Feature Suggestions

[mikelove]

ldolse - well we're certainly aiming to match them on the desktop features-wise, we're just not going after the same market. E-C flashcards indeed don't work very well yet, and I really do think English audio would be a must to compete with the other products out there (though they're not too particular about speaker quality / accents - I could probably record the darn thing myself if I had to), and even if the included dictionaries are high-quality we'd need at least one title of the Collins / Oxford Advanced Learner's / etc type (i.e., English-Chinese with detailed usage explanations) in order to compete with the dedicated dictionaries from Besta et al. Certainly not insurmountable problems, just enough to keep this from being a priority at least until after the iPhone / desktop versions are done.

renovator - heh, yeah, there are some goofy words in there - no way you're getting a better dictionary database in a title that inexpensive, though.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

BTW. Did you manage to make any progress on a license for a high quality English - English dictionary yet? What about an English thesaurus? I would love to have both of these as they would be useful for me on a daily basis since I enjoy looking up words, I do a moderate amount of translating and I often find myself teaching English to Chinese friends. Additionally, they might be quite useful for your non-native English speaking customers to look up the definitions of the English words that Pleco gives them for Chinese headwords.

Eagerly awaiting these.

 

[mikelove]

Haven't done much work on that yet - we're waiting to get all of our existing licenses deployed before we start working on any new ones. And there are a couple of other Chinese-related things that may take priority over something English-only - there's only so much we can take on data-conversion-wise at any one time, unfortunately.

 

[radioman]

When in the flashcard session, I believe it would be great to change the score off the button either up or down without having to press and hold. I know there is a default, but what I am thinking is to take the current button icon (an arrow pointing up, a line, and an arrow pointing down, and make that double height like the X and checkmark button size. Then the button could be programmed to be used as a rocker switch of sorts, where pressing the top would increment by some fixed amount, and pressing the bottom would decrement by the same fixed amount.

 

[mikelove]

Interesting... this would have to go next to a score counter, of course, so it might actually make sense integrated into the fields at the top of the screen somehow - make those interactive in general, maybe, people might want to alter other values too and that would be an easy way to do so.

 

[radioman]

I will say that from my personal perspective, I find it intuitive and easy to access the buttons and change the score while referencing the score number at the top of the screen. Next to the score counter does makes sense though, so if there is a better way to lay it out in the grand scheme of things, I am certainly for it.

Not to hack things up, but in the more near term, I am wondering if it is possible just to add another score change button just like the original, that could be set to increment down, while the other increment's up.

 

[mikelove]

Well I guess we could add a second "Score" button checkbox to the Controls panel, then change the icon for each button depending on whether it was set to increase or decrease the score, but I'm not wild about adding yet more clutter to that already overcrowded interface. Though I suppose once you're letting people have as many as 14 different buttons at the bottom of the screen at the same time, drawing the line at that and refusing to go to 15 is a bit silly.

 

[mintcheerios]

First I'd like to say thanks for making a great product. Pleco is working great on my Samsung Omnia.

One features I wanted to suggest may have already been mentioned or may even be possible (but I don't know how to do it).

I'd like to be able to put a flash card into a new category while I'm going through a flash card session. It's kind of like putting a card in a different stack as you go through them. I mention this because I like to use the three shoe boxes method to learn flash cards. Here is the method copied and pasted from Handango:

1. You put small pieces of papers (with a word in your own native language on the one side and the meaning of the word on the other) into the first box.

2. You close the box and shake it well to have the papers mixed (to make sure they always come in a different order).

3. Then you start to get the papers one by one out of the 1st box. If you know the meaning of the word you took, you put it in the second box, if not, you put it back in the first one.

4. You do the same with the 2nd and 3rd boxes, until all the words are taken. Two or three days later you take the whole box again and do the same.

By this method, a word only reaches the third box (and finally get out of it) if you really learned it.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks!

I'm happy to tell you that this is already possible in Pleco 2.0 - go to the "Controls" tab of Advanced Settings and check the box next to "Toggle Category" to add a button to flashcard sessions that lets you add / remove cards from a particular category. You can also tap-hold on that same button to add the card to to / remove it from any other category.

However, you can actually get Pleco to take care of all of this box-shuffling for you if you like. Go into the "Scoring" tab of Advanced Settings, set "Scoring Type" to "Manual," check the Increase and Decrease boxes, set Increase to "by 100 points after 1 correct in a row" and Decrease to "by 100 points after 1 incorrect in a row". Then, go into the New Flashcard Session screen, go to the Card Filter tab, check the "Score Filter" box, and set the range of scores in it to go from 0 to 399.

With this configuration, cards start out with a score of 100, which is equivalent to being in the first box; the score is increased by 100 (move up to the next box) each time you answer a card correctly, and decreased by 100 (move down to the previous box) each time you answer it incorrectly. Once a card's score reaches 400 (leaves the third box, in other words) you're no longer tested on it.

You should probably also reset your cards' scores before starting to use this method; you might have some cards whose scores are already higher than 400 but that you still want to study (the default Automated scoring algorithm increases scores a lot more aggressively). To do this, open up the Manage Cards screen, search for all of the cards (or all of the ones you want to reset, anyway), tap the "Batch" button, and look for the "Score" button on that screen. Make sure the menu next to it is set to "reset" and the score to "100 pts", then tap the Score button and that will reset all of the cards' scores to 100.

