The "Report a missing Word" button in Settings is a great idea. I think I would use it a lot more if I could make the button optionally appear in one of the Reader menus (Web Reader or Pastbook Reader), so that I could simply highlight a word/phrase that didn't exist in the dictionary, and tap a button to report it.
iPhone Feature Requests
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
About Copy/Paste in Reader (Document):
1) If I select text and try to extend selection beyond the displayed text, the text doesn't scroll when I hit the top or bottom of the displayed area, forcing a manual page scroll, which often results in the selection being lost. After a couple of tries it does work but would be easier if the page was automatically scrolled during selection extension.
2) It also seems that there's a limit - apparently around 100 characters, on the amount that can be copied/pasted. Even though I can select large blocks of text, only 100 or so characters actually get pasted into email or note files - with the cutoff always being at the same point.
1) If I select text and try to extend selection beyond the displayed text, the text doesn't scroll when I hit the top or bottom of the displayed area, forcing a manual page scroll, which often results in the selection being lost. After a couple of tries it does work but would be easier if the page was automatically scrolled during selection extension.
2) It also seems that there's a limit - apparently around 100 characters, on the amount that can be copied/pasted. Even though I can select large blocks of text, only 100 or so characters actually get pasted into email or note files - with the cutoff always being at the same point.
mikeo said:
Most people actually enter text without worrying about that input language button (treat it more as an indicator) - if you switch into HWR and start entering characters the system will automatically switch back to 中.
mikeo said:
Good idea, though tough to jam it into that interface.
mikeo said:
Very very difficult thing to get working well - we'll probably get this fixed in a few releases, but we didn't consider it an urgent priority since people seem to mostly be interested in copying out interesting words / phrases.
mikeo said:
That one's news to us - we'll take a look at the relevant code, thanks.
mikelove said:
That's intelligent behavior on the program's part. But from a UI point of view IMHO it's better to reduce options presented to those that are immediately relevant, so questions like mine above don't arise in the user's mind.
mikeo said:
mikelove said:
If there was a settings option to choose this button over one of the others (so that the space occupied would be same), I'd gladly take it, because it would mean (presumably) more up to date and complete dictionaries.
mikeo said:
mikelove said:
Agreed there are surely higher priorities, yet glad it's on the todo list.
mikeo said:
mikelove said:
BTW, I tried this for the first time after updating to IOS 4.2.1, so there may or may not be some connection.
mikeo said:
True, but a user isn't necessarily opening up the search bar expecting to have to think about which language is currently selected - if someone wants to enter a Chinese character they're going to tap on that bar and then tap on HWR, and if HWR is hidden / inactive because the last search they did was E-C they're going to get confused / irritated.
mikeo said:
We can make it a custom toolbar option, I suppose, though we hadn't actually been planning to do that for the reader UI... hmm.
mikeo said:
Possibly, though I'm much more inclined to think this is attributable to some leftover bit of memory-conserving code from our Palm OS days.
Hi I'm sorry if my suggestion is a duplicate since i haven't read every single reply.
In the reader view I am just dying for the old version with the dictionary bar at the bottom.
I know there are probably challenges due to the iPhone UI. An alternative might be to have the pop up disappear on finger release or something. It's just really tedious to have to tap twice (once to show, once to hide) every time i want to look up a word. Is there something planned to streamline the process?
In the reader view I am just dying for the old version with the dictionary bar at the bottom.
I know there are probably challenges due to the iPhone UI. An alternative might be to have the pop up disappear on finger release or something. It's just really tedious to have to tap twice (once to show, once to hide) every time i want to look up a word. Is there something planned to streamline the process?
In the past years of using pleco i more and more realized how useful i'd find the possibility to make notes for certain dict entries. I sometimes made "notes" by changing an FC to a custom one and then adding my notes to the FC, but this is definitely not what i consider a good solution, as the notes should be linked to the dict entry rather than to the FC.
It was already possible in Wenlin to edit entries. But what i'm thinking of now is something like that: http://www.ascendo-inc.com/languages/ip ... ebook.html
I haven't downloaded this app, but from the description it sounds fantastic. There's a possibility to add written, spoken, or image notes that are then linked to any dict entry. I just recently read an article about how brains work, and that all memories need to be interlinked and put in context in order to be remembered. In the past years of studying Chinese it frequently happened to me that i reviewed an FC in Pleco and could not remember the circumstances in which i have first learned this expression, which led to me not being able to exactly know how the expression is being used and also being unable to memorize the expression, because there was no context to link it to. Just imagine if you could just take a picture of the person and situation in which you learned the expression, or just record a short audio note.
Another point is that i often think of synonyms or just related expressions, which i then organize to word groups in my mind, which helps me a lot to remember them. With the "notes feature", i could just add a note with related words to the dict entry, which helps me a lot to memorize them.
For me (and I believe for many others too) that would be the absolute killer-feature.
