iPhone Feature Requests

[Yohmi]

Hi

I’ve just got a request because I haven’t been able to find it yet, neither here or on another software…
What would be nice is to be able to favorite some words, to create our own personal dictionary based on what we’re learning and where we live. Because for me, the biggest problem is synonyms, while a request will give me dozens of expressions, I sometimes have to skip until maybe the fifteenth to find the one I’m looking for. It’s like favoriting words, a little bit like flashcards, but without all the flashcard features, just an user made favorite dynamic shortcut list (that you can browse or search).
Maybe it has to do with the "Word List" function, but I must admit I have no idea how to display this one… I do add words to it, though

Heaven would probably be the possibility to start a totally user-made dictionary within the software, because I learn from people and situations, and then I’d love so much to be able to carry and complete my own dictionary based on what I live and what people explain to me. Especially because as I’m living in Taiwan, we often have some differences compared to the mainland "academic" language, and I also have to deal with 台語 and aboriginal dialects.

In fact, before even looking for a dictionary (and end with this excellent tool), I was looking for a blank dictionary, and slowly fill it with what I’d learn from lessons and life. But I haven’t been able to find that, sadly…
I think this kind of function could also be very good to help saving many languages (especially regional dialects), because everyone could easily, in a convenient way, participate in the construction of the database. It could even give birth to another app, dedicated to these "community-fueled" dictionaries.
Anyway, that’s daydreaming, let’s keep it simple :

• Would it be possible to add a favoriting function to the built-in search tool ?
• Would it be possible to create a "blank page" mode where the goal is to fill-in the pages by ourselves ?

Thanks

 

[mikelove]

I’ve just got a request because I haven’t been able to find it yet, neither here or on another software…
What would be nice is to be able to favorite some words, to create our own personal dictionary based on what we’re learning and where we live. Because for me, the biggest problem is synonyms, while a request will give me dozens of expressions, I sometimes have to skip until maybe the fifteenth to find the one I’m looking for. It’s like favoriting words, a little bit like flashcards, but without all the flashcard features, just an user made favorite dynamic shortcut list (that you can browse or search).
Maybe it has to do with the "Word List" function, but I must admit I have no idea how to display this one… I do add words to it, though

Heaven would probably be the possibility to start a totally user-made dictionary within the software, because I learn from people and situations, and then I’d love so much to be able to carry and complete my own dictionary based on what I live and what people explain to me. Especially because as I’m living in Taiwan, we often have some differences compared to the mainland "academic" language, and I also have to deal with 台語 and aboriginal dialects.

We actually already support both of those things, but they're both part of the paid flashcard module - you can use that to create / manage lists of words (though there's not yet any easy way to filter search results to only include them) and to create searchable user dictionaries with words you add yourself.

Would it be possible to create a "blank page" mode where the goal is to fill-in the pages by ourselves ?

Could you expand on this a bit? What exactly do you mean by "blank page" - do you want to create your own lists of Chinese words for an English one? Best way to do that would probably be with a custom English-Chinese dictionary entry.

 

[radioman]

Jukuu.com, any chance to get that in your search lookup. I believe you support Google Translate now. I want to be able to highlight a Chiense word and get a list of related sentences.

 

[mikelove]

Jukuu.com, any chance to get that in your search lookup. I believe you support Google Translate now. I want to be able to highlight a Chiense word and get a list of related sentences.

We only support Google Translate in the reader and we're having to phase that out now that they've started charging for it. In general I'm wary of over-reliance on web-based services because of the likelihood of their getting pulled / redesigned / adding fees / etc; we don't want our software relying too heavily on something we don't control. Plus an astonishingly high percentage of our users have no 3G data service on their devices.

However, there are some Creative Commons projects to come up with example sentence repositories that we could look at offering as an offline database - that seems more elegant / reliable and more in keeping with how we've developed other parts of our software.

 

[radioman]

Understand about not wanting to confuse the users, but seems to me that if there was an "advanced user" way to allow someone to put in their own search coding, and have that as a non-default function. The web is a big place with lots of resources. Some will go away, new ones will come. I'm sure there are other reasons not to do this, but I'll go on record as wanting this.

Not sure if you can share that Creative Commons avenue, but if so, please pass it along.

