iPhone Feature Requests
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
Dear Mike,
As a philosophical concept, I find buttons that I use repeatedly, like the audio button, on the top toolbar to be a bad location. What I meant to suggest when I said the middle of the screen was the middle east/west of the top toolbar. Even that is not great as I don't think anything that I use repeatedly should be on the top toolbar. The buttons are hard to reach, and smaller than any other button. I use the audio on every card, many times many times per card as I drill the sounds and tones into my feeble brain. Swapping it with the [x], which have have never in my life used and could simply be eliminated, would be better for me when I'm using my left hand, but when my left hand gets tired I switch to my right hand and would want the audio button back on the right. Can you detect which hand I'm using and switch appropriately? If not, I don't want the audio button on top at all. I want it in a consistent position on the bottom.
Yes, I already have the "Arrows on top" option turned on. So now the audio is on top in flashcards, and as soon as I bring up the popup reader, which I do on almost every card, the audio is somewhere on the bottom. To be precise, in the third position from the left out of six buttons. Then when I hit the > button to get a fuller screen, the audio button, since it is a free spirit and refuses to be confined to just two different locations, now jumps to the fourth position from the left out of five buttons. That's three different locations for the audio button, a button that I personally use more than any other button in the entire interface.
What I would like is for the audio button to find a home on one of the lower rows and stay there, forever.
Yes, I use the lightbulb button for that purpose, but it still requires extra care to switch to the lightbulb while I'm using the forward button.
Not me. I just want to get back the state I was in before I hit the wrong button. I can take it from there.
On #4, actually once I bring up the popup reader, the ABC is happy to show the word.
I suspect the audio subsystem on the iPhone is inferior to what I'm used to the Palm. I know this isn't your fault but I though I'd bring up the audio problems anyway. ( I find the analog subsystems on the iPhone to be worse than the analogous functions on my Palm. The iPhone audio has problems mentioned above, the phone has trouble holding a signal as I drive from tower to tower, the phone has trouble reacquiring a signal after losing a signal (I often have to turn on airplane mode and then turn it off to get the iPhone to reacquire a signal), etc. I think they need to hire a new engineer to design their analog systems.)
Yes, I understand the theory. But for the vast majority of my cards, one day will be a very small percentage as I don't consider a card learned until it is over 72000. So if the card was supposed to come up in a year and instead came up in a year and a day I don't think it's going to do much harm. Even if it were supposed to come up in 4 days and instead came up in 3 or 5 or 2 or 6, I don't think it's much of a problem. It will come up again soon enough and I either get it right or wrong and the system will give it an appropriate score at that time.
Yes, that would work for roman fonts which have very few strokes and can be much smaller than Chinese fonts which can easily have 20 strokes. The Chinese fonts have to be pretty large (24) for me to read them (but I'm old so for most people this might not be the same problem).
Yes, that will be nice. I find that I spend a lot of time looking up the word that I incorrectly guessed. The incorrect guess might have been a homonym, in which case the selecting the pinyin will be much faster than calling up the dictionary.
Yes, sorry, I should have said frequency.
The buttons all register fine. It was just a philosophical point that I would put infrequently used buttons either on the top toolbar or on the bottom toolbar. I would put buttons that are frequently used up a little higher.
Well, we certainly have different font size at the beginning of the line when it is a head word, but I realize that is a special case. It would be interesting to see how bad it looks if the Chinese is font is just a few font sizes larger, like 24 on Chinese and 20 on roman or 24 on Chinese and 22 for roman?
John
mikelove said:
As a philosophical concept, I find buttons that I use repeatedly, like the audio button, on the top toolbar to be a bad location. What I meant to suggest when I said the middle of the screen was the middle east/west of the top toolbar. Even that is not great as I don't think anything that I use repeatedly should be on the top toolbar. The buttons are hard to reach, and smaller than any other button. I use the audio on every card, many times many times per card as I drill the sounds and tones into my feeble brain. Swapping it with the [x], which have have never in my life used and could simply be eliminated, would be better for me when I'm using my left hand, but when my left hand gets tired I switch to my right hand and would want the audio button back on the right. Can you detect which hand I'm using and switch appropriately? If not, I don't want the audio button on top at all. I want it in a consistent position on the bottom.