It was already possible in Wenlin to edit entries. But what i'm thinking of now is something like that: http://www.ascendo-inc.com/languages/ip ... ebook.html
I haven't downloaded this app, but from the description it sounds fantastic. There's a possibility to add written, spoken, or image notes that are then linked to any dict entry. I just recently read an article about how brains work, and that all memories need to be interlinked and put in context in order to be remembered. In the past years of studying Chinese it frequently happened to me that i reviewed an FC in Pleco and could not remember the circumstances in which i have first learned this expression, which led to me not being able to exactly know how the expression is being used and also being unable to memorize the expression, because there was no context to link it to. Just imagine if you could just take a picture of the person and situation in which you learned the expression, or just record a short audio note.
Another point is that i often think of synonyms or just related expressions, which i then organize to word groups in my mind, which helps me a lot to remember them. With the "notes feature", i could just add a note with related words to the dict entry, which helps me a lot to memorize them.
For me (and I believe for many others too) that would be the absolute killer-feature.
benzhen said:
I think we're going to add an embedded definition option to the reader in 2.3 if not before - personally I really don't like it at all (takes up too much space on the iPhone's screen and requires too much eye travel to go from the text to the definition), but people have been asking for this since our first demo video appeared (even before our first iPhone app actually came out) and at some point we have to bow to customer demands on this.
sinoreen said:
Notes are one of those features that keeps getting put on the back-burner because some other project pushes its way to the front of the queue - certainly something we'd like to add, but possibly not until after Android is out and we can (hopefully) stop thinking about new platform ports and focus all of our attention on new features again.
I'd like peoples' opinion about providing a document title search inside pleco "Reader".
Imagine the following situation: a Pleco user with a large number of MP3 audio files and HTML documents. An example would be someone who is subscribed to Chinesepod, where each MP3 has an accompanying HTML document. The HTML document contains song lyrics, supplemental vocabulary, etc.
You'd like to review a topic, say, colors. You type in "colors" in Spotlight and all MP3s with "color" in the title pop up, but the accompanying Pleco documents remain hidden. How can I find a Pleco document with a certain keyword in the filename?
One possibility would be to wait until Apple provides Spotlight/app integration ( ♫ "One day my prince will come" ♪ )
Another possibility would be a button inside Pleco "Reader" to search document filenames.
Opinion?
Imagine the following situation: a Pleco user with a large number of MP3 audio files and HTML documents. An example would be someone who is subscribed to Chinesepod, where each MP3 has an accompanying HTML document. The HTML document contains song lyrics, supplemental vocabulary, etc.
You'd like to review a topic, say, colors. You type in "colors" in Spotlight and all MP3s with "color" in the title pop up, but the accompanying Pleco documents remain hidden. How can I find a Pleco document with a certain keyword in the filename?
One possibility would be to wait until Apple provides Spotlight/app integration ( ♫ "One day my prince will come" ♪ )
Another possibility would be a button inside Pleco "Reader" to search document filenames.
Opinion?
kun4 said:
That would certainly be easy enough - heck, we could stick a search bar on top of the file browser and not even need to change the interface - but why limit ourselves to titles? If in-app Spotlight isn't likely to show up until iOS 5 next summer (if even then), we might as well go all the way and search document contents as well - would only be incrementally more work (though it could take a while to run) and it'd give people a nice new way to dig up example sentences.
Some thoughts on the reader:
First of all, thanks for adding the ability to copy and paste, which has been an enormous time-saver.
Generally when reading I try to force myself to read a few paragraphs without looking up any words, as I think this is a better habit than looking up every new word as it comes along. However, I often end up just reading through and checking words as I go. This is mainly because going back through the passage a second time is so time-consuming, as it requires just as careful a reading as the first time round in order to find all the words I want to check.
What I would find perfect would be an alternative 'first read' mode, in which the dictionary look-up is disabled, and when you tap on a word it highlights or underlines it instead. Then when you've read a chunk you can switch back to the 'standard read' mode, and quickly skim through the passage again to check the words you've highlighted.
I have no idea whether or not this would be possible, depending on how Pleco handles its document files, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would find it extremely useful.
I've attempted to bodge together a solution by using Goodreader to read .pdf files and using its highlight function, then going back through and copying sentences across to the pasteboard in Pleco, but for some reason it ends up as a garbled mess of unrelated characters.
So, two questions really:
1. Would this be feasible to implement within Pleco itself?
2. Any suggestions on other ways to approximate the effect?
First of all, thanks for adding the ability to copy and paste, which has been an enormous time-saver.
Generally when reading I try to force myself to read a few paragraphs without looking up any words, as I think this is a better habit than looking up every new word as it comes along. However, I often end up just reading through and checking words as I go. This is mainly because going back through the passage a second time is so time-consuming, as it requires just as careful a reading as the first time round in order to find all the words I want to check.
What I would find perfect would be an alternative 'first read' mode, in which the dictionary look-up is disabled, and when you tap on a word it highlights or underlines it instead. Then when you've read a chunk you can switch back to the 'standard read' mode, and quickly skim through the passage again to check the words you've highlighted.
I have no idea whether or not this would be possible, depending on how Pleco handles its document files, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would find it extremely useful.
I've attempted to bodge together a solution by using Goodreader to read .pdf files and using its highlight function, then going back through and copying sentences across to the pasteboard in Pleco, but for some reason it ends up as a garbled mess of unrelated characters.
