Feature Suggestions

[The Duelist]

Hi Mike

I Think That The Flashcard Statistics Screen
Should Display The Name Of The 'Score Profile' That Is Being Displayed.
At The Moment It's Not Obvious What Stats Are Being Displayed

:?: Also, Is A Way To 'Change' The Number Of Times You Have To Get A Card 'Correct'
Before It Is 'Known' On The Statics Screen.
This Is Currently 'Set' To 3.

TIA
The Duelist

BTW: I Think PD2 Is Definitely 'Ready' For RC Status !
I've Now Organised Myself A Complete PD2 Study Program (Pun Intended :lol: )
For Drilling My Vocab/Listening/Writing/Tones/Review. 8)

 

[stephanhodges]

Reader suggestion for dictionary window portion.

When showing a definition, set the initial definition showing as the "*" (most common) one. Example ABC "guo 过" could actually select guò, which is the word Wenlin chooses to show first.

Second, it would be nice to be able to set preferences for the reader from within the reader window (to avoid reselecting the text).

Third (probably already mentioned), a selection entry (perhaps at the top, or a button) to just select the last item opened in the reader, and position to the last opened location within that document.

 

[stephanhodges]

Ability to have pop-up menu in reader to magnify selection. This isn't the same as using a large font in the reader, but something that would magnify a selection of text using the 96 point font.

You can get a smaller version if you have it configured to always magnify in the dictionary window, but this is different from that.

 

[stephanhodges]

How do I prevent (or get a confirmation message) for duplicates WITHIN the same list (as opposed to the save word in different lists?

Either when manually adding or when importing (perhaps with duplicates, or just duplicate headwords, etc).

Duplicate handling, perhaps, is an area to improve in 2.1

 

[stephanhodges]

When at the flashcard management main screen, I think the "Statistics" button should default to the currently selected categories from the flashcard session. I can always switch to "all", but it seems to me that most people would want to (more often) see statistics for the sessions they are focusing on.

 

[mikelove]

The Duelist - that fits with the general idea of making the current profile visible in more screens; if we do that, though, I'd rather do it everywhere (so it's basically always at the top of the screen in new session / advanced settings / statistics), which means rearranging a lot of screens / expanding to an extra panel or two as we're probably going to do in 2.1.

There's no way to change the cutoff for "learned" yet, though it's definitely something we could add a preferences setting for. And great, hopefully the about-to-be-released b7c will be the last test version before we can put out a release candidate.

stephanhodges - the * actually just indicates the most common word with that particular Pinyin without regard to tones, so it wouldn't be a reliable guide for those character choices - I'm not sure Wenlin gets their information about which version is the most common. The reader already does default to the last opened document on Windows Mobile so we should probably add that on Palm as well.

Duplicate-checking within a particular category would be really hard (slow enough to make adding new words extremely awkward), and I'm not quite sure what the point would be of having it - if you have duplicate-checking applied systemwide, you won't be able to create more than one card with a specific word, and since a specific card can't be duplicated within a category (the database checks disallows this) you'd never end up with a duplicate in the same category. So the only way you would have a duplicate within a category would be if you had duplicate-checking turned off for the whole system, and while that's certainly an option, it's not something we're really trying to encourage / expand.

Adding an option to generate statistics from all of the currently selected categories makes sense, but that too would be rather tricky - definitely a 2.1 possibility though.

 

[caesartg]

Hi Mike

Probably others have asked but:

Will the vocalisation of texts/examples sentences/entries beyond the headword be a feature for Pleco 2.1? I think I read one suggestion made earlier as being removing the gaps from the singular vocalisations - this would be a rudimentary way of doing it but I would certainly be very pleased with that.

Also, really hope you'll go ahead with the desktop versions. I'll probably get myself a NetBook like the Asus EEE sometime in the future which would be ideal for studying Chinese outdoors and could be hooked up to a large monitor indoors. Certainly, the hours and hours spent squinting at a PDA over the past 4 years have not been good for my eyes and while I'd use PDAs/Smartphones for quick reference, short study sessions and the ability to scribble a character, I'd rather use a much larger screen for the more extensive and extended work. I wonder what the licence issues would be - would users need two licences or perhaps a discounted extended licence for a single user?

