HW60 said:If you google WYSIWYG, you get lots of hits for the last 24 hours. The problem for software like Pleco is the increasing complexity. At the same time the manual is of no help, because nobody will ever read it, as you can see when you have a look at some of the less complicated questions in the forum. When Microsoft invented the ribbons, they added a software soon after to help users to find the buttons they knew in the old office, but not in the ribbon office. Pleco's settings are not far away from Microsoft's ribbons as far as complexity is concerned. Therefore WYSIWYG is so important - I do not always want to ask a question in the forum if I want to change one of the settings and do not find it.
Increasing complexity is exactly what this change is meant to help address. Having two buttons is, I would argue, less intuitive for many users; if you've got a search bar and one button next to it and you're not seeing the search results you want, and you think that there are probably better results in there somewhere, the natural thing to do is to tap on that button and see what happens. With two buttons, it's not necessarily obvious to everyone that one button toggles between C-E/E-C and the other one determines which dictionary you're searching in, and when you throw the whole "dictionary groups" concept into the mix it gets even more befuddling; collapsing all of this to a single "try a different type of search" function seems much easier for the typical user to understand.
So if that button will by-and-large encapsulate everything that more advanced users want to do as well, and I think it will (in the two months since we released 2.4, we've had exactly one complaint about the fact that the software now jumps back to the grouped [C] search by default, which would seem to suggest that very few people are attached to single-dictionary searches), then it seems like an all-around design win. It may be less WYSIWYG in the sense that you're no longer dealing with language + dictionary as discrete concepts, but it's more intuitive in that it draws all of the "different type of search" options together in one button.