 

[mikelove]

Understand about not wanting to confuse the users, but seems to me that if there was an "advanced user" way to allow someone to put in their own search coding, and have that as a non-default function. The web is a big place with lots of resources. Some will go away, new ones will come. I'm sure there are other reasons not to do this, but I'll go on record as wanting this.

Honestly, while an "advanced user" custom search mode sounds cool, I don't think this would get enough use to justify implementing it unless we had a lot of built-in site links. But we can still consider that, might actually have a good place to put it in our new merged multi-dict results interface.

Not sure if you can share that Creative Commons avenue, but if so, please pass it along.

Can't share the one I was thinking of yet, but there are probably a couple of others floating around.

 

[Z-Lo]

Hi.

There are document scanners for the iPhone that use OCR to turn a photo of an entire page of text into digital text.

It would be great to simply have my Chinese lesson texts right in my phone (as digital text).

This feature may already be possible through some combination of the document reader and the OCR camera, such as the "Scroll Capture Text" feature. But I'm not sure, as I have not yet bought either (OCR is too inaccurate and I'm just not convinced yet that document reader will be useful). So sorry if this feature is already available in some form, and I am just to computer-illiterate to figure it out.

Thanks for the awesome study tool!

 

[mikelove]

There are document scanners for the iPhone that use OCR to turn a photo of an entire page of text into digital text.

It would be great to simply have my Chinese lesson texts right in my phone (as digital text).

This feature may already be possible through some combination of the document reader and the OCR camera, such as the "Scroll Capture Text" feature. But I'm not sure, as I have not yet bought either (OCR is too inaccurate and I'm just not convinced yet that document reader will be useful). So sorry if this feature is already available in some form, and I am just to computer-illiterate to figure it out.

OCR is too inaccurate for you even with still document images? Where are you getting these images from? If you're taking them with your iPhone's camera, are you sure they're reasonably well-lit? The document reader would only help if you'd already OCRed the images, so it's not going to do you much good without that feature working correctly.

 

[Yohmi]

Could you expand on this a bit? What exactly do you mean by "blank page" - do you want to create your own lists of Chinese words for an English one? Best way to do that would probably be with a custom English-Chinese dictionary entry.

Well, it’s quite simple. You’ve heard a word, so you create a new entry for it (with definitions, pronunciation tips and quotes). And you can create a new definition for it too. That way, you can fill in your dictionary with the words you really know and understand, and it grows bigger and bigger as you’re learning. And it should not be only dedicated to chinese : as I’m living in Taïwan, I learn 閩南語 and formosan language (tribes), so it’d be veeery helpful to have my own dictionaries. I don’t know if it’s possible or not, but it’d be wonderful.

 

[Z-Lo]

OCR is too inaccurate for you even with still document images? Where are you getting these images from? If you're taking them with your iPhone's camera, are you sure they're reasonably well-lit? The document reader would only help if you'd already OCRed the images, so it's not going to do you much good without that feature working correctly.

Hi Mike. Thank you for your response Please don't get me wrong: Pleco is an amazing app and I love it, and the OCR is an amazing technology.

It's just that I have downloaded the demo (as well as tried other OCR apps for chinese) and I feel that for any character which I can recognize well enough to write my self, the full-screen handwriting tool would be more useful. This is just as far as my own personal study habits are concerned. For example, in a test, it read 字 as 宇... if I were not already familiar with the characters, I would not know it was wrong. I am hoping the technology will improve. Maybe I could optimize the settings for better ease of use. Anyway, I would be using it mostly to read characters I encounter out in the world such as signs and menus, and such. These are often written in script or fonts, so I have not yet decided to spring for the OCR. But this was not my point.

The feature I was interested in is converting a longer scanned text (in standard print) into digital text with the functions of the document reader. Does this function already exist? The option of highlighting certain vocabulary words you want to focus on would also be nice. This would require an integration of the OCR and document reader, currently separate purchases.

(As an aside, two other features I would love to see: 1) a Japanese-Chinese/Chinese-Japanese dictionary, and 2) I don't know how or if it's possible, but an ability to look up words directly from within a QQ chat without having to open and close the two apps.)

These are all just my ideas of a perfect chinese study tool, and pleco is already pretty close.

Keep up the excellent work. I believe that you are the steve jobs or bill gates of chinese language study. The developer feedback you provide and constant improvement is ONE of the things that makes pleco so great and I am inspired by your work.

