Thanks for the updates Mike. Regarding the Flashcard Module, that was about the best possible answer I could have expected. Anxiously waiting for the Apple Gestapo to stop stealing servers and start approving apps. http://gizmodo.com/5524843/police-seize-jason-chens-computers
iPhone Feature Requests
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
I'm not too comfortable with that raid protecting-journalists-wise (though it's certainly a constitutional gray area given the potentially-felonious circumstances by which they came by the phone), but after Gizmodo released the name of that poor Apple engineer (who doesn't seem to have been fired, Jobs haters take note) I can't say I feel too sorry for them - if anybody deserved to have the police break into their house as a result of that incident it's probably Jason Chen.
character
状元
For the iPhone/iPod Touch version, instead of having to decide between buttons to display, it would be nice to have a popup menu in which one could order options. That way one could put less-used options there, and not cram the UI with buttons (a number of us have found it hard to hit the buttons in Pleco as it is). So a few buttons would require one touch, a few two touches (menu | button), and a few more effort (menu | scroll | button). Just a thought.
llammamama
探花
Is it possible to replace the ~ characters in definitions with the actual headwords?
Especially when looking up single characters in the guifan dictionary, it is aukward trying to look up example words or sentences because the ~ prevents you from being able to hilight the word. I have the "replace headword with ~" option set to off.
Especially when looking up single characters in the guifan dictionary, it is aukward trying to look up example words or sentences because the ~ prevents you from being able to hilight the word. I have the "replace headword with ~" option set to off.
C
Charles
Guest
One of the really useful features of Pleco is the ability (when looking at multi-character entries in a dictionary) to look at the definitions of individual characters in the pop-up bubble. However, in some cases, the definition that shows up in the pop-up bubble is for a different pinyin/meaning of the character than the pinyin/meaning of the character in the dictionary entry you are reviewing. The following are examples of this using the ABC dictionary:
便宜 piányi: When you select 便 and get the pop-up bubble, it shows the definition for biàn.
宿舍 sùshè: When you select 舍 and get the pop-up bubble, it shows the definition for shě.
I realise this is because the pop-up bubble just takes the first entry in the dictionary that matches the character (and the ABC dictionary appears to be sorted alphabetically and by tone). It is also easy enough to go to the right pinyin/meaning of the character in the pop-up bubble by pressing ▼. However, I think it would make sense for the pop-up bubble to automatically show the pinyin/meaning of the character in the context of the entry that is currently on the screen.
便宜 piányi: When you select 便 and get the pop-up bubble, it shows the definition for biàn.
宿舍 sùshè: When you select 舍 and get the pop-up bubble, it shows the definition for shě.
I realise this is because the pop-up bubble just takes the first entry in the dictionary that matches the character (and the ABC dictionary appears to be sorted alphabetically and by tone). It is also easy enough to go to the right pinyin/meaning of the character in the pop-up bubble by pressing ▼. However, I think it would make sense for the pop-up bubble to automatically show the pinyin/meaning of the character in the context of the entry that is currently on the screen.
This feature requests thread seems to have turned into a general questions and answers thread since most of the features are actually available, just tough to find for us Pleco newbies. So, here's my issue, or request. I often use pleco in Chinese look-up mode, with HWR turned on, but sometimes I open Pleco to look up a word in English, so hit the 中 and change it to 英, but it stays in HWR mode, which doesn't work for English letters, so I must also hit the keyboard button.
So my question is, how can I set it that in Chinese look-up it defaults to HWR input, but by changing to English look-up it automatically switches to keyboard input?
So my question is, how can I set it that in Chinese look-up it defaults to HWR input, but by changing to English look-up it automatically switches to keyboard input?
Charles - good point; the coding for that would be a bit tricky but it feels like a bug the way it works now.
sburkle - in Settings / Panels / Default Input Mode, set "Chinese-English" to "Handwriting" and "English-Chinese" to "Keyboard." This only works if the language is already selected when you open input, though - it doesn't yet change the input mode when you tap on the language switch button with input already open.
sburkle - in Settings / Panels / Default Input Mode, set "Chinese-English" to "Handwriting" and "English-Chinese" to "Keyboard." This only works if the language is already selected when you open input, though - it doesn't yet change the input mode when you tap on the language switch button with input already open.