Yes, I already have the "Arrows on top" option turned on. So now the audio is on top in flashcards, and as soon as I bring up the popup reader, which I do on almost every card, the audio is somewhere on the bottom. To be precise, in the third position from the left out of six buttons. Then when I hit the > button to get a fuller screen, the audio button, since it is a free spirit and refuses to be confined to just two different locations, now jumps to the fourth position from the left out of five buttons. That's three different locations for the audio button, a button that I personally use more than any other button in the entire interface.
What I would like is for the audio button to find a home on one of the lower rows and stay there, forever.
Yes, I use the lightbulb button for that purpose, but it still requires extra care to switch to the lightbulb while I'm using the forward button.
Not me. I just want to get back the state I was in before I hit the wrong button. I can take it from there.
On #4, actually once I bring up the popup reader, the ABC is happy to show the word.
I suspect the audio subsystem on the iPhone is inferior to what I'm used to the Palm. I know this isn't your fault but I though I'd bring up the audio problems anyway. ( I find the analog subsystems on the iPhone to be worse than the analogous functions on my Palm. The iPhone audio has problems mentioned above, the phone has trouble holding a signal as I drive from tower to tower, the phone has trouble reacquiring a signal after losing a signal (I often have to turn on airplane mode and then turn it off to get the iPhone to reacquire a signal), etc. I think they need to hire a new engineer to design their analog systems.)
Yes, I understand the theory. But for the vast majority of my cards, one day will be a very small percentage as I don't consider a card learned until it is over 72000. So if the card was supposed to come up in a year and instead came up in a year and a day I don't think it's going to do much harm. Even if it were supposed to come up in 4 days and instead came up in 3 or 5 or 2 or 6, I don't think it's much of a problem. It will come up again soon enough and I either get it right or wrong and the system will give it an appropriate score at that time.
Yes, that would work for roman fonts which have very few strokes and can be much smaller than Chinese fonts which can easily have 20 strokes. The Chinese fonts have to be pretty large (24) for me to read them (but I'm old so for most people this might not be the same problem).
Yes, that will be nice. I find that I spend a lot of time looking up the word that I incorrectly guessed. The incorrect guess might have been a homonym, in which case the selecting the pinyin will be much faster than calling up the dictionary.
Yes, sorry, I should have said frequency.
The buttons all register fine. It was just a philosophical point that I would put infrequently used buttons either on the top toolbar or on the bottom toolbar. I would put buttons that are frequently used up a little higher.
Well, we certainly have different font size at the beginning of the line when it is a head word, but I realize that is a special case. It would be interesting to see how bad it looks if the Chinese is font is just a few font sizes larger, like 24 on Chinese and 20 on roman or 24 on Chinese and 22 for roman?
John
Dear Mike,
Some additional thoughts that I didn't want to lump into my previous post and thread although they are really a continuation of those thoughts.
1. Question, is there a way so that at the end of a flashcard session it doesn't ask me if I want to continue with cards that aren't due? I never want to do that and would like it to just quit rather than offering to continue. I have my repetition spacing set up so that when I get a word wrong it falls to 50, so it will come up today when I restart the flashcard session which is what I always do until I've answered them all correctly.
2. In list view after a search, if I tap and hold (accidentally, I'm just moving the screen and it's interpreted as a tap and hold) it adds a flashcard. I have added several unwanted flashcards this way, and have never actually wanted to add a flashcard from that screen. I only add flashcards from a dictionary or popup reader screen where there is already a +.
