iPhone Feature Requests

[johnh113]

Dear Mike,

I'm on iPhone. After using my wired earbuds for a year, I've returned to my Sony Ericsson Bluetooth earbuds. They're working much better than a year ago but they still have a couple of problems. The biggest problem is that the bluetooth audio connection turns off after about 8 seconds. So if I then hit the flashcard button for a new card, I don't get audio. I hit the speaker button and I get the audio because hitting the first button reestablished the bluetooth connection. As long as I take less than 8 seconds after hearing audio everything is fine. But if I delay more than 8 seconds, the audio turns off, and then when I hit a sound inducing button, it misses the first audio as it is reestablishing the connection. Pleco is probably playing the audio before the bluetooth connection is reestablished. This is probably to save the battery, but 8 seconds is way too short for me. My preference would be to keep the bluetooth connection active for as long as the screen is active, which in my case is 3 minutes. I know this will cause more drain on the battery, but not getting audio when I expect it and then having to hit another audio button is annoying. And doing something to keep the bluetooth connection always active would also be a problem because that would really drain my battery. There needs to be some way to keep the connection active while I'm active in Pleco, but turn it off after a period of inactivity, but a period much longer than 8 seconds.

As an experiment, I tried playing the iPod and using Pleco at the same time. Better. The iPod keeps the bluetooth connection active so I always hear the Pleco audio. The problem with this solution is that I don' t have independent volume control of the two audio streams. If I did, I would turn down the iPod audio and turn up the Pleco audio and everything would be fine. But as it is, the Pleco audio is too faint compared to the iPod audio.

John

 

[Vzzzbx]

(...) I don' t have independent volume control of the two audio streams. If I did, I would turn down the iPod audio and turn up the Pleco audio and everything would be fine. But as it is, the Pleco audio is too faint compared to the iPod audio.

I've found this to be the case too. All my music has been run through MP3Gain (which normalises everything around the 89 dB mark), so the Pleco audio is slightly clearer than it would otherwise be, but I don't know whether a third-party app can crank up the audio beyond that of the ipod app.

 

[mikelove]

I'm on iPhone. After using my wired earbuds for a year, I've returned to my Sony Ericsson Bluetooth earbuds. They're working much better than a year ago but they still have a couple of problems. The biggest problem is that the bluetooth audio connection turns off after about 8 seconds. So if I then hit the flashcard button for a new card, I don't get audio. I hit the speaker button and I get the audio because hitting the first button reestablished the bluetooth connection. As long as I take less than 8 seconds after hearing audio everything is fine. But if I delay more than 8 seconds, the audio turns off, and then when I hit a sound inducing button, it misses the first audio as it is reestablishing the connection. Pleco is probably playing the audio before the bluetooth connection is reestablished. This is probably to save the battery, but 8 seconds is way too short for me. My preference would be to keep the bluetooth connection active for as long as the screen is active, which in my case is 3 minutes. I know this will cause more drain on the battery, but not getting audio when I expect it and then having to hit another audio button is annoying. And doing something to keep the bluetooth connection always active would also be a problem because that would really drain my battery. There needs to be some way to keep the connection active while I'm active in Pleco, but turn it off after a period of inactivity, but a period much longer than 8 seconds.

This would be rather challenging, I'm afraid - we can't keep the connection active all the time or it'll drain the battery too fast, so we'd still have to turn it off after some sort of delay, but I'm not sure if there's a way we can programmatically detect that the Bluetooth session has been disconnected and wait for it to reconnect before playing audio. We can certainly investigate, but this is tricky enough that it might be a while before we can make any progress on it.

I've found this to be the case too. All my music has been run through MP3Gain (which normalises everything around the 89 dB mark), so the Pleco audio is slightly clearer than it would otherwise be, but I don't know whether a third-party app can crank up the audio beyond that of the ipod app.

No, but our audio could / probably should / probably will be remastered to use a louder volume; we've had lots and lots of requests for that.

 

[Vzzzbx]

Brilliant!

 

[scoff]

To echo the previous (pages of...) comments, I just want to express how useful Pleco has been for me and how much we all appreciate the dedication Mike and his team bring to the product(s).

