stroke order score-file, free answer written score-file, free answer pronunciation score-file, multiple-choice reading [HEADWORD/MEANING, MEANING/HEADWORD] score-file, etc etc) and you can literally just jump in there as currently and have a whole bunch of different tests for different cards thrown at you and the system will gradually become aware of your weak understanding of one FC, your inability to write another properly, your misunderstanding of the tones of another, etc and use repetition-spacing or frequency adjusting algorithms to focus on these specific tests for these specific flashcards. You could have the character flashcards simply already set up in there for character-based testing. In summary (sorry for my long windedness!) to have not just an alternating subject selection but an across the board alternating test selection too (E.g. A multiple choice test for one card testing headword to definition, then write the stroke order for another, then write another's character, then another multiple choice giving the definition and asking for the headword, then to give the pronunciation of another with the tone, etc, etc and mix not just the user-selected flashcard words in but also pre-configured character FCs for the stroke orders and character meanings using the unicode info)? Such a system could be set up to be the fire-and-forget default configuration and still have plenty of the current back-end flexibility you already have tucked away somewhere.

The 'free answer' test is a big step towards doing this but doesn't go the whole hog and I'm not sure it distinguishes between the different testing or rather clumps it all into the one score-file.

Is this what you were thinking of doing?

 

[radioman]

While I am thinking of this....

I do not want to sound off the wall here, but... is there a way to get an English to English dictionary into Pleco. Now and again within some of the card definitions, or just because I want to look up a word in English, this has happened a few times over the past month.

 

[mikelove]

renovator - the latest plan on flashcard UI is to transition it to something HTML-based, so that not just the definition but the entire interface can be easily scrollable - jamming 8 input boxes into the current interface would be a very tricky proposition. So that's what's on the horizon for that - another thing that will probably debut on iPhone (due to its much-better-than-IE built-in web browser).

jiacheng - since the flashcard system code is pretty modular we'd most likely keep the old repetition-spaced system in there too. As far as the new system, I don't know if we'd still want to impose a hard limit, maybe there could be an option to cut off the session after a certain point, or we could just have a warning dialog pop up - "Congratulations, you've completed all of your high-priority cards for the day, would you like to quit or continue with lower-priority cards?" (probably phrased a bit more nicely than that, though) And yes, it would be a sort-of hybrid, though the internal structure is somewhat different.

caesartg - yes, it would be a force-this-type-of-answer button. And we'd certainly want to make it easy to access if we did add it.

The HTML-based flashcard UI I mentioned above is closely tied up with sentence-based testing - without making the whole thing scrollable there's not a good way to jam arbitrary numbers of boxes onto the screen. As far as alternating test types, this has come up a few times before I believe (though not IIRC with the scorefiles alternating too, so that's an interesting twist on it) - I think, however, that it's likely to prove complicated / intimidating enough that we'd want to avoid making it a default, and instead handle it pretty much like the current "field selection" options - choose one type, alternate between several or choose test type for each card based on score (in which case they'd all be going to the same scorefile).

radioman - in theory you could probably import one into a user dictionary from a text file, though I'm not sure how well that would work. The main free E-E dictionary out there is WordNet, but unfortunately it's organized as a tricky interlinked graph-type thing rather than as a simple list of words and their meanings so it wouldn't be easy for us to format for Pleco.

 

[Alexis]

I'd like to suggest an "undo" button in flashcards.

Sometimes I accidentally hit the correct/incorrect button by mistake when I meant to hit the other one (mainly because I may be going through a long list of cards that I know, then one shows up that I don't and the force of habit has me clicking "correct" anyways. I usually realize as soon as I hit it, but by then it's too late.

 

[sych]

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.

Either of the following would suit me nicely:

1. Put an "edit last card" option in the tap-and-hold menu on the add-flashcard toolbar button, or
2. Put an "edit last card" in the main drop-down menus, along with the other flashcard functions.

Ideally it would edit whatever card was affected by my last "add to flashcards" action. (i.e. even if my last "Add flashcard" action just added a new category to an existing card, I'd still like this "edit last card" to take me to the edit screen of that card. So what I'm talking about here is not strictly an "edit last card added" option, more of a "edit last card affected" option.)

 

[sinoreen]

hi mike!
thanks for the continuous improvements also for palm OS.
one thing that might have been mentioned before is that it would be great if it was possible to select and copy text from an opened document in the reader. sometimes I find sentences in documents that I want to add to FCs, and being able to copy would save me quite some time.

 

[mikelove]

Alexis - I don't know if we'd implement it with an Undo button, but providing an option to revise your card answer / score when backtracking through flashcards using the Back button is something we've gotten a bunch of requests for.

sych - this would ideally want to go to the Card Info screen, right? Seems like that would be more useful than Edit Card as it would allow you to change categories too.

sinoreen - good idea, but we'd probably need to add it through an extra button (something that toggled into "text selection" mode) so it'll have to wait until the reader interface gets overhauled / made more customizable.