So, two questions really:
1. Would this be feasible to implement within Pleco itself?
2. Any suggestions on other ways to approximate the effect?
magicdave said:
Hmm... interesting idea. I think this would probably be best integrated with the note-taking / range-highlighting feature a few other people have asked for... maybe we'd add an option to lock out / disable text lookups in a particular document until you manually went back and re-enabled them?
magicdave said:
If you could find an app that would let you do simple HTML editing, that would probably be the best way to pull this off - highlight the text that way, then bring up the resulting document in Live Mode to get easy tap-lookup of the characters you'd highlighted.
numble said:
You can already download files from Dropbox via our built-in web browser, I think. Full Dropbox integration wouldn't be too difficult, but I'm not sure how important it is anymore with iOS 4 supporting USB file sync - I think we'd be better off working on our own file sync solution so that we can do automatic flashcard sync / backup. (I suppose that might technically be doable via Dropbox - fetch the current version of the flashcard database if it had changed, do the actual syncing on-device, then upload the merged file - but it seems like we'd waste a lot of bandwidth that way and we wouldn't be able to roll out a web-based flashcard management system later on)
I think the benefit is kind of like Instapaper--if I want a document to be loaded into Goodreader from browsing the web on my computer, I just save it to my Dropbox folder on my desktop, which automatically syncs with the online account. I can then get it on my iPad later without plugging in a cable. And I can also get it on my iPhone later, or on another computer.mikelove said:
I think the Anki desktop client offers Dropbox integration (not sure), and the developer is working on adding that feature to the iPhone version. I don't know how huge flashcard files are on Pleco, but my ~17,000 card Anki file is roughly 18 mb, so having to hold all your users flashcards on your own servers might be a drain. I don't know if their web client works with Dropbox.
Just thinking about this, how about a setting that enables Pleco to automatically load a clipboard URL into the Pleco web browser on opening the app? (Maybe this already exists). To get some pages into Pleco, I currently send the URL to my iPhone via Pastefire, which sends the URL to the iPhone Pastefire app, launches Safari and loads the URL upon opening Pastefire on the iPhone, and then I copy/paste the text of the article and load Pleco, which puts everything in the Pleco Reader.
numble said:
Fair point, but wouldn't you be more likely to want to sync those documents with a general-purpose app like Goodreader and then transfer them individually to Pleco? Seems like it might be annoying to have two copies of your Dropbox document archive on the same device, though I suppose you could sync one document horde with one app and one with another...
numble said:
I think a 17k card file in Pleco would be more in the 5-10 MB range, but anyway with Amazon charging $0.14/GB/month for storage it's not going to be a big problem to hold a lot of users' files - most of them will probably be more in the sub-5-MB range, and of course if they're compressed they get considerably smaller, but even assuming every user's eating up 10 MB we're looking at a cost of less than 2 cents per user per year; data transfer charges could add a bit more to that ($0.10/GB in, $0.15/GB out), but even at 10 cents per user per year we could offer online backup / sync service to flashcard module buyers for free for 20 years and still be spending less on that than we do on royalties for pretty much anything we pay royalties on.
numble said:
Doesn't exist, but I suppose it could - so we'd auto-detect an HTTP / HTTPS and bring up the browser on that?
I'm not too keen on Dropbox stuff--just starting to get into it--but it's supposed to be similar to another disk drive, just one that exists in the "cloud." A lot of the "productivity" apps on iPad/iPhone now integrate that, since it's so much easier than connecting with a computer cable all the time. Probably not a big deal for Pleco as it's not a big "productivity" type app yet. It just came to me as I was discovering Dropbox.mikelove said:
On the URL/clipboard thing, that is exactly what I mean, though I would probably make it an adjustable setting since some people might be opening Pleco with a stray URL (that they don't intend to read in Pleco) in their clipboard. Another feature that some apps have are Safari URL integration--I don't know exactly what it's called--but in Safari, if you add g or i to a URL (ghttp://URL or ihttp://URL), it will launch Goodreader or Instapaper and download that webpage to the app.
mikelove said:
The lookups disabling wouldn't be that important if it was possible to highlight words and passages; I just thought it might be a way to simplify things if you do add a highlighting function - so that tapping words would simply highlight them instead of looking them up. But any kind of highlighter would be great.
As for the HTML editing app, I'm not entirely sure what you mean - would you mind explaining a bit further?
magicdave said:
Well it certainly makes sense if we continue expanding on the reader function.
numble said:
That one would be quite easy too, though I'm worried we could run into conflict with another "phttp" app - no way to turn support for that off programmatically since it would have to be specified in our app's property list file. A nice bonus would be that people could embed those URLs on flashcard etc web pages to have a super-easy way to download them into Pleco.
magicdave said:
It's a tricky decision, actually - disabling lookups would be nice to keep people honest with themselves / avoid the temptation to cheat but it would also be confusing for people who turned it on by accident.
magicdave said:
If you had a document file in HTML format, it would be pretty straightforward to edit the file to change the background color of specific ranges of text; I'm not sure if there's a good iPhone app for this, but there probably is, and using that app you could put together a highlighted version of the document that you could then open up / look up words in in Pleco.