Document Reader Sentence Extraction:

While going through documents using the reader (iPad), I often find myself wanting to save an especially interesting sentence. When this happens I usually highlight and copy the sentence, close Pleco, open a note-taking app, and paste the sentence into a document I have for interesting quotes before returning to Pleco. However, when you're in the middle of a gripping novel, sometimes this process is a little too cumbersome. It would have been incredibly useful if Pleco could append the highlighted portion of a document to a new (or existing) text file. I imaging this feature would be useful for people collecting sentences to review or quotes to take notes on later.

Thoughts?

Disclaimer: Please excuse me if this feature exists or has been requested previously.

 

[mikelove]

To echo the previous (pages of...) comments, I just want to express how useful Pleco has been for me and how much we all appreciate the dedication Mike and his team bring to the product(s).

Thank you!

Document Reader Sentence Extraction:

While going through documents using the reader (iPad), I often find myself wanting to save an especially interesting sentence. When this happens I usually highlight and copy the sentence, close Pleco, open a note-taking app, and paste the sentence into a document I have for interesting quotes before returning to Pleco. However, when you're in the middle of a gripping novel, sometimes this process is a little too cumbersome. It would have been incredibly useful if Pleco could append the highlighted portion of a document to a new (or existing) text file. I imaging this feature would be useful for people collecting sentences to review or quotes to take notes on later.

That's an interesting use for a feature that we've been bouncing around for a few years - something we've usually referred to as "sentence flashcards" though we still haven't nailed down an exact spec / feature list for it. We were mostly thinking of it for learning set phrases, but this is another thing we could do with the same database system - let you collect interesting little Chinese text snippets to review / classify later.

 

[Tezuk]

Perhaps this has been mentioned before, but is there any chance of an annotation feature. I would like to assign notes to certain words; alternative pronunciations or usage notes for example. I think it would be better if such notes were stored to a certain word and not a specific dictionary and so would come up as a tab no matter which dictionary you were viewing. Hope that makes sense.

 

[xiaopan8]

Max number of cards for spaced repetition

Apologies for requesting the "Max Number of Cards" feature for spaced repetition again.

I have been using SRS with Anki/ Pleco for nearly two years now, but in recent months I became rather tired, investigated the fixed methods in Pleco's flashcard system and became pretty used to tricking myself into "let's see if I can do just another set of 20 flashcards". So I became a fan of time boxing, it helps a lot in case motivation runs low. http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/category/timeboxing-series

Despite my request, I agree with Mike's statement http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2278#p17688 that SRS reps need to be finished everyday to make sense. In the fixed sets I often check with "all" how many cards are there, before I switch back to "20" cards and finish my daily load in small peaces of 20. I just love this "let's just do one more set..."-feeling.

Thanks a lot for consideration.

 

[mikelove]

Perhaps this has been mentioned before, but is there any chance of an annotation feature. I would like to assign notes to certain words; alternative pronunciations or usage notes for example. I think it would be better if such notes were stored to a certain word and not a specific dictionary and so would come up as a tab no matter which dictionary you were viewing. Hope that makes sense.

Requested quite a few times - a lot of these sorts of new user data features have been delayed / complicated by the appearance of iCloud (now we have to not only store this stuff but also synchronize it), but we're busily sorting that out and hopefully there'll be a number of new features like annotations / embedded flashcard images / audio / etc soon.

Apologies for requesting the "Max Number of Cards" feature for spaced repetition again.

I have been using SRS with Anki/ Pleco for nearly two years now, but in recent months I became rather tired, investigated the fixed methods in Pleco's flashcard system and became pretty used to tricking myself into "let's see if I can do just another set of 20 flashcards". So I became a fan of time boxing, it helps a lot in case motivation runs low. http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/bl ... ing-series

It's a reasonable theory, but I'm very worried about people triggering it without realizing the consequences - if we put a "number of cards" option somewhere where people are likely to find it, then they're going to use it and assume the system is doing its job and end up forgetting everything because they're not reviewing words often enough. We could add an alert when it's enabled but nobody would read it, we could bury it in an advanced settings screen but then nobody would use it... so I think instead of a "number of cards" setting we almost need a "take a break" type thing - pop up a message after every # of cards telling you you still have # cards due today and asking if you'd like to do another twenty now, say?

 

[xiaopan8]

pop up a message after every # of cards telling you you still have # cards due today and asking if you'd like to do another twenty now, say?