This is a feature request. I think particularly with the ipad, it would be nice to include some automatic character conversion functions. Much like how guifan and Abc can switch between simp/trad characters (btw, how can you do this with user dict definitions? - does it require 2 defs, one in brackets?), but be able to do this for the document reader. I like to read novels on my iPod touch (no ipad yet), and it would be nice to switch back and forth between reading simp. and trad. characters. Also if you ever get into selling textbooks, I think this would be a great tool. I know there is an open source tool called iconv for unix-based systems including BSD.
Very sensible request, yes - it may have to wait until we improve our text segmentation system, since conversions to Pinyin at least would be much easier with that, but we definitely need to provide some kind of mechanism for people to enter a string of characters in one set and have the other set / Pinyin prepopulated (maybe with the option to prompt you when the results are ambiguous). iconv unfortunately doesn't seem to do SC/TC conversion that well, at least not from our testing (maybe it's improved since then), but with our massive dictionary databases we can do a pretty nice job of that ourselves if we get a good text segmenter in there - once we've got that it's just a matter of looking up the correct translation of each word, plus extra heuristics for a few tricky ambiguous single characters like 里.
And yes, when importing flashcards or user dictionary entries from a text file you'd put the traditional version in brackets (exactly - no dashes-in-place-of-matching-characters) in the headword section if you want to have both - when editing them on-device there are separate simplified / traditional boxes.
And yes, when importing flashcards or user dictionary entries from a text file you'd put the traditional version in brackets (exactly - no dashes-in-place-of-matching-characters) in the headword section if you want to have both - when editing them on-device there are separate simplified / traditional boxes.
I mentioned earlier the conversion table that Wikipedia designed, it's been tested for a few years, with millions of Wikipedia articles, and is quite robust. It's also easy to implement (not sure how fast it would be, it's just a table of a few thousand search and replace strings, but I am sure a real programmer could optimize it in some way - I just use sed to run through the entire text with all the replacements).
You can see an example here: http://kaifangcidian.com/gongju/fanjian/
(or on any article in Chinese Wikipedia).
It's licensed under the Wikipedia license, so there shouldn't be any problems with including it.
You can see an example here: http://kaifangcidian.com/gongju/fanjian/
(or on any article in Chinese Wikipedia).
It's licensed under the Wikipedia license, so there shouldn't be any problems with including it.
Is it really that robust? Search-and-replace seems unlikely to do the job well by itself; you at least need something like Adsotrans that analyzes parts of speech and creates rules based on them - I do like the fact that the list is free, but I'm not sure how much it offers over just plugging texts into the ABC dictionary or another dictionary database with good simplified<>traditional mappings. Has there been any testing done versus human-aided SC/TC conversion?
I want the *opposite* to this... in Flashcards, when testing writing (i.e. not showing headword before reveal), I'd like if you can blank out (with a tilde) all of the places in the Tuttle definitions and examples that give me the answer! I like using the Tuttle definitions because the examples are really good, but sometimes it's just impossible not to 'cheat' when the answer is right there in front of mellammamama said:
In the spirit of reducing the number of options, I'd propose that this behavior just happens automatically whenever the flashcard options for "show" don't include "headword". It shouldn't need a pref setting, the software should just 'do the right thing'. Helping me cheat is not the right thing
sych - yeah, we definitely need to tag those ~s in Tuttle definitions - actually a data file problem in both cases, it's just that Tuttle only supports not hiding them while ABC only supports hiding them. We also need to tag example sentences themselves in Tuttle so that those can be hidden as they already are in PLC/ABC. And good point, there's not really any reason you'd ever want to see the ~ replaced by the actual word in flashcards except once the card is revealed.
rypervenche
Member
Hey Mike. We have spoken before about one of the features that I would like to request, but I have a few others that I would like to ask for at the same time, so here they are.
1. This has been mentioned before, but it would be nice to be able to update the CC-CEDICT without having to wait for updates. I personally add new entries to the dictionary every week, so I would like to be able to use an updated version of my main dictionary. I believe with 4.0 there will be an update allowing for personal dictionaries, but is there no way to be able to do it through Apple or through you guys? Or even MDBG's website? It would be much more convenient.
