iPhone Feature Requests

[mikelove]

Where it's cryptically called "Search for Headword" instead of "Copy to Input".

"Copy to Input" actually isn't used anywhere on iOS (or at least isn't supposed to be), that's just what we called that command on Palm OS and Windows Mobile.

I found another setting in there for landscape mode whose intended use is eluding me: "Device Top/Bottom." Why would anyone want to fix the location of the definition (or anything else) to a physical edge of the device?

We did it that way so that the search results list in landscape orientation would naturally fall on the side of the device where a user's thumb was likely to be - right-handed people tend to hold their iPhone with the home button on the right, while left-handed people tend to have it on the left, so "Device Bottom" makes it likely that they'll naturally end up with the list in the most thumb-friendly place without having to fiddle around with settings. Though it probably would have been easier to just stick it on the right and make left-handed people go digging for a way to change it...

 

[mikeo]

I'm not sure if I quite understand - can't you just tap on the (>) button next to the closest matching entry to jump to the other entries that start with it? I suppose we could add a command to select an entry in the search results and copy it directly to the input field (maybe triggered by the same tap-hold command that we support now for creating flashcards), but that's actually what the (>) buttons and the ever-confusing Dictionary/Results buttons are designed to do.

Based on your comment I dug around in the doc a bit more and discovered that if I turned off the default 1-char for 1-char switch in settings, a tap on ">" does jump to other entries that start with it .

But because it's sometimes faster to just type the remaining pinyin than to scroll, and sometimes the searched for phrase isn't in the dictionary at all, it would still be nice to have a quicker way to get one of those entries into the search field.

Maybe I still don't get the Dictionary/Results buttons though...I always noticed them having an effect on the Palm Pleco, but on iphone they're usually dimmed.

 

[yong_li]

Have you tried the "fill-in-the-blanks" test in our current flashcard system with "Prompt for" set to "Characters"? That's more-or-less what you're talking about, something like those other systems but without auto-correct; we've actually had quite a few requests for some sort of auto-correct but are still weighing the usefulness of that. Personally I'm not convinced that it does a better job of teaching you how to read Chinese than our test, but it does seem to have some benefits for writing, and however outdated handwritten text may be a lot of Chinese teachers still spend huge amounts of time on it.

Hi Mike,

I know this feature and I'm already using it. It's quite nice, but in fact it's more or less an adoption of the handwriting interface. You will get suggestions while wirting – yet another way to cheat. Ok admitted – you don’t have to cheat …
From my point of view the perfect system would offer the following:

- preview feature (get to know the character if you come across the flashcard for the first time)
- probably no suggestion while writing
- a morphing feature when writing is done (if you missed a stroke it’s probably red or something)
- It would also be nice if the system tracks your progress automatically (not like the self grading feature know).

 

[Entropy]

however outdated handwritten text may be a lot of Chinese teachers still spend huge amounts of time on it.

Handwritten text outdated. That's amusing. I certainly never use a pen anymore except to write checks... wait, I never do that anymore either.

 

[mikelove]

But because it's sometimes faster to just type the remaining pinyin than to scroll, and sometimes the searched for phrase isn't in the dictionary at all, it would still be nice to have a quicker way to get one of those entries into the search field.

Fair enough. Part of me wants to come up with a cleverer solution to this, though - maybe some little thing you can tap on to replace a previously-entered Pinyin syllable with a character from a popup list?

Maybe I still don't get the Dictionary/Results buttons though...I always noticed them having an effect on the Palm Pleco, but on iphone they're usually dimmed.

That's because there's no persistent list selection on iPhone - the button only works when you're in Dictionary mode, where tapping on it returns you to the list of search results. In Results mode we don't know which result you want to jump to so we replace it with (>) buttons. This is high on the list of items to improve for the Big UI Redesign, though.

preview feature (get to know the character if you come across the flashcard for the first time)

Almost certainly adding something like that in 2.3 - have to finally stop supporting every conceivable flashcard study mode and start committing to a few basic concepts like pools of actively-studied cards.

probably no suggestion while writing

Good idea - maybe a manual "Recognize" button and then you can pick from one of the matches to what you drew? I suppose we could even just require it to be the first match...

a morphing feature when writing is done (if you missed a stroke it’s probably red or something)

That one would be difficult to integrate with our current handwriting recognizer, though I suppose we could add a separate algorithm to match strokes up more precisely.

It would also be nice if the system tracks your progress automatically (not like the self grading feature know).

Doesn't it already do that? You're prompted to tell it how well you remembered the card, but it decides for itself whether you were correct or incorrect... I suppose we could look at the closeness of the match or the time taken to enter it and calculate that score on our own, but I'm not sure how good a metric that would really be; you might enter a character sloppily because you know it well.