 

[mikelove]

Could you expand on this a bit? What exactly do you mean by "blank page" - do you want to create your own lists of Chinese words for an English one? Best way to do that would probably be with a custom English-Chinese dictionary entry.

Well, it’s quite simple. You’ve heard a word, so you create a new entry for it (with definitions, pronunciation tips and quotes). And you can create a new definition for it too. That way, you can fill in your dictionary with the words you really know and understand, and it grows bigger and bigger as you’re learning. And it should not be only dedicated to chinese : as I’m living in Taïwan, I learn 閩南語 and formosan language (tribes), so it’d be veeery helpful to have my own dictionaries. I don’t know if it’s possible or not, but it’d be wonderful.

Oh, well you can already do that with our user dictionary feature; see:

http://www.pleco.com/ipmanual/dict.html#userdict

for more on that. It badly needs to be expanded / made easier to use, but it's pretty functional, and the format is an open-source database so you can always get your data back out of it if you need to.

It's just that I have downloaded the demo (as well as tried other OCR apps for chinese) and I feel that for any character which I can recognize well enough to write my self, the full-screen handwriting tool would be more useful. This is just as far as my own personal study habits are concerned. For example, in a test, it read 字 as 宇... if I were not already familiar with the characters, I would not know it was wrong. I am hoping the technology will improve. Maybe I could optimize the settings for better ease of use. Anyway, I would be using it mostly to read characters I encounter out in the world such as signs and menus, and such. These are often written in script or fonts, so I have not yet decided to spring for the OCR. But this was not my point.

That's reasonable - the accuracy can vary a lot depending on the sort of fonts you're using, and having a few neighboring characters for context can help too (if it sees 宇典 it'll probably figure out it should be a 字 there), but certainly it's far from perfect in its current form. Plain, black, evenly-aligned 宋体 text against a well-lit white background is what it's best at.

The feature I was interested in is converting a longer scanned text (in standard print) into digital text with the functions of the document reader. Does this function already exist? The option of highlighting certain vocabulary words you want to focus on would also be nice. This would require an integration of the OCR and document reader, currently separate purchases.

If you're scanning the text with our OCR system, you can actually read it without buying the document reader - open the image in Block Recognizer, then tap on the button to bring it up in a separate document reader screen. No way to save / reopen the text without the reader, but it's going to be the exact same text the next time you OCR it anyway. If you scanned it elsewhere then you can open that text file with the document reader without needing OCR.

Highlighting vocabulary in documents is something we've had in mind for a while, but first we need to come up with a more reliable text segmentation system. (so that we'll know it's actually that word, rather than the last character of one word plus the first character of another that happen to combine to make that word - more common occurrence than you might think)

(As an aside, two other features I would love to see: 1) a Japanese-Chinese/Chinese-Japanese dictionary, and 2) I don't know how or if it's possible, but an ability to look up words directly from within a QQ chat without having to open and close the two apps.)

Japanese we just don't have the time or resources to do properly right now, unfortunately. In-app dictionary lookups are currently only possible with Apple's official built-in dictionary, but we're hoping they'll enable other apps to do it in the future. (or perhaps not, since it would make our document reader a bit less unique...)

Keep up the excellent work. I believe that you are the steve jobs or bill gates of chinese language study. The developer feedback you provide and constant improvement is ONE of the things that makes pleco so great and I am inspired by your work.

Thanks! That's very flattering, though I'd never compare myself to those guys - having gone to college at the same place and time as Mark Zuckerberg (couple of years ahead, but we overlapped some) I've always had a bit of a Life of Brian thing going on with regard to tech startup success...

 

[character]

Thanks! That's very flattering, though I'd never compare myself to those guys - having gone to college at the same place and time as Mark Zuckerberg (couple of years ahead, but we overlapped some) I've always had a bit of a Life of Brian thing going on with regard to tech startup success...

I hope you're happy with your level of success and don't try to pull a Zuckerberg. I don't want the Pleco UI to change every time I start it up, or get notifications that 7 of my friends Like a character, or have to fix my flashcards' privacy settings every month, or... :wink:

OTOH, Zuckerberg has a Chinese gf and 'learned' Chinese a few years ago -- maybe you can get his endorsement.

