iPhone Feature Requests

D

dcarpent

榜眼
Mike Love wrote:

"You can move the cursor around on iPhone by tap-holding on the field. As for the dark green, drag the slider on the bottom of the color picker screen to darken / lighten the current color, or switch to RGB mode (switch at the top-right corner of the screen) and set the R/B dials to 0% and G to something less than 100%. For the keyboard, have you tried the tone bar option? (last item in Panels) Not quite as good as integrating it into the keyboard, but pretty close."

Thanks, Mike! I had not yet noticed any of these options, and they resolved my three issues quite well. In addition to a great application the "tech support" via this forum is second to none!
 
F

Fluhkes

Member
Features I'd like to see in a future version of a software that is already setting the standard in its field...

1. A character learning feature, providing stroke-by-stroke feedback when a character is being entered using the handwriting screen (like Skritter, KingHanzi or Lexikan do), or at least providing some feedback upon entering the final stroke of a character.

2. An Anki-like spaced recognition algorithm that should combine with the yet-to-come flashcard feature and with above character learning feature.

3. Character analysis, including a search feature, using Heisig's primitives and their corresponding key words, as an alternative to using "traditional" radicals.
 
F

Fluhkes

Member
Forgot one, not sure whether it has been mentioned by someone else:

4. An undo feature to delete strokes instead of clearing the whole screen (which is what tapping the screen does)
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Eggwind - not sure; given that I don't speak Norwegian I'm don't know how I'd go about asking either. The availability of a free iPhone version into which these sorts of dictionaries can be installed may strengthen our case a bit - we're no longer in a situation where free dictionary downloads necessarily mean some extra revenue for us from people buying our software to run them - but people do get antsy about working with for-profit companies like Pleco.

dcarpent - great! Glad I could help.

Fluhkes - 1) is kind of supported and 2) is fully supported in our flashcard system on Palm / WM and should be coming over to iPhone too. I don't really love that disappearing-stroke feedback system in Skritter et al, but we've got some other ideas about how to provide feedback as a character is drawn that we think would be a bit more intuitive / free-flowing; may be ready by the time the first iPhone flashcard version is out, actually.

3) is partially supported already by the "Chars" tab in Char Info - that at least lets you pull up a list of character components (not just radicals) and then search for other characters containing those components. But it's a bit awkward, not to mention missing some components, so we plan to expand on it considerably in a future release.
 
G

Gleaves

Member
For single characters, I love that you can look up entries that "start/contain/both" with a simple toggle. Can that functionality be extended to 2 (or 3, 4) character words? I'll often look up a word and wonder if it is part of a bigger fixed expression/idiom. I find the Wild function a bit unwieldy, espeically after I've already typed something.

(First time pleco user and I am enjoying it greatly. It's already great and it sounds like it is going to get even better, with flashacrds, etc.)
 
E

Eggwind

举人
mikelove said:
Eggwind - not sure; given that I don't speak Norwegian I'm don't know how I'd go about asking either. The availability of a free iPhone version into which these sorts of dictionaries can be installed may strengthen our case a bit - we're no longer in a situation where free dictionary downloads necessarily mean some extra revenue for us from people buying our software to run them - but people do get antsy about working with for-profit companies like Pleco.
Click to expand...
It seems the database might not be distributed quite as freely after all - it is inside a FileMaker runtime, which from what I can tell possibly indicates some kind of encryption, and at least makes it non-trivial to extract and convert the data.

Next month I will be returning to Oslo after a prolonged period of foreign study and will try to find one of the authors and ask their opinion. Seeing as how Norwegian academics working on books in their native language usually have few illusions of ever making any money from publishing (it is my informed guess that vanishingly little of the >$150 price of the dictionary goes to the authors), I would think that the idea of making their work accessible to a greater audience would sound appealing to them.

I wonder though, how interested are you really in making available dictionaries, such as this one, that have a relatively limited audience? Admittedly, a Norwegian dictionary would likely be of interest to Danish and Swedish users as well, but that's still not a lot of users.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Gleaves - thanks! We certainly could do that, but I'm a little uncertain about the right interface for it; I guess we'd want to add an extra button to the search bar (or maybe a tap-hold menu) to set up the appropriate wildcard query.

Eggwind - well we'd certainly be interested in hearing about that. It's true that these sorts of dictionaries have limited audiences, but at the same time, going to the trouble to offer them can instantly get us a bunch of very loyal new customers; AFAIK there aren't really any Chinese-Norwegian dictionary apps out there now, and there are certainly plenty of Scandinavian language speakers learning Chinese.
 