That's also been the barrier for many people here where I work at university. Plecodict should be a tool that every Chinese studies academic should have to hand but PDAs and Smartphones not only scare them but many already have pretty poor eyesight from years spent squinting at the printed page and then their PC monitors.

Cheers

Ben

 

[caesartg]

Hi Mike

About the flashcard system, I think you definitely need some kind of basic mode for when you release Pleco 2. Might I suggest that rather than having a feature-limited option (which has the disadvantage of people jumping into the more advanced stuff prematurely just to get one thing the basic set didn't provide) you have something much simpler like a pre-configured set of flashcards (probably using the base Oxford dictionary, if that will be with every release of Plecodict) and using a pre-configured learning algorithm for the scoring, card selection, frequency and what in the card is tested). For example, you might have a set of quick tests on such things as colours, fruits, countries of the world, verbs, adjectives, nouns, etc, using primary school and high school vocab from one of the education ministries. You could give the user just a few options - e.g. able to select the flashcard content of the test and the kind of test (E.g. Multiple choice, stroke order, mix it up based on behind the scenes scoring etc) with the actual configuration being entirely based on what's available in the current advanced flashcard system.

This will be adequate for beginners and will also give a quick taste of the system to more advanced learners who would then go on, learn the intricacies of the advanced system in order to set up their own more advanced flashcards. If it was there, quick and fun, I'd probably dip in and brush up the basics too.

Cheers

Ben

 

[thph2006]

...Probably others have asked but... Also, really hope you'll go ahead with the desktop versions... Plecodict should be a tool that every Chinese studies academic should have to hand but PDAs and Smartphones not only scare them but many already have pretty poor eyesight from years spent squinting at the printed page and then their PC monitors. ...Ben

I agree 1000%
Although PD will be an awesome tool once 2.0 is released and I find a supported PDA-phone with a decently sized screen (my eyes are bad too!) what I'd find even more useful would be a desktop version. If it really is a trivial port to Windows PLEASE release a beta or even completely unsupported Win-XP version with the 2.0 release. Even if the interface was ugly and buggy I'd find it supremely useful and promise I wouldn't complain if it crashed now and then.

...And I'd be willing to bet in the end you'd end up selling even more of the desktop than the mobile version.

 

[koreth]

Hard to tell what the market would look like, but I think I wouldn't have much use for a desktop version. Most of my PlecoDict usage is when I'm not at my desk; I review flashcards on the train to work, I look words up when I'm reading Chinese books in bed or when I'm out and about and see something I can't understand, and I use it as a crutch when I'm having a conversation with someone in Chinese and the subject matter gets beyond my still-limited vocabulary. And of course it's indispensable when I'm in China trying to get around on my own, though of course I try really hard not to pull the dictionary out unless I have no choice.

It's true that I do also sit at a table and do focused studying, so I could use a desktop version for that, but honestly even there it's nice to have PlecoDict take up only a tiny bit of table space so I can spread my other materials out more.

On the other hand, different people probably have very different usage patterns than I do. But for me, anyway, I'd much rather see the mobile version evolve than see mikelove and company get sidetracked with a desktop version.

That said, I bet if they do an iPhone port, a Mac version would fall out of that without a ton of extra fuss. Not sure how similar Windows Mobile is to regular Windows but the iPhone OS is pretty much just OS X with some bells and whistles.

 

[caesartg]

Well, in my department there are over 100 students studying Chinese Studies or taking Chinese classes and more than 10 Chinese studies academics and dozens of phd and masters students. Sheffield, SOAS, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh also have sizeable Chinese Studies programmes. Based on the students at my uni, a barrier for them is the device, as few of them have compatible smartphones and PDAs or the funds, technical savvy and patience to purchase and use one themselves. All of them have laptops though, so with a desktop version there is no barrier to entry. With the growth in popularity of netbooks, many of these being bought running Windows XP, some of the mobility aspects of the WM/Palm versions are retained. I think the market is substantially larger but if a desktop version would require a great deal of reworking of the WM code, then Mike would obviously be best conducting some market research into it beforehand. I try not to base my understanding of the market on my own personal usage of Plecodict as, while I am probably typical of current Plecodict users, I am likely atypical of the potential market of those who would benefit from Plecodict and its multifarious uses at all stages of learning and research.