2. Actually the 3 other requests all have to do with the handwriting recognition. First and foremost, I bought the HWR and I must say that I love it (it can recognize both simplified and traditional at the same time, yay!). However, I no longer use it because of one thing that it lacks, associated characters. Whenever I need to use the handwriting recognizer, it's usually because I don't know a group of characters, and since I use traditional characters, it saves a lot of time and sometimes helps me a LOT (especially if I can't see the character well) to be able to guess the next character. So for now, if I only need to look up one character, I use the HWR on Pleco, if I need to look up 2 or more in a row, I use the iPhone's HWR. I do like the feature that you have where after you input the character, the list of possible characters still stays there. That way, if I clicked on the wrong hanzi, I can just go back and choose another one without having to redraw the character. It is very useful, but I think you should have an option to perhaps toggle the two features. Either in the settings or even better have a little button on the HWR screen itself that will let you toggle associated characters and possible choices. I think a lot of people would find that option very useful.
3. I will include my 2 other requests here in one. The first is the single-touch punctuation list. It is very useful when typing, very quick. The thing is, I can see why you didn't offer this, on Pleco it has no purpose. That is why I think you should make a Handwriting Recognition keyboard for the iPod Touch/iPhone (and add the punctuation thing to it as well). That way we can use it in any application, in any environment and have no trouble "typing" so to speak. I know many Chinese/Taiwanese people who use the iPhone's HWR to type in Chinese, and I think you would have a big market for this. As for how to put get it onto the iPhone/iPod, I don't know if an application could do it, you may have to make it available on Cydia for jailbroken phones, I don't know, I'm not a programmer. I would love to an effort made to make this a possibility though. If anyone could help by giving information or helping create it, I think we could all benefit from it.
Ok, I think I got my points across. I'm sorry if it is poorly written, I'm running on very little sleep. I hope you will take into consideration all of my requests, and I hope others will be as enthusiastic about them as I am.
Sincerely,
A happy Pleco user
1. This has been mentioned before, but it would be nice to be able to update the CC-CEDICT without having to wait for updates. I personally add new entries to the dictionary every week, so I would like to be able to use an updated version of my main dictionary. I believe with 4.0 there will be an update allowing for personal dictionaries, but is there no way to be able to do it through Apple or through you guys? Or even MDBG's website? It would be much more convenient.
2. Actually the 3 other requests all have to do with the handwriting recognition. First and foremost, I bought the HWR and I must say that I love it (it can recognize both simplified and traditional at the same time, yay!). However, I no longer use it because of one thing that it lacks, associated characters. Whenever I need to use the handwriting recognizer, it's usually because I don't know a group of characters, and since I use traditional characters, it saves a lot of time and sometimes helps me a LOT (especially if I can't see the character well) to be able to guess the next character. So for now, if I only need to look up one character, I use the HWR on Pleco, if I need to look up 2 or more in a row, I use the iPhone's HWR. I do like the feature that you have where after you input the character, the list of possible characters still stays there. That way, if I clicked on the wrong hanzi, I can just go back and choose another one without having to redraw the character. It is very useful, but I think you should have an option to perhaps toggle the two features. Either in the settings or even better have a little button on the HWR screen itself that will let you toggle associated characters and possible choices. I think a lot of people would find that option very useful.
3. I will include my 2 other requests here in one. The first is the single-touch punctuation list. It is very useful when typing, very quick. The thing is, I can see why you didn't offer this, on Pleco it has no purpose. That is why I think you should make a Handwriting Recognition keyboard for the iPod Touch/iPhone (and add the punctuation thing to it as well). That way we can use it in any application, in any environment and have no trouble "typing" so to speak. I know many Chinese/Taiwanese people who use the iPhone's HWR to type in Chinese, and I think you would have a big market for this. As for how to put get it onto the iPhone/iPod, I don't know if an application could do it, you may have to make it available on Cydia for jailbroken phones, I don't know, I'm not a programmer. I would love to an effort made to make this a possibility though. If anyone could help by giving information or helping create it, I think we could all benefit from it.
Ok, I think I got my points across. I'm sorry if it is poorly written, I'm running on very little sleep. I hope you will take into consideration all of my requests, and I hope others will be as enthusiastic about them as I am.