Dear Mike,

Thanks a lot for your consideration. That sounds like a good proposal. It would be important that the "Top Field 0" counter reflects that you only want to do a batch of x cards. I just love seeing this "Top Field 0" x/20 counter telling myself "only x more", giving me the "I can do that"-feeling. That just doesn't work if it shows "x/141". :shock:

 

[mikelove]

Thanks a lot for your consideration. That sounds like a good proposal. It would be important that the "Top Field 0" counter reflects that you only want to do a batch of x cards. I just love seeing this "Top Field 0" x/20 counter telling myself "only x more", giving me the "I can do that"-feeling. That just doesn't work if it shows "x/141". :shock:

Right, the psychological aspects of this are certainly essential.

 

[character]

I'd like the option to delete a flashcard while viewing it in a session.

 

[mikelove]

I'd like the option to delete a flashcard while viewing it in a session.

Already exists - turn on "Show delete button" in "Commands" and it'll show up in the middle tab (triangle icon). (why that's optional I don't know)

 

[character]

Thanks!

I'd like a feature in the forum that, when I press Preview or Submit, puts up a pop-up which says "Are you sure you've checked the manual?"

 

[michaji]

Hi ! It would be great if PLECO would show if a word is in one of the 6 new HSK vocabulary word listings,
So, for example , if i look up the word 报纸 bàozhǐ, it would show me it is part of the HSK 3 vocabulary list.

 

[mikelove]

Hi ! It would be great if PLECO would show if a word is in one of the 6 new HSK vocabulary word listings,
So, for example , if i look up the word 报纸 bàozhǐ, it would show me it is part of the HSK 3 vocabulary list.

We're actually already working on something like that - our latest Android beta version has a flashcard indicator that changes to indicate that a card is in one of your word lists, and we're planning the same thing for iOS.

 

[johnh113]

Hi ! It would be great if PLECO would show if a word is in one of the 6 new HSK vocabulary word listings,
So, for example , if i look up the word 报纸 bàozhǐ, it would show me it is part of the HSK 3 vocabulary list.

We're actually already working on something like that - our latest Android beta version has a flashcard indicator that changes to indicate that a card is in one of your word lists, and we're planning the same thing for iOS.

Dear Mike,

I think both ideas are good, and not mutually exclusive. It would be nice to know if a word is already in one of my lists, and it would be nice to know the relative frequency of usage of the word. I think the latter is a bit more important. I have added many words, and I have no way of knowing whether the words are actually used or are obscure. Some sort of ranking system would be great. An HSK ranking might be the easiest to implement, but any kind of ranking system would be appreciated.

John

 

[mikelove]

I think both ideas are good, and not mutually exclusive. It would be nice to know if a word is already in one of my lists, and it would be nice to know the relative frequency of usage of the word. I think the latter is a bit more important. I have added many words, and I have no way of knowing whether the words are actually used or are obscure. Some sort of ranking system would be great. An HSK ranking might be the easiest to implement, but any kind of ranking system would be appreciated.

Actually, the thinking was that we could achieve both ends just by a more robust flashcard indicator system (one that would also give you some indication as to which categories a card was in); if you wanted to flag HSK cards you'd just import a list of HSK cards and configure the results list to display which one of those a word was in. That makes it much easier for us to meet the needs of individual users - someone in Taiwan for example would probably be less than thrilled about an HSK-oriented system.

 

[michaji]

Great comment John, to have an idea of frequency is indeed the most important idea behind this feature. Great answer Mike, got the idea how your system is indeed more flexible. One additional request regarding this : It would be absolutely great if you would look up a character for example with a @ wildcard, as to show all words in which this character appears, that this feature would actually already show in the Left column where all the words are listed, so as to choose the ones with a high frequency / HSK . Thanks !

Micha

 

[mikelove]

Great comment John, to have an idea of frequency is indeed the most important idea behind this feature. Great answer Mike, got the idea how your system is indeed more flexible. One additional request regarding this : It would be absolutely great if you would look up a character for example with a @ wildcard, as to show all words in which this character appears, that this feature would actually already show in the Left column where all the words are listed, so as to choose the ones with a high frequency / HSK . Thanks !

That should be possible, yes, though we're also planning to make some the lists on the character info screen frequency sorted (at least as an option).