 

[caesartg]

Dear Mike

I find the 'Char Info' section to be particularly useful when studying flashcards and use all areas of it. However, I find that the 'Compounds' tab is much less useful when it derives so many obscure words from the ABC dictionary and would like some way to limit it to just using the Oxford dictionary, as these are the compounds I am most likely to learn for productive use. I think that the only way I can do this is to switch off the ABC Compr. dictionary's 'Use in search' flag in the 'Manage Dicts' preferences. However, I still want to use the ABC for the majority of my searches in the main dictionary lookup area, so it would mean a rather convoluted process in switching it on or off whenever I want to study flashcards and then later want to search the ABC dictionary.

Would it be possible to have a button or flag next to 'Popup word' on the 'Compounds' tab of the character info screens that would appear if the user has purchased the ABC dictionary and allow either the Oxford or the ABC to be used for compound lookup. This would allow for the quick studying of compounds for both mainly productive (Oxford) and receptive (ABC) use. Another method would be to have separate flags in the 'Manage Dicts' preferences for 'Search' and a separate flag for 'Compounds' (separation of functions) but this would be less useful than a contextual option allowing for both receptive and productive compounds to be popped up for a character.

Cheers

Ben

 

[ipsi]

There's actually a very simple solution to that: Go into Dict/Manage Dicts and move whichever dictionary you want to use for the compound words to the top of the list. Pleco, as far as I'm aware, uses that dictionary (and only that dictionary) for the Compound Words tab.

 

[johnh113]

Dear Ben,

I have the same problem. I like to use the compounds tab to find new words to add to my flashcards. But many are obscure.

So I play the audio for each one. If the audio plays smoothly it usually means that it was specially recorded and therefore is a fairly well used word. If the word is pronounced as two separate sounds it means that the word is probably not often used and I don't add it.

That's kind of laborious. Maybe it would be nice to have a special mark to show that the word has a recorded audio for it, signifying a certain level of popular usage.

John

 

[mintcheerios]

Thanks mike, this seems to work.

 

[caesartg]

Cheers Ipsi, that is a good fix for the problem.

Mike - how about a dictionary selector or button on the compound page then? It would be useful to flip between Tuttle, Oxford and ABC without having to rearrange the search order.

Cheers

Ben

 

[caesartg]

Dear John,

Yes, I think the compound recordings reflect all of the Oxford dict. Although, I think Ipsi's solution would be suitable for you too.

I mainly use the compounds as a quick reminder of where else I use a character for some of the trickier-to-remember-ones and I have plenty of mini-epiphanies as I go along. It's such a great feature!

Cheers

Ben

 

[mikelove]

caesartg - dictionary-switching in Compounds is already implemented in the iPhone version, actually, so it'll probably show up in the 2.0.3 Palm/WM update. I'm a bit wary of it on Palm because of the long time those searches usually take (generally it's best to minimize the frequency with which someone will hit a button and then have to wait five seconds with the screen frozen) but I don't know if we're ready to start making new features like that WM-only yet.

The audio recordings include all of the words from Oxford and from the future "Pocket" version of the ABC dictionary, along with every HSK vocabulary word (and IIRC we checked against a couple of other beginner-oriented vocabulary lists too). That's not perfectly lined up with modern usage frequency, however - there are a number of fairly archaic / literary terms in there.

 

[sych]

I'm a bit wary of it on Palm because of the long time those searches usually take (generally it's best to minimize the frequency with which someone will hit a button and then have to wait five seconds with the screen frozen) but I don't know if we're ready to start making new features like that WM-only yet.

I vote give us the option anyway, we'll learn to avoid it quick enough if we don't want to wait.

 

[mikelove]

Already implemented in the 2.0.2 update, enjoy!

 

[ben_gb]

I have 2 suggestions for the flashcard section:

• 1. Would it be possible to have an extra button on the "show answer" screen which allows you to see the full dictionary entry for a flashcard (when not using the "Show All" option).
  
  I use the "Defn Only" option when doing my flashcard testing and reviews because it's easier to remember and be tested when the entry is short (also the full entries often give too much away in their examples). However, after I have seen the answer, I frequently find it would be useful to show the full definition with examples, as this can help me remember the usage. It could even be a toggle button - though it should always start with the default choice on each answer card.
  
  By the way, I normally use the English definition as the Question, and chinese + pinyin + definition as the answer, but actually this might be useful whichever way around users do their flashcard tests. Maybe this could be added as an optional button like the 'skip card' button, in the 'controls' section of the Flashcard Advanced.
  
  I know that I can highlight the entry and use the Pop-up definition, but this is a bit clumsy, and means lots of scrolling around for longer entries. That said, making the pop-up definition full screen, with a button to pop it up (automatically using the current Flashcard characters as it's search term) might be an alternative way to achieve what I'm looking for, with the added benefit that you could also switch dictionaries in the pop-up to see different examples.
  
  
• 2. It would be useful if there was a setting to make it so that the score data on the top line is only displayed with the Answer/reverse side, not on the Question side too. I sometimes find that seeing the score info out of the corner of my eye can subconsciously help me to remember a word, because it tells me whether or not I've seen it before and how many times I've seen it etc, so it makes me think I know the word better than I actually do.
  

Ben

 

[mfcb]

2. It would be useful if there was a setting to make it so that the score data on the top line is only displayed with the Answer/reverse side, not on the Question side too. I sometimes find that seeing the score info out of the corner of my eye can subconsciously help me to remember a word, because it tells me whether or not I've seen it before and how many times I've seen it etc, so it makes me think I know the word better than I actually do.

hehe, already mentioned this long time ago, that i obviously learn the score info also, for each card. i would like to be able to define a top line for the question and a different one for the answer... as i dont use a watch, i terribly miss a time indication during flashcard tests.