 

[yong_li]

Almost certainly adding something like that in 2.3 - have to finally stop supporting every conceivable flashcard study mode and start committing to a few basic concepts like pools of actively-studied cards.

Good news Also like the recognize function. Good idea.

That one would be difficult to integrate with our current handwriting recognizer, though I suppose we could add a separate algorithm to match strokes up more precisely.

Morphing is just a visual effect. It's not that necessary… but there has to be some kind of feedback concerning strokes and stroke order. Something like “strokes missing” or “wrong stroke order” would be sufficient.

The current system is more like “do you know how to read the character?”: If you get some of the strokes right and know the reading you can choose the correct character from the proposals.

The system automatically tracks if you chose the right character, but that does not count as feedback concerning your actual writing.

But if the proposals would be left out and a recognize feature as well as a preview feature are added it’s quite a big step forward. Adding some kind of feedback would be perfect.

By the way: Did you think about adding a mnemonic popup (probably even pictures) or something like this into the flashcard system? This would be so great

 

[numble]

You've mentioned UI designers in passing in several posts--any hints on what their ideas are?

 

[mikelove]

The system automatically tracks if you chose the right character, but that does not count as feedback concerning your actual writing.

Well our stroke order test does that, though it's based on the order in which you tap on the strokes rather than the order you draw them... for a more ambitious stroke order test I think we'd probably also need to fix the biggest issue with the current one, which is that we have no way of tracking character studies independent of word ones; the fix for that might be as simple as automatically adding cards for any single characters in a new card that you don't already have cards for, but whatever that fix is, we have to do something about that before we can move forward with more context-independent character study modes.

But if the proposals would be left out and a recognize feature as well as a preview feature are added it’s quite a big step forward. Adding some kind of feedback would be perfect.

By the way: Did you think about adding a mnemonic popup (probably even pictures) or something like this into the flashcard system? This would be so great

Very high on the priority list for 2.3 is adding the ability to embed audio and pictures into cards - people have been asking for this since the day our iPhone flashcard module came out.

You've mentioned UI designers in passing in several posts--any hints on what their ideas are?

Still waiting for those - we hired them very recently and I just yesterday finally sent them a lengthy document detailing most of the biggest problems people have with our UI now (lack of consistency, intimidating for new users, difficult to access documentation, poor discoverability of handwriting input and Character Info, a lot of people seem to really hate our Chinese-character icons and we're thinking of replacing almost all of them except the now-much-too-iconic-to-get-rid-of 魚, startup screen is ugly and non-iPhone-like, some specific thorny issues like List / Dict mode and the jumping dictionary switch icon...)

 

[numble]

Has anyone ever brought up the idea of a "Universal Search"?

Kind of like Spotlight on OS X or the iPhone, it just gives you all search results. If it's a problem, you could limit it to just dictionary entries (and not say, flashcards or documents).

This would especially be useful on the iPad given the screen space--if I search for say, 马桶, I get a list of all entries throughout my installed dictionaries. So I don't need to keep pressing the Dictionary button to shuffle through all the entries.

 

[mikelove]

Has anyone ever brought up the idea of a "Universal Search"?

Kind of like Spotlight on OS X or the iPhone, it just gives you all search results. If it's a problem, you could limit it to just dictionary entries (and not say, flashcards or documents).

This would especially be useful on the iPad given the screen space--if I search for say, 马桶, I get a list of all entries throughout my installed dictionaries. So I don't need to keep pressing the Dictionary button to shuffle through all the entries.

The multi-dictionary aspect of this has been in the pipeline for a while; we've basically been waiting on processor speed, we need to be able to not only search every dictionary instantly (which we already do in a lot of places - pretty much any time you look up anything with the document reader or with OCR you're doing an all-dictionary search) but also merge together instances of the same word; we think it's a lot more useful this way, get a list of words independent of dictionary and tap on one of them to view every dictionary's results for it on a single page.

Hopefully it'l happen sometime this year, maybe after this summer when Apple (probably) drops support for the second-gen iPod / iPhone 3G in iOS 5 - it's going to need some new UI too, we've asked the designers to come up with a look for it (icons, how multiple entries look together, etc).

 

[mikeo]

Further to the search discussion, I keep finding instances where I'd love to have it, so here's the usecase:

I come across a phrase in Reader that is new, and I make a card for it. I'm reviewing that card, and I would like to see the text in which I saw it. So one or both of these new features would be nice:

a) on the flashcard, search for the flashcard phrase in all texts Pleco has locally available. From a list of hits, choose one to bring it up in Reader with the search phrase highlighted. Or, if it's not found locally, go out to Google search to find it.

b) in Reader, search the current text for an arbitrary phrase (entered with pinyin or handwriting recognition).