3. On the list view after a search I find the relationship between the blue arrows on the right and the dian at the bottom to be very non-intuitive. I think that the previous (Palm) version of the toggling between dian and guo was better although still not great.
4. In flashcards I often go to the dictionary to look up a word that I confused with the current flashcard. If the confused word has the same pinyin being able select the pinyin, which I know you are working on, will be helpful. But often times it's a different character entirely and I need to bring up the dictionary. This happens a lot for me. So what I would like is to eliminate the fan button that brings up the bottom menu, and just leave the bottom menu on all the time so that I can easily switch between the flashcards, dictionary, reader and settings. You can see a preview of this by going into flashcard mode before doing the reveal, and then hitting the fan button. The big buttons move up a little bit and the menu toolbar is consistently visible until I hit the fan button again. I like this, except I think it should be permanent and we just get rid of the fan buttons forever. And while we're at it, I would get rid of the add-on button and put that under settings, and perhaps put the permanent audio button in one corner of this row, either corner is fine with me. I would also move the 3 tabs to be bottom tabs for the big reveal, right and wrong buttons, and put those right above the permanent menu toolbar at the bottom. I know you hate this. But I've run with the menu toolbar visible and it seems to work just fine and looks fine too.
5. Sometimes in a 4 character phrase the actual word is split into characters 2 and 4 (无情无义）or in characters 1 and 4 (乱七八糟）and the other characters are just intensifiers. It would be nice to have some way of selecting two characters that are separated to find that word. Or like 千变万化. I would like to be able to look up bianhua.
John
Some additional thoughts that I didn't want to lump into my previous post and thread although they are really a continuation of those thoughts.
1. Question, is there a way so that at the end of a flashcard session it doesn't ask me if I want to continue with cards that aren't due? I never want to do that and would like it to just quit rather than offering to continue. I have my repetition spacing set up so that when I get a word wrong it falls to 50, so it will come up today when I restart the flashcard session which is what I always do until I've answered them all correctly.
2. In list view after a search, if I tap and hold (accidentally, I'm just moving the screen and it's interpreted as a tap and hold) it adds a flashcard. I have added several unwanted flashcards this way, and have never actually wanted to add a flashcard from that screen. I only add flashcards from a dictionary or popup reader screen where there is already a +.
3. On the list view after a search I find the relationship between the blue arrows on the right and the dian at the bottom to be very non-intuitive. I think that the previous (Palm) version of the toggling between dian and guo was better although still not great.
4. In flashcards I often go to the dictionary to look up a word that I confused with the current flashcard. If the confused word has the same pinyin being able select the pinyin, which I know you are working on, will be helpful. But often times it's a different character entirely and I need to bring up the dictionary. This happens a lot for me. So what I would like is to eliminate the fan button that brings up the bottom menu, and just leave the bottom menu on all the time so that I can easily switch between the flashcards, dictionary, reader and settings. You can see a preview of this by going into flashcard mode before doing the reveal, and then hitting the fan button. The big buttons move up a little bit and the menu toolbar is consistently visible until I hit the fan button again. I like this, except I think it should be permanent and we just get rid of the fan buttons forever. And while we're at it, I would get rid of the add-on button and put that under settings, and perhaps put the permanent audio button in one corner of this row, either corner is fine with me. I would also move the 3 tabs to be bottom tabs for the big reveal, right and wrong buttons, and put those right above the permanent menu toolbar at the bottom. I know you hate this. But I've run with the menu toolbar visible and it seems to work just fine and looks fine too.
5. Sometimes in a 4 character phrase the actual word is split into characters 2 and 4 (无情无义）or in characters 1 and 4 (乱七八糟）and the other characters are just intensifiers. It would be nice to have some way of selecting two characters that are separated to find that word. Or like 千变万化. I would like to be able to look up bianhua.
John
Dear Mike,
I forgot one more problem.