 

[mikelove]

caesartg - full-fledged text-to-speech is more likely to come along in 3.0 or some other far-off version; along with removing gaps we'd have to deal with at least the basic sandhi tone changes and also do a whole bunch of new recordings to cover shorter versions of syllables / in-between tones and the like.

A desktop version is still in the works, and hopefully not too far away - we've had the handwriting recognizer license for desktop Windows sitting around unused for several years now, we really need to do something with it and a quick-and-dirty port from Windows Mobile would be quite easy.

There won't be a basic mode in the 2.0 flashcard system, but we may add something like that in 2.1 - really the default settings are fine as far as learning algorithm / card selection / etc so if you just import a premade word list you can pretty much get up and running without having to understand how any of that stuff works.

koreth - porting from iPhone to Mac would be a bit harder than porting Windows Mobile to desktop Windows, but it's quite feasible too.

 

[Mator]

Hey Mike,

Just wanted to see if it would be possible to put in an option (or make default) to auto search in the manage flashcards section for "all cards" and on category searches. Almost every time I switch categories, I forget to tap the search icon so I'm looking through the wrong cards. Because the screen flashes and redraws I think most people will assume it has updated the search with the new results. Even though I know it doesn't, it keeps catching me offguard. Even if there was just someway to keep the screen from flashing that would be helpful.

 

[mikelove]

We can definitely try to do something about the screen flashing at least - some of the searches (particularly Uncategorized) in those are slow enough that there really ought to be a separate button press, though I guess it might make sense as an option on a fast system.

 

[thph2006]

Hard to tell what the market would look like, but I think I wouldn't have much use for a desktop version...

Just to clarify, I used the term desktop a little too loosely. What I really meant was a Windows version. I agree being tied to a desk isn't good but just think about all the new windows-capable form factors coming on the market like Eee PC, UMPCs, netbooks. These things range from something you can put in your pocket to notebooks with 6-10" screens. The common denominator being they're all really portable and can all run windows. Perfect for me at least.

Cheers, tom

 

[mikelove]

Right, we see that as the bigger market too - particularly in the "real" / non-preview desktop version once we add some features tailored towards reading documents / web pages / etc rather than just writing in characters.

 

[stephanhodges]

Palm

Fix so that "copy to internal" and "mark as backup" can be done in one step

Fix display to show when something is marked as backup. Right now, it's not possible to tell from looking. Perhaps a different color, etc.

 

[mikelove]

The latest version of PlecoMover already does that - did you install the new one from b7c? The new opening screen lets you do both of those things with a single "backup to internal" or "backup to SD", and the file lists in Advanced mode clearly indicate "(BACKUP)" after backup files (while in the opening screen they're listed under separate tabs).

 

[stephanhodges]

A future suggestion (but welcome if you get it in without any bugs!)

One of my classmates has a Japanese - Chinese dictionary. It allows TWO characters to be written, in two side by side squares. That way, much more often, someone can write a complete word, etc. I assume that also means the software can eliminate most of the possible choices. It looks like it's completely optional as to writing 1 or 2 characters before requesting it to recognize.

So, two entry positions for us with large displays, please

 

[ipsi]

I'd like to request the ability to have one set of font sizes for Flashcards, and another for the screen. I'm frequently using Flashcards on the bus or what have you, and I find that with my preferred font size (tiny!), things can be hard to read, especially when the bus is shaking all over the place. So yeah, I'd like two different font sizes .

Oh, and a slightly more compact interface. I'm not sure if this is the case with other devices, but there seems to be a reasonable amount of wasted space.

Ah, and something I almost forgot: I think there was an option in previous betas (on Palm at any rate) that allowed you to remove the menu bar at the top of the screen. Was that removed or am I just not looking hard enough? That would easily resolve my current complaint of 'everything's a little cramped'.

EDIT: My bad, I found it. Was expecting a check box, as opposed to '7, 6, 5, 4, 3, Hide'. Helps a lot.