Dear Mike,
johnh113 said:
I use the audio on every card, many times many times per card as I drill the sounds...I want it in a consistent position on the bottom.
mikelove 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?
Yes, permanently by the answer buttons helps. I use it a lot and would prefer it be in the same place always and everywhere. Also, with the sound on top, my left thumb covers up the display when I reach to the top right for the audio button (and I like to look at the hanzi while listening to the sound). This isn't as much a problem for right handed people using their right hand to reach for the audio button in the top right hand corner, as the text is left justified and is covered up less. But if the button were switched to the left hand size for left handed people, we would probably need the hanzi, pron and defn to be right justified. Just another reason for the audio button to be below the display.
Now that I've upgraded to 4.0.1, I now use the X button sometimes. But before 4.0.1, I would just use the physical button at the bottom of the iPhone to exit the program and go to a different program or use the power button to turn it off. Now that I'm at 4.0.1 there is utility in the X button.
johnh113 said:
What I would like is for the audio button to find a home on one of the lower rows and stay there, forever.
mikelove 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.
Yes, I understand you preference for a clean, uncluttered design. Myself, I would put it in my new row of buttons at the bottom that also includes the reader, dict and flashcards. And yes I know I'm not getting my desire here.
johnh113 said:
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.
mikelove 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.
Obviously, I will live with whatever you provide. I suspect that the reason for a lot of those requests for an option to set a new score is because we don't have a proper undo.
johnh113 said:
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.
mikelove 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)
I would prefer the ability to set the "wiggle room" in days rather than a percentage. And I would prefer it after I have completed all my cards for today and want to begin on tomorrow's. And I sometimes get behind and turn my clock back a day or even two days to work on cards that I haven't finished from a previous day. This is really about leveling the number of cards that are going to come up. I like to finish today's cards because otherwise there will be a spike in the number of cards that come up tomorrow and then periodically according to my repetition spacing. My solution was to be able to set the date forward or back a day or two in order to get a jump on tomorrow's cards or to finish yesterday's cards, but a leveling solution of some sort would also work. And if nothing else, I can continue to change the date on my iPhone as I have been doing.
johnh113 said:
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.
mikelove 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).
Yes, that is exactly what happens. I confuse a character with another that looks similar. Your new character page is fabulous for this as I can set the character broken down into its component parts (although the database could be better - many of the parts don't have their pinyin even though they are common characters or parts) and I can also look at other characters that use any of those component parts. Really a great, great addition. Now if only I could adjust the font sizes on those screens.
mikelove 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):
Yes, it doesn't look too bad. Not as nice as all the same height, but in general hanzi needs to be larger than roman simply because most hanzi have many more strokes than roman characters. I'd like the ability to set headword size, pron size, roman and hanzi definition sizes on all lists everywhere, including on the character pages. I know its a lot of work for you that adds no functionality other than making it easier to read (and will look worse, I know), and so will be way, way down on the priority list.
johnh113 said:
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.
mikelove 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?
I understand, and unfortunately have no suggestions.
mikelove 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.
Ok, I don't agree, but I do understand I'm not getting my new row of buttons at the bottom.
mikelove said:
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.
Something along those lines might work. When in flashcards I often go to the fan to get to the dict, do some looking around, and then want to come back to flashcards. That's why I wanted the dict and flashcard buttons to be permanently visible. If there's another solution to toggle back and forth that will be fine, probably better.
johnh113 said:
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.
mikelove 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?
Yes, I didn't really want you to automatically detect them. What I meant to ask for was a way to select two non-contiguous characters myself, like using the "apple command" button on the Mac to add to a previous selection. That way I could select the first character, do something magic, and then select the second character and have it added to the first selection so that I could look up that two character word.
And now for new requests.
On the character pages, I'd like to be able to play the sound. Not that I can't read pinyin, I just like to hear the sound when I'm looking at a character. This is obviously a low priority.
On the character pages, I'd like the radicals to have their spoken name (san dian shui) rather than their radical number, or, in addition to their radical number. In conversation people never refer to the radical numbers, they use the radical names and we need to know those names.
In the settings tab, a lot of settings are not clear. And it's a lot of trouble to exit the settings and go to the reference to find out what the setting does. Perhaps it might be better if every setting were actually a link to an explanation of that setting, with the explanations stored locally on the iPhone, not Internet based.
A minor bug: In Zhang4, 丈, in the ABC Dict, if you click on the first link, "1chi" it crashes Pleco.
And just a note so you don't think I'm ungrateful for all you do for us. I love Pleco. All of these suggestions are really minor, low priority suggestions. I use Pleco for 2 to 3 hours every day, and I really enjoy using it.
John