6. In the Dictionary settings, entry list Chinese-English, I select "head pron def" and change the font sizes but changing the font sizes for pron and def has no effect. All 3 font sizes are determined by the head font size. If I look at the list in the character page under "chars", it uses the same font settings except this time the "def" font size actually has an effect. But the head and pron are determined by the head font size. In the same character section if I switch to words, all the font sizes are determined by the head font size. I would like in all 3 lists to be able to have the head, pron and def font sizes affect the font sizes, rather than having them all determined by head, or by head and def.
John
I forgot one more problem.
6. In the Dictionary settings, entry list Chinese-English, I select "head pron def" and change the font sizes but changing the font sizes for pron and def has no effect. All 3 font sizes are determined by the head font size. If I look at the list in the character page under "chars", it uses the same font settings except this time the "def" font size actually has an effect. But the head and pron are determined by the head font size. In the same character section if I switch to words, all the font sizes are determined by the head font size. I would like in all 3 lists to be able to have the head, pron and def font sizes affect the font sizes, rather than having them all determined by head, or by head and def.
John
Thanks for all of the feedback.
How about if we simply added an option to permanently put the audio button on one side of the answer buttons? (so it would be integrated with correct / incorrect / reveal / etc, taking up a consistent 1/4 or so of the area on one side) In general I'm still comfortable with the design arguments for putting it on top, but I can certainly see how heavy users might derive some ergonomic benefits from putting it on the bottom. How have you managed to never use the X - do you always see sessions through to their completion?
I see your point with the popup reader toolbars - that's just an oversight owing to the fact that that button isn't normally in the top bar at all, it should be in a location that corresponds to its regular bottom bar location - but there's no way for us to put it in that same location in the flashcard screen too without completely screwing up the design of that screen; putting it on the bottom of the screen somewhere as an off-by-default option for heavy audio flashcard users is one thing, but adding a whole extra toolbar to the screen just for the sake of consistency is another. Consistency is a fine thing, but not when you have to seriously compromise the design of your UI to attain it; some interfaces just work better for one task than another.
We've now swapped forward / skip in the latest development build, so you should be able to go forward without accidentally skipping cards in 2.2.
Understood, but would you be terribly bothered if we did add a popup for that after tapping Undo? (one to which you could hit Cancel if you weren't interested in applying a new score) I suppose we could add Yet Another Incredibly Obscure Option Checkbox to turn off that prompt, but we've gotten a lot of forum posts / emails asking for an option to set a new score so I'm inclined to just make that the only behavior.
That may be more a matter of capacity shortages - back in the era where everyone carried Treos, cellular spectrum was a lot less saturated than it is now. (even Verizon's getting ready to institute bandwidth caps, it's not just an iPhone thing) The audio in Pleco on Palm worked well because we basically wrote it ourselves - there was scarcely any Palm code involved, to be honest
But I do think we can get the audio on iPhone to stop skipping, it's just a very tricky thing to debug, and something about which we've had very few complaints (given how many people use audio in Pleco), so it's been lower on our priority list than some other fixes like adding support for arbitrary text selection.
That makes sense - a little "wiggle room" in the algorithm wouldn't really hurt matters, if we added an option to include in rep-spaced reviews cards within, say, 5% of their target review date or so. (or an arbitrary percentage for that matter)
Arbitrary text selection is now implemented for 2.2, though we've also started playing around with some ideas for dealing with ambiguous words - partly because we've seen a ton of "missing entry" reports for words that it turned out people had simply typed wrong, choosing another character that sounded the same as the correct one (and usually contained the correct character as a radical, or was contained within it as one).
That does make sense in general, but there's some virtue in sticking to iPhone UI conventions too - this is why we need to add custom toolbars, that way we can have the default UI familiar enough to not confuse new Pleco users but still let "power users" put buttons wherever they want them.
It actually doesn't look that bad (this is with 26 and 22, but keeping lines a consistent height regardless of whether not they have Chinese on them):
So good point on that.
No, but we've actually had a few complaints about that so it might make sense to add an option for it.