挪

挪威森林

秀才
About the Norwegian dictionary situation (apologies in advance to those who find this too esoteric). I have actually written to the professors at UiO who work on this dictionary, proposing that they license it under a CC licens and make it available publicly. I realize that it is an enormous task to create such a dictionary, and I am by no means one of those who think that everything should be for no pay -- but in this case, all the work has been subsidized by the Norwegian state, both indirectly, through subsidies to the University of Oslo, and as far as I understand, directly through some very large research grants. The dictionary costs 1000 kr, and I can't imagine that it has sold more than a hundred copies - given that the bookstores take half, and the book is a mastodont, I can't imagine that they make any money off it. So to me, it's almost criminal to waste so much great potential...

According to the professor, they are actually planning to release a web version, and after that, they will discuss the rights issue with the publisher... So we'll see where it goes. Feel free to contact them you as well though, the more people who request this, perhaps the better.

Another project that might interest you, is that I have been working with some others on building a completely openly licensed and downloadable collaborative Norwegian-Chinese dictionary. It takes the Wikipedia data as a base (Norwegian - Chinese), but adds a lot of other data that we've added, and hopefully people will add even more. It's already fairly useful, and will be even more so. We also intend it as a meeting place for Chinese learning Norwegian, and Norwegian learning Chinese. http://kaifangcidian.com/norsk.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well we'd almost certainly be interested if they did choose to make it openly / easily licenseable.

Interesting website - I think it might be a little too early to do a Pleco conversion of it, but it definitely demonstrates the potential for Wikipedia dictionary data-mining in languages other than English.
 
D

DotComCTO

秀才
Firstly, I've been formally studying Chinese for 3 years or so now. The iPhone has been an excellent tool in assisting with the classroom and homework. I had been using a different dictionary, but had been keeping an eye on Pleco for quite some time. Glad I did! This application is outstanding! The feature set, additional dictionaries, etc are very impressive. I am looking forward to the flashcard feature being added, so I can integrate the NPCR flashcards HSK has into the app.

So, on a "really out there" note, I wondered whether something like the ABBYY iPhone OCR SDK could be incorporated with Pleco. The idea would be to use the camera and ABBYY to scan the document and feed that into Pleco's document reader. It would make the Pleco app a sort of one-stop-shop for scanning and translating a document. As a student, the idea would be to scan some part of the NPCR textbook and/or workbook to more easily work with more difficult sections that come up (our class is getting ready for NPCR Vol. 3).

Thanks again for a great product!

--DotComCTO (嘉利）
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks! We're working as fast as we can on flashcards.

I don't believe that ABBYY actually supports Chinese characters - if you go to http://www.abbyy.com/mobileocr/features and open up the "More Languages" item, Chinese isn't among the languages listed. Chinese OCR is very complicated - much harder and more resource-intensive than with alphabetic languages - and even if there were a licenseable Chinese OCR library for iPhone I doubt it would work very well; we're a couple of hardware generations (and a couple of brilliant AI discoveries) away from making camera-phone Chinese OCR a real possibility, and the first company to get it working well would probably guard it way too jealously to consider licensing it to Pleco. Right now I don't even think the iPhone's built-in camera would provide sufficient sharpness / detail to facilitate Chinese OCR, at least not for anything smaller than a road sign.
 
ACardiganAndAFrown

ACardiganAndAFrown

状元
I don't know whether or not this has been mentioned, and sorry if it has, but it would be extremely helpful if under character details (or somewhere appropriate) it had the 'proper' name of the characters radical. Is this possible at all?
 
I

imron

举人
With the transparent background for HWR, I would like to see it keep the definition window visible if possible. For example, I've currently got the layout of pleco iPhone configured to look basically the same as pleco WM/Palm (entry list set as "head pron" and definition window visible on the left). When I tap into the search bar however, the definition disappears and I only get the "head pron" entry list, this despite the fact that "Rearrange list when keyboard open" is disabled.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That's something of a performance issue - updating the definition along with the list whenever the search changes could make things feel kind of laggy. (background threading things won't help, since pretty much all of the processing time is spent in drawing text, and that has to be done in the foreground) The "rearrange list" just changes the layout of cells in the list, mainly to accommodate the fact that the area for the list is usually changing (squeezed by the keyboard).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top