Feature Suggestions

[mikelove]

stephanhodges - tricky, but something to consider for the future I guess - probably not on Palm, though, the recognizer's too slow (runs in 68k) and the lag from entering two characters would I think be past what people would consider acceptable. (this is also the reason why we don't have live recognize-after-you-draw-each-stroke recognition, it's too slow on Palm)

ipsi - you can already set separate font sizes for flashcards in the Display section of Advanced Settings - does that not work?

 

[ipsi]

Doh! Don't mind me, I'll just sit here and happily miss the blindingly obvious .

 

[TroiOi]

I don't know if this could be a feature suggestion.

1. Support Vietnamese's special characters. The font you create is not full. Therefore, some characters in Unihan does not show or not show correctly. I think the Vietnamese's special characters set is rather small. Just more than twenties chars. It would be nice if you could include Vietnamese's charset to you font file so that I can make a Chinese-Vietnamese dictionary.

2. I've question about the ABC dictionary. In fact, I usually use Wenlin. In this program, it will show the root of the character like the original of the word "sun", "moon", or it will show how a character composed. But in Pleco, the ABC does not have such feature. I wonder it because we are not intend to support or ABC does not sell this feature to you . The root/origin of a character and how it composed help me alot to memorize the character. Could we have this feature in Pleco?

 

[radioman]

Is it possible to do a search on, say, ABC dictionary on all the words that are under the "comp." abbreviation (as an example?).

The reason I bring this up is that it would be interesting to see all the computer related words that are listed.

This could be applied to other word categories as defined by other abbreviations in ABC as well.

 

[mikelove]

TroiOi - interesting idea about Vietnamese, but I'm a little hesitant on that right now because adding new characters to our fonts on Palm is a *lot* of work - have to create custom font bitmaps in 4 different sizes, which means instead of 20 characters we'd have to create 80. (or 40 if we leave out people with low-resolution devices) Might be a bit more doable on Windows Mobile though.

We didn't license that character root data from Wenlin - we actually just recently did license their table of stroke order / character component data, so it should be possible to list components in a given character / search for components other than the main radical (as Wenlin does) in a future version of Pleco, but we haven't done anything with them on character roots. There are a lot of references like that available, though, so we certainly might license one of them at some point - we've made a few attempts at doing so without much luck (had a nice discussion with the zhongwen.com guy but for some reason he stopped responding to my e-mails) but there are plenty of other titles out there we can look at.

radioman - not possible yet, but a whole bunch of people have asked for this actually - wouldn't be too difficult to add (just an extra index, and in the ABC that data's all very nicely formatted so it's easy for us to extract / index it) so we can certainly consider it for 2.1.

 

[stephanhodges]

For Plecomover what is the difference between "Internal (PDB)" and "Internal (Card)"?

I suggest the names be more distinct. Since I am not sure of their difference, I am guessing when I suggest the following as an example:

I suspect you are "matching" the filez nomenclature, but if that's the case, their names aren't clear either, but because it DOES NOT MATTER, it isn't as important to remove confusion.

The reason this is more important, of course, is that internal memory actually gets backed up during a hotsync, and (on the downside), uses up resources that may not be a good choice...

Internal Memory
Card (Hidden)

 

[mikelove]

We're using whatever names Palm OS gives us for those cards - didn't take the time to come up with something more user-friendly since that whole Advanced screen is really only meant for people who already know their way around FileZ and just need something to set / remove those backup markers and convert between PQB and PDB. Internal(Card) on the Zodiac is I believe the Zodiac's extra internal file system, which is stored in RAM but not backed up on a HotSync (much like the internal drive on the Tungsten T5) - Internal (PDB) is the only thing that gets backed up on a HotSync.

 

[caesartg]

Hi Mike

I'm not studying writing or translation just now but I know this would be something I'd really want once I do get back into it - could you maybe make use of the E-C dictionaries in the reader, allowing the user to click on an English word in a read in document and automatically get the respective OX, NWP, etc entry (basically the current handling except for the English side)? After loading an English text file, I noticed with considerable surprise you don't have this already. It would really help for translation classes, rather than typing in each English word on the keyboard after looking at the printed page, which is what I was incessantly doing in translation back at uni. I say 'I' but I think it would be fair to say pretty much anyone in any E-C translation class in the world!

Cheers
Ben

 

[caesartg]

Another one Mike.

I have to practice reading documents in both simplified and traditional renditions.

Would it be an easy or difficult implementation to have a trad/simp button in the reader or to have the reader reflect the current system trad/simp setting in its display of a document? Your implementation works very well with the dictionary content, but I guess there might be other issues with the reader.