That tap-hold command is off by default, so just turn it off again via Settings / Flashcards / Tap-hold list to add and it'll go away.
That one didn't work on iPhone because there's no persistent text selection - it's not clear which entry you want to jump to the dictionary location of. People seem to like the function in general, so the main question is whether there's a way we could present it better - having a button somewhere on every result entry is necessary in order to take care of that selection problem, but can you think of a better way to handle the button aspect of this? Maybe show a button in all of the dictionary entries that are also search results and let you tap on that to go back to the search results, or just bring them back when tapping on the search bar?
Works fine for you but it's a non-starter for far too many people; you simply can't hit buttons reliably that way. I have fairly narrow fingers and I've found when testing with two rows of buttons that I hit the wrong row maybe 10-20% of the time, which is WAY too often with commonly-used commands like the switch dictionary button. I'm also not big on sacrificing all of that screen space / adding more clutter, many of our screens are already ridiculously crowded by iPhone app standards and an extra row of permanently-visible buttons would start to make things seem downright silly.
We could, however, consider adding some sort of other shortcut to get back to the Dict tab - lots of requests for one of those. A few people (including you?) have suggested a three-finger tap, which I'm not crazy about but which might work in flashcards at least; shaking the device would be another possibility, and in either case an additional shake / tap could take you back to the tab you were in before.
It's a little tough to detect those - lots of different combinations of characters in between and sometimes the same characters will also appear in words that don't naturally separate like that. I'm not sure where we could really find room in the UI for a "shrink 4-character phrase" button either... maybe some sort of optional UI that gave you big blown-up versions of the characters in the search field to allow you to more easily remove some of them?
This is another decision made largely for my own personal aesthetic reasons - this one actually does look ugly (at least to me) - but I suppose once we added the ability for people to configure Pleco to show yellow characters on a purple background with brown toolbars I gave up the right to impose my aesthetics on everyone, so fair point.
johnh113 said:
How about if we simply added an option to permanently put the audio button on one side of the answer buttons? (so it would be integrated with correct / incorrect / reveal / etc, taking up a consistent 1/4 or so of the area on one side) In general I'm still comfortable with the design arguments for putting it on top, but I can certainly see how heavy users might derive some ergonomic benefits from putting it on the bottom. How have you managed to never use the X - do you always see sessions through to their completion?
johnh113 said:
I see your point with the popup reader toolbars - that's just an oversight owing to the fact that that button isn't normally in the top bar at all, it should be in a location that corresponds to its regular bottom bar location - but there's no way for us to put it in that same location in the flashcard screen too without completely screwing up the design of that screen; putting it on the bottom of the screen somewhere as an off-by-default option for heavy audio flashcard users is one thing, but adding a whole extra toolbar to the screen just for the sake of consistency is another. Consistency is a fine thing, but not when you have to seriously compromise the design of your UI to attain it; some interfaces just work better for one task than another.
johnh113 said:
We've now swapped forward / skip in the latest development build, so you should be able to go forward without accidentally skipping cards in 2.2.
johnh113 said:
Understood, but would you be terribly bothered if we did add a popup for that after tapping Undo? (one to which you could hit Cancel if you weren't interested in applying a new score) I suppose we could add Yet Another Incredibly Obscure Option Checkbox to turn off that prompt, but we've gotten a lot of forum posts / emails asking for an option to set a new score so I'm inclined to just make that the only behavior.