Sincerely,
A happy Pleco user
rypervenche - on the CC-CEDICT updates, unfortunately there's no good way to do that without creating your own giant customized user dictionary each time - this may get considerably easier / faster once we release a desktop user dictionary converter, but right now you'd have to wait quite a few hours for the import process to complete on your iPhone.
We are working to automate the CC-CEDICT creation process on our end to the point where we can do weekly updates ourselves (and we are trying to do them at least monthly even now) - the in-app dictionary updating is a lovely feature to have and we really ought to make better use of it - but we're not quite at that point of efficiency yet.
Character association has been requested since way back in the very first Pleco iPhone beta test - to be honest I've never quite understood why people want it, though. Wouldn't it be just as easy to just search for that first character in the dictionary? If you don't like that extra step of tapping on > to view multi-character entries for a single-character search, you can go to Settings / Dictionary / Search Results and disable "1-char for 1-char" and that will get it to always show the multi-character ones. And if you want to see results without having to exit the handwriting input box, enable the transparent handwriting background options in Settings / Panels / Handwriting Interface / Background.
There actually is a 1-touch punctuation input system in our handwriting box in the text editor screen (used for editing dictionary entries / documents), but as you say there's no reason to include it in a dictionary search. As far as making an add-on iPhone keyboard, we'd love to do that but it's not technically possible right now; I'm not sure if it ever will be, actually, Apple could certainly add support for plug-in keyboards but it would be a lot more difficult to make them fullscreen without running into enormous compatibility problems.
We are working to automate the CC-CEDICT creation process on our end to the point where we can do weekly updates ourselves (and we are trying to do them at least monthly even now) - the in-app dictionary updating is a lovely feature to have and we really ought to make better use of it - but we're not quite at that point of efficiency yet.
Character association has been requested since way back in the very first Pleco iPhone beta test - to be honest I've never quite understood why people want it, though. Wouldn't it be just as easy to just search for that first character in the dictionary? If you don't like that extra step of tapping on > to view multi-character entries for a single-character search, you can go to Settings / Dictionary / Search Results and disable "1-char for 1-char" and that will get it to always show the multi-character ones. And if you want to see results without having to exit the handwriting input box, enable the transparent handwriting background options in Settings / Panels / Handwriting Interface / Background.
There actually is a 1-touch punctuation input system in our handwriting box in the text editor screen (used for editing dictionary entries / documents), but as you say there's no reason to include it in a dictionary search. As far as making an add-on iPhone keyboard, we'd love to do that but it's not technically possible right now; I'm not sure if it ever will be, actually, Apple could certainly add support for plug-in keyboards but it would be a lot more difficult to make them fullscreen without running into enormous compatibility problems.
rypervenche
Member
Ok, I the keyboard is not going to happen, I got that. The dictionary updates will get better, great! As for the character association, it seems the only reason it is not included, is because you don't think it useful. I can give you an example off the top of my head (I'm there are better examples though). If I want to look up 一直, and I only remember it was 一 plus another character, if I see the character, I will know it. So if I draw 一 then add a wildcard (or take off the 1 on 1 char thing), it gives me a very very long list. Since 直 is at the very bottom of the 2 character list, it I have to scroll slowly through about half of the entire list before I get to the word I was looking for. This has happened to me a lot actually. It is very very time-consuming.
However, if I use any of the keyboards on the iPhone that have the character association, I type 一 and then have the list of the most commonly used characters with 一, and 直 happens to be the 5th character in that list. So I could spend anywhere from a few minutes to maybe 10 minutes if I'm a beginner looking for something when I could find it in a few seconds with character association. You may not find it useful, but I do, and it is the only reason I no longer use Pleco's HWR. Would it be easy to integrate into Pleco since it's already in the iPhone?
However, if I use any of the keyboards on the iPhone that have the character association, I type 一 and then have the list of the most commonly used characters with 一, and 直 happens to be the 5th character in that list. So I could spend anywhere from a few minutes to maybe 10 minutes if I'm a beginner looking for something when I could find it in a few seconds with character association. You may not find it useful, but I do, and it is the only reason I no longer use Pleco's HWR. Would it be easy to integrate into Pleco since it's already in the iPhone?