 

[dcarpent]

One interface change to consider for the iPad version. I would find it useful to have a larger search field and esp. a larger erase/clear button in the field on the iPad, since I spend quite a bit of time looking up vocabulary and I often miss the clear key. Making it easier to hit in a hurry would be helpful.

 

[mikelove]

a) on the flashcard, search for the flashcard phrase in all texts Pleco has locally available. From a list of hits, choose one to bring it up in Reader with the search phrase highlighted. Or, if it's not found locally, go out to Google search to find it.

I'm worried a multi-document search might be painfully slow unless we built some sort of index (which would be really complicated) - it wouldn't be difficult to code, but if you had a document collection big enough to make this useful the time it would take to search all of those documents would be unacceptably high.

b) in Reader, search the current text for an arbitrary phrase (entered with pinyin or handwriting recognition).

That one's easy assuming you're OK with using a Pinyin IME rather than just searching the entire text for a block of characters that happen to match a particular Pinyin string. Not that the Pinyin search is impossible, just a lot harder / more error-prone.

One interface change to consider for the iPad version. I would find it useful to have a larger search field and esp. a larger erase/clear button in the field on the iPad, since I spend quite a bit of time looking up vocabulary and I often miss the clear key. Making it easier to hit in a hurry would be helpful.

The search field is already about 1.5x the size of the iOS average... I'm worried that if we make it any taller it's going to start to look a little silly. And also present a problem with customizable toolbar icons since we'd need icons in a different resolution to make them look right in a taller toolbar.

A larger clear button makes a lot of sense, though, or at least a larger tappable area for it.

 

[dcarpent]

A larger tappable area might help. Also, to have the history button less close to the clear botton. I often hit the history button when trying to clear the search field.

 

[mikeo]

b) in Reader, search the current text for an arbitrary phrase (entered with pinyin or handwriting recognition).

That one's easy assuming you're OK with using a Pinyin IME rather than just searching the entire text for a block of characters that happen to match a particular Pinyin string. Not that the Pinyin search is impossible, just a lot harder / more error-prone.

Certainly. Pinyin as IME only to construct searched-for character string. Handwriting recognition as alternate IME, when you don't know the sound of the character.

 

[mikelove]

A larger tappable area might help. Also, to have the history button less close to the clear botton. I often hit the history button when trying to clear the search field.

Actually now we're trying to incorporate a much bigger / more tactile clear button into our new UI design - not 100% sure if it'll work well in practice but we're giving it a shot at least.

Certainly. Pinyin as IME only to construct searched-for character string. Handwriting recognition as alternate IME, when you don't know the sound of the character.

Sensible enough, yes.

 

[goldyn chyld]

Mike, how much work would it make to implement "fast idiom/phrase searching" by the initials of each syllable as seen in computer pinyin inputs? I.e., let's say you wanted to look for an idiom "kai men jian shan" 开门见山 and you would simply look it up by typing kmjs....

 

[mikelove]

Mike, how much work would it make to implement "fast idiom/phrase searching" by the initials of each syllable as seen in computer pinyin inputs? I.e., let's say you wanted to look for an idiom "kai men jian shan" 开门见山 and you would simply look it up by typing kmjs....

Very little work to perform the actual search - literally about 10 lines of code, maybe another 10 to support it in user dictionaries too - but it'd screw up lots of other aspects of our search interface; for example, it'd be a lot harder to auto-detect English versus Pinyin input. It would have to be completely off by default to avoid confusing new users, and users who turned it on would probably need an extra button (maybe replace Full) to temporarily toggle it on and off when they found that it was preventing a particular search from working the way they wanted it to.

 

[goldyn chyld]

Ahh, well I guess it's a no go then... :?

 

[mpwilson]

Hi there, I've been using Pleco for some months now and I love it. I'm still a relative newcomer to Mandarin and my comprehension of Hanzi is minimal. However, there is one feature which would really help me - I apologise if it has already been mentioned or addressed.

When I use the flashcard system, I often mistake one Hanzi character for a different one, due to very slight variations between the characters - for example: 问 wen (ask), 间 jian (room), 门 men (door). So I switch out of Flashcard mode into Dictionary mode to look up the word I got confused with. However, I find it very difficult to remember the slight differences between the characters, as I can't see both characters on the screen at the same time.

Do you think it would be possible to implement a modification to Pleco which would allow me to see the Hanzi + definition of more than one character on the screen simultaneously?

Thanks, and keep up the good work.