johnh113 said:
That may be more a matter of capacity shortages - back in the era where everyone carried Treos, cellular spectrum was a lot less saturated than it is now. (even Verizon's getting ready to institute bandwidth caps, it's not just an iPhone thing) The audio in Pleco on Palm worked well because we basically wrote it ourselves - there was scarcely any Palm code involved, to be honest
But I do think we can get the audio on iPhone to stop skipping, it's just a very tricky thing to debug, and something about which we've had very few complaints (given how many people use audio in Pleco), so it's been lower on our priority list than some other fixes like adding support for arbitrary text selection.johnh113 said:
That makes sense - a little "wiggle room" in the algorithm wouldn't really hurt matters, if we added an option to include in rep-spaced reviews cards within, say, 5% of their target review date or so. (or an arbitrary percentage for that matter)
johnh113 said:
Arbitrary text selection is now implemented for 2.2, though we've also started playing around with some ideas for dealing with ambiguous words - partly because we've seen a ton of "missing entry" reports for words that it turned out people had simply typed wrong, choosing another character that sounded the same as the correct one (and usually contained the correct character as a radical, or was contained within it as one).
johnh113 said:
That does make sense in general, but there's some virtue in sticking to iPhone UI conventions too - this is why we need to add custom toolbars, that way we can have the default UI familiar enough to not confuse new Pleco users but still let "power users" put buttons wherever they want them.
johnh113 said:
It actually doesn't look that bad (this is with 26 and 22, but keeping lines a consistent height regardless of whether not they have Chinese on them):
So good point on that.
johnh113 said:
No, but we've actually had a few complaints about that so it might make sense to add an option for it.
johnh113 said:
That tap-hold command is off by default, so just turn it off again via Settings / Flashcards / Tap-hold list to add and it'll go away.
johnh113 said:
That one didn't work on iPhone because there's no persistent text selection - it's not clear which entry you want to jump to the dictionary location of. People seem to like the function in general, so the main question is whether there's a way we could present it better - having a button somewhere on every result entry is necessary in order to take care of that selection problem, but can you think of a better way to handle the button aspect of this? Maybe show a button in all of the dictionary entries that are also search results and let you tap on that to go back to the search results, or just bring them back when tapping on the search bar?
johnh113 said:
Works fine for you but it's a non-starter for far too many people; you simply can't hit buttons reliably that way. I have fairly narrow fingers and I've found when testing with two rows of buttons that I hit the wrong row maybe 10-20% of the time, which is WAY too often with commonly-used commands like the switch dictionary button. I'm also not big on sacrificing all of that screen space / adding more clutter, many of our screens are already ridiculously crowded by iPhone app standards and an extra row of permanently-visible buttons would start to make things seem downright silly.
We could, however, consider adding some sort of other shortcut to get back to the Dict tab - lots of requests for one of those. A few people (including you?) have suggested a three-finger tap, which I'm not crazy about but which might work in flashcards at least; shaking the device would be another possibility, and in either case an additional shake / tap could take you back to the tab you were in before.
johnh113 said:
It's a little tough to detect those - lots of different combinations of characters in between and sometimes the same characters will also appear in words that don't naturally separate like that. I'm not sure where we could really find room in the UI for a "shrink 4-character phrase" button either... maybe some sort of optional UI that gave you big blown-up versions of the characters in the search field to allow you to more easily remove some of them?
johnh113 said:
This is another decision made largely for my own personal aesthetic reasons - this one actually does look ugly (at least to me) - but I suppose once we added the ability for people to configure Pleco to show yellow characters on a purple background with brown toolbars I gave up the right to impose my aesthetics on everyone, so fair point.
Attachments
Is it possible to have the night mode be activated only in the reader? I think most people would only need the night mode for the reader. It doesn't make as much sense for the dictionary or flashcards. I personally find it easier on the eyes to read text against a black background on the screen because it reduces the glare.
If a user exits Pleco while reading a document in the reader, I think Pleco should automatically enter the reader in that document upon the next start. Right now, one would have to go through several menus to start reading the same document again. What do you think?