 

[radioman]

I don't OCR documents anymore because Pleco's OCR just works too well. It you allows you to, even in difficult places with pictures, "redact" on the fly around graphics that would otherwise screw up a standard OCR system without painstakingly going through the document to figure out what needs to be redacted, etc. Full pages of Hanzi are OCRed in a second or two.

In the example below, I exported a PDF as pictures, store them in iPhoto, load them in the iPad, and bring them into Pleco's block reader as needed.

Note all the normal text book Hanzi is read correctly. (English words I am not "pressing" on... so the fact that any English might get misinterpreted is not an issue). I get similar results taking photos of A4 or letter-sized pages using my iPhone 4 camera.

Then you can hide the green markings and just press on unknown characters on the screen, and up comes the definitions. You can save definitions to your flashcards per normal, as well as access all the dictionary functions, stroke order, etc.

And on the off chance a character was misinterpreted, you can still see the dictionary definition applied by Pleco as well as the character as it was depicted in the original text. You can then press and hold the character to correct it.

 

[mikelove]

I hope you're happy with your level of success and don't try to pull a Zuckerberg. I don't want the Pleco UI to change every time I start it up, or get notifications that 7 of my friends Like a character, or have to fix my flashcards' privacy settings every month, or... :wink:

OTOH, Zuckerberg has a Chinese gf and 'learned' Chinese a few years ago -- maybe you can get his endorsement.

I am, though if Pleco ever does go under I've got half a dozen other interesting ideas for mobile app startups ready to go. (one of which is sufficiently exciting that I'd probably be working it now in my spare time if I had any of that)

I'm the only person I know who doesn't have an active personal Facebook account, but that's mostly that I don't see a need for it in my life - generally, if I'm not interested enough in someone to communicate with them regularly on a one-on-one basis, I'm not interested enough to look at their vacation photos or find out what they had for breakfast either. (funny that the once-controversial Wall is now the main thing people associate with Facebook - in the olden days all you could really do was click on people's names to view their profiles) Smalltalk at family gatherings / reunions / etc is awkward enough without taking away 90% of what you'd normally talk about. And if I feel the need for non-work-related online chitchat, I'm much happier spending it somewhere freewheeling and non-friend-specific like reddit or Twitter.

But that's just me - I recognize that Facebook or something like it is going to be part of life for a pretty large % of humanity going forward, and whatever one may feel about Facebook or its many annoyances and missteps, they came up with the winning formula first and Zuck probably deserves to be in the history books for that alone.

Priscilla Chan is actually Cantonese, IIRC, though, so wrong language until we finally release something for that.

 

[moelicious]

Hey, first of all thanks so much for this awesome iOS app! It's definitely worth every single euro!
My question: Is there any way to hide/cover the blank character boxes in flashcard mode?
Scenario: I'm testing myself on characters, Pleco is showing me definitions and is prompting for characters. Now if I can see (for example) three blank character boxes at the top, I already know the vocabulary asked for has to be tu2shu1guan3, without even looking at the definition, since there is only one three-character-vocab in this specific set of vocabulary.
What I often do is cover the top of the iPhone screen with a piece of paper, to make sure I can't see the number of blank character boxes, but it would be cool, if I could just hide the blank boxes or make Pleco to always show (for example) 5 blank boxes, no matter how many characters the vocabulary has really got. That way, my mind couldn't just cheat instead of practicing sometimes.. :wink:
I hope my inquiry is comprehendable, maybe there already is a way to solve this and I just haven't found it yet...

 

[mikelove]

Hey, first of all thanks so much for this awesome iOS app! It's definitely worth every single euro!
My question: Is there any way to hide/cover the blank character boxes in flashcard mode?
Scenario: I'm testing myself on characters, Pleco is showing me definitions and is prompting for characters. Now if I can see (for example) three blank character boxes at the top, I already know the vocabulary asked for has to be tu2shu1guan3, without even looking at the definition, since there is only one three-character-vocab in this specific set of vocabulary.
What I often do is cover the top of the iPhone screen with a piece of paper, to make sure I can't see the number of blank character boxes, but it would be cool, if I could just hide the blank boxes or make Pleco to always show (for example) 5 blank boxes, no matter how many characters the vocabulary has really got. That way, my mind couldn't just cheat instead of practicing sometimes.. :wink:
I hope my inquiry is