Currently, I would have to create two separate versions of the document for this (and maintain them if I was adding to them) - one trad and one simp. If this new fangled thing they be calling a kompyoota could do it for me...

 

[stephanhodges]

We need to have someone collect all the unimplemented suggestions (excluding this one) and put them up on a site, so that people could rank them in preference and viability. (Perhaps by bidding on them with real money - haha). But seriously, it would be nice to have a single list of the viable suggestions.

 

[Alexis]

Hi Mike,

A few suggestions for features:

1) Color the "Play Audio" Icon to indicate what "level" of sound will play:

ie.
Blue (native recording)
Yellow (multi-syllable recording) (when "Skip words without multi-syllable audio" is not selected)
Gray (no recording) (when "Skip words without multi-syllable audio" is selected)

Colors are just a suggestion, there are probably more appropriate ones.

This would make it easy for the user to know exactly what to expect when they hit the button

2) How about explicit "regular search" and "full text search" buttons. This would make it very simple for users to use the powers of both searches. I'm afraid that if the "full text search" requires special characters then it may not get as much use as it deserves to.

- Alexis

 

[mikelove]

caesartg - we can certainly consider adding E-C support in the reader, though it would be tricky enough that I'd like to get a sense of how many people are using the new 2.0 E-C features (like E-C flashcards) first. Might be a nice thing to accompany the additional new E-C Dictionary we'll hopefully be making available in 2009.

TC/SC conversion would be more difficult, it's really tough to get that working well automatically - with a couple of simple heuristics you can get pretty good accuracy on the ambiguous characters like 歷/曆 but there'd still be quite a few mistakes.

Alexis - great idea about changing the color on the audio button, that's definitely something we could look at for 2.1. There already is a full-text search button option, actually - it just inserts that # character in front of the current query but saves people from having to fiddle around with special characters.

 

[The Duelist]

Open PDF Files In PD2 Reader

Hi Mike

Just Wondering If It Would Be Possible To Open PDF Files Inside The PD2 Reader?
This Would Be Useful For ChinesePod Users.

The Duelist

 

[caesartg]

Hi Mike

With the simp/trad in the reader, personally, I'd be happy to have a few errors here and there as I'd still likely get almost all of the benefit. I'd also say the same about the pronunciation of sentences issue mentioned before where you were concerned that there'd be some errors if the system read out sentences or from the reader. You could always put in some small disclaimer. After all, Gmail is still in 'beta', but it's great. Wikipedia? Not reliable enough to depend on for research but when you want an overview of something or to read around some topic, it's of huge value. And anyway, just as with this beta and the audio files, you know that you would get plenty of feedback along the way to improve the system.

Haha, I doubt I've convinced you. Ah well.

Ben

 

[mikelove]

Well they're both possibilities, I guess - there are certainly other features in Pleco that are a bit rough like that. Really it depends on how much interest there is in the reader among our customers as a whole - the main reason why flashcards have gotten so much attention is that a ton of people use them, if lots of people start using the reader too then almost any reasonable upgrade is on the table.

 

[stephanhodges]

Perhaps I am repeating myself, but the thread is long!

Could we get the "A/A" large/small font switcher button onto the reader screen, so I could switch sizes without exiting the screen?

 

[mikelove]

One of many interface customizations that will likely be coming to the reader in 2.1, yes.

 

[stephanhodges]

The one usability feature I would like more than any other is to separate the category management from the flashcard session logic. Right now, if I start a flashcard session, I cannot change the default category for adding new words, cannot look at other flashcard lists, etc.

So, between classes I can start a session, but cannot finish it, even for a single chapter (about 120+ words) before the next class starts. Since the "add card" requires careful attention to pick the correct list if it's not default, it's a bit of a PITA.

Is there a way to at least move the "resume last session" question to WHEN I PRESS the Session button? That would let me get to the category config stuff, etc. I can see you would want to restrict all the flashcard session keys in this case...

 

[stephanhodges]

Going along with the expanded support for other European languages, perhaps you could replace the "pinyin" keyboard with most if not all of the keys needed for European languages? I know in the future, perhaps more keyboards would also be welcome.

But right now, the entire Pinyin keyboard is superfluous, since one can just type the letters and numbers from the regular Roman keyboard, so the change might only be the encodings of individual keys.

 

[stephanhodges]

Enhance the "Duplicate Card" message to something like:
"Card Added"
"Category Added"
"Duplicate Skipped"

This says what happens for all three cards, instead of one message with a result, one with a status/state

Preferably also add "(ABCD)" (category name) to the 1st two messages.