If a user exits Pleco while reading a document in the reader, I think Pleco should automatically enter the reader in that document upon the next start. Right now, one would have to go through several menus to start reading the same document again. What do you think?
gato said:
Not at the moment, but we've had a few requests for a separate color configuration option for the reader (versus dictionary definitions) and we might implement that in the next update - that way you could have that set to white-on-black even in "day mode."
gato said:
Now that iOS 4 automatically supports resuming to exactly where you were when you exited an app, I'm not sure if that's necessary anymore - if you don't open Pleco for a while and it's forcibly unloaded in the background, you might have to go through three taps (menu / reader tab / open last document) to get back to the reader, but at least in the very common interrupted-by-a-phone-call-case you can go back to where you left off very easily.
What I would really like to see is an option that displays my flashcard characters as a slideshow. I just recently got pleco on the iPad and it would help my studying a lot if i could place my iPad in the living room or office and just have the characters I'm studying flashing by for quick recaps when I'm doing other things.
Any chance that you can implement this "restart with reader" feature for those of us who haven't been able to upgrade to iOS 4, yet? I haven't been able to find an easy jailbreak for iOS4, yet. There must be millions who haven't upgraded, particularly those of us have to use jailbreak iPhones in China.
radioman
状元
A few comments with regard to my 3Gs running 4.0
I know this is not a "jailbreak" board, but since using an iPhone in China is kinda on topic, I thought I would mention the following. This is more about my experience and less about a technical review of jail breaking iPhones. For that you would need to refer to the various on-line jailbreak resources (e.g., http://blog.iphone-dev.org/)
Anyway - to my point.
I was pleasantly surprised when I found Cydia was storing my blobs (or whatever) Apparently, I set some Cydia flag to store these. Without going into all the details, the fact Cydia has stored them for you allows you to effectively "back up" with regard to your software load, to an earlier version. You can easily see if this is the case by starting Cydia. On the home screen it says - "This device has SHSHs on file for iPhone OS / iOS: 3.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3" ... for example.
Bottom line was that I could upgrade to 4.0 and still maintain the jailbroken/unlocked phone.
That was my experience.
NOTE: Jailbreaking is not illegal anymore (at least in the U.S., but it COULD VOID YOUR WARRANTY. As well, if you are uncomfortable with working with the various loads, jailbreak software, etc., on any level, you should NOT BOTHER, it is not an easy process. Also, I am running 4.0 on 3Gs - iPhone 3G and below have issues either with lack of support or lack of memory.
I know this is not a "jailbreak" board, but since using an iPhone in China is kinda on topic, I thought I would mention the following. This is more about my experience and less about a technical review of jail breaking iPhones. For that you would need to refer to the various on-line jailbreak resources (e.g., http://blog.iphone-dev.org/)
Anyway - to my point.
I was pleasantly surprised when I found Cydia was storing my blobs (or whatever) Apparently, I set some Cydia flag to store these. Without going into all the details, the fact Cydia has stored them for you allows you to effectively "back up" with regard to your software load, to an earlier version. You can easily see if this is the case by starting Cydia. On the home screen it says - "This device has SHSHs on file for iPhone OS / iOS: 3.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3" ... for example.
Bottom line was that I could upgrade to 4.0 and still maintain the jailbroken/unlocked phone.
That was my experience.
NOTE: Jailbreaking is not illegal anymore (at least in the U.S., but it COULD VOID YOUR WARRANTY. As well, if you are uncomfortable with working with the various loads, jailbreak software, etc., on any level, you should NOT BOTHER, it is not an easy process. Also, I am running 4.0 on 3Gs - iPhone 3G and below have issues either with lack of support or lack of memory.
One small feature I'd love to see added is the option to have the pasteboard automatically look up the first word.
I know this seems like a small thing, but I am constantly switching between Pleco and other programs copying in sentences and this would make the process much more efficient. Since your thumb is naturally at the bottom of the screen to both change apps and to scroll through the sentence in the pasteboard, it is much faster for single sentences to just scroll to the words you need rather than to click on them.
I know this seems like a small thing, but I am constantly switching between Pleco and other programs copying in sentences and this would make the process much more efficient. Since your thumb is naturally at the bottom of the screen to both change apps and to scroll through the sentence in the pasteboard, it is much faster for single sentences to just scroll to the words you need rather than to click on them.
Joshi said:
You mean a system that would automatically advance through flashcards without being prompted? We've had a few requests for that, actually, mostly in conjunction with audio but it would make sense to have a visual component too.
gato said:
There was actually a very widely-distributed one a few weeks ago - can't remember the name though. It's tough to make a feature like that a priority when the number of people who need it is steadily declining and we've got so many other things to work on, though I suppose there's an argument for adding it for iOS 4 users too... I'm very very wary of the startup crash potential of this, but maybe if we made it off by default and combined it with an option in the regular Settings app to reset all Pleco preferences (preventing a situation where you'd get stuck in an infinite crashing loop) we could make it work... I don't think this can make it into 2.2, though.
rcloud said:
Interesting idea - I'm a bit worried it might promote scanning-through-an-entire-text-using-arrow-buttons (which I'd consider a bad habit - it's much easier to improve your reading speed / skill if you force yourself to keep recalling the words that you do know) but the convenience boost would be substantial.
Are you referring to "jailbreakme" that used the PDF exploit? I think it's been fixed by Apple.
http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/ ... f-exploit/
iOS updates fix JailbreakMe.com PDF exploit
by Josh Holat on Aug 14, 2010 at 09:25 AM Add a Comment
By "resuming to exactly where you were when you exited an app", do you mean iOS now allows you to automatically resume your place in a closed program upon restart? Or are you referring to resuming place in a program that's been put in the background under new iOS4 multitasking? If the latter, doesn't that mean you have to keep Pleco open forever (either in foreground or background) in order for this to work?
gato said:
Yes, and since they're no longer signing 4.0/0 / 4.0.1 firmware on devices there's unfortunately not really any way to get a jailbreakable 4.0 update if you didn't update before they released 4.0.2.
gato said:
Yes, but the practical effect of that is that if you exit the app and then go back into it fairly quickly (say after a phone call / SMS / email interruption, or 5 minutes of unwinding with Doodle Jump), you return to right where you left off, whereas if you exit and don't return to it for hours or days you go back to the main dictionary screen. Which to me seems almost ideal, though if your primary use for Pleco is the document reader I suppose it might be preferable to default to that all the time.
That'll be great. Just noticed the "reopen last document" feature in the reader.
I think Pleco will be more and more the reader app of choice for reading Chinese material. Will be nice if the reader's features get more fleshed out as we go on. There are readers that have already built in English language dictionaries, but no built-in Chinese dictionary yet. That'll be something to watch out for.
I think Pleco will be more and more the reader app of choice for reading Chinese material. Will be nice if the reader's features get more fleshed out as we go on. There are readers that have already built in English language dictionaries, but no built-in Chinese dictionary yet. That'll be something to watch out for.
gato said:
Oh we definitely plan to keep fleshing it out, it just has to happen little bit by little bit given that we're simultaneously juggling OCR / flashcards / Android / etc / desktops / new licenses / etc / etc. And there are a couple of other Chinese readers now, actually, though their efforts are still somewhat primitive at this stage.
mikelove said:
Maybe another way of doing this would be to have separate icons on the iphone home screen for the main functions of Pleco. EG one each for dictionary, reader and flashcards...?
This way, if you press the 'reader' button, it ALWAYS opens in the reader, and the same with flashcards and dictionary icons.
Not sure if this can be done on the iphone without splitting them into separate programs, or maybe each icon could call the main program with a different command line switch.
ben_gb said:
That's very dicey - we would need separate programs, and even if Apple would approve an app whose sole purpose was to open another app the tech support problems would be significant; people would download the wrong thing and get mad / give up. Maybe we could add an option to open up the tab bar on startup, reducing the number of buttons required to navigate to your preferred tab from two to one, but I think just setting a default tab (or restoring the last open tab on startup) would probably be enough for most people.