 

[stisev]

Suggestion for next beta

Hi mike,
I've got a suggestion for the next beta. The manage flashcards screen, albeit useful, is (IMO) a bit of a mess. Finding specific cards is very tedious and one must do multiple clicks to get there.

Basically, what I'm proposing is a "field" under the 2 scroll down bars + [search] button that allows you type in the pinyin (with tone markers or without) and it shows you only the ones matching your input. Basically, it's like a mini-dictionary-type search inside Manage flashcards.

What do you think?

 

[sych]

sych - this would ideally want to go to the Card Info screen, right? Seems like that would be more useful than Edit Card as it would allow you to change categories too.

Sorry, yes - Card Info screen. That's what I was meaning to say!

 

[mikelove]

stisev - That's a pretty big addition, actually; not impossible, but probably more of a 2.1 feature at this point. The more immediate flashcard organization problem (we think) is the difficulty of moving cards between categories, which is what "Organize Flashcards" is designed to fix. But I can certainly see that there might be some value in adding an instant, dictionary-like flashcard search option eventually.

 

[radioman]

Background - When doing a handwriting flashcard session, I am shown a definition, and it provides me two empty blocks and the writing area to fill in. I am in immediate handwriting recognition mode. I write, make my selections, and my two character words come up green and red (as an example). - At that point I see the headword, revealed on the screen. Still on the same screen, I can now use handwriting recognition again, but it is now disabled from looking up a definition until the next flashcard.

The new functionality sought - After "revealing" of the headword, I want to be able to write in the writing area , and when I see the character of interest being "recognized" I want to tap it and now bring up the popup definition box. In this way, Even without a specific etymology type dictionary, I can still write component parts of the word, and if they are in Pleco's dictionaries, anywhere, I would be able to see the info in a popup definition box.

I like this because the headwords are already being presented on the screen in large font, and the writing box is present as well. This makes it easy to quickly copy parts of the characters for lookup. I know that there are ways to hack around this, and I use them now. But I believe this would be a neat, elegant way (at least from the user perspective), with the tools already being presented on the screen. Of course, behind the scenes software implementation is potentially another story...

 

[mikelove]

Interesting, but I think this would be better implemented via Character Info (with a new feature to display the component parts of a character and jump to their respective Character Info screens) - linking it with the handwriting recognizer in flashcards makes it too difficult to access and nearly impossible for people to discover / use if they're not specifically looking for it.

 

[radioman]

That sounds logical. Have any plans been posted for that yet? I certainly would be interested in using that type of functionality.

 

[mikelove]

Not really, aside from alluding to the fact that we had the necessary data licensed in another thread. A lot of our upcoming development schedule is going to depend on what happens with Pre and iPhone - if we have to take a couple of weeks to retool the Palm OS version interface to be finger-friendly for Pre users, that could push some features that were hopefully going to be in 2.1 to a later release, and with iPhone we never know what sorts of changes / redesigns might be mandated by Apple after we submit our first version of that, again potentially delaying other projects.

 

[sych]

Ever had any requests for a Chinese-interface version of Pleco? I'd like that!

 

[mikelove]

Tricky, given our refusal (thus far) to rely on external software to enable Chinese display / input; it would take a lot of hacking to get menus / dialog box labels / etc to display reliably in Chinese on our own, so we'd have to make the Chinese-localized mode exclusive to Chinese-localized systems. Which, given how buggy the available Chinese localization solutions are (particularly on WM), limits its usefulness somewhat. Particularly since we're not trying to sell to the Chinese-speaking market (for reasons I've discussed before: can't compete with Kingsoft et al on price, dictionary licenses all chosen for their utility to English speakers learning Chinese, expense of adding Chinese-speaker-learning-English features like English audio and conjugation guides, etc).

 

[ldolse]

I'd agree on the desktop side of things that their is no competing with Kingsoft, for the Chinese market. However - if you could make Pleco Desktop behave like Kingsoft with popups throughout the system with Pinyin, etc I'd pay for that pretty quickly. The problem with Kingsoft is it's aimed squarely at native Chinese speakers looking for quick translations, but it doesn't include basic things for the non-native Chinese learner like Pinyin, etc.

For the mobile space I think there is probably a market for native Chinese speakers though. It's true that there is lots of competition, but I think Pleco beats most of that competition hands down in terms of features and dictionary quality. A number of my Chinese colleagues have often been impressed by Pleco. I'm guessing the biggest things stopping it is lack of local marketing and a Chinese interface(Having it only on a Chinese ROM would be fine in this case). The other bit that would probably be useful for a Chinese student is E->C flashcards, not sure if that's really working yet.

 

[renovator]

You can also always tell if a Chinese individual used Kingsoft to help them in their translations as Kingsoft tends to be a language in itself. I learn a lot of English from people who use Kingsoft as many of the Kingsoft recommended English words have not actually been used in English for the past 300 years or so. Pleco does a much better job of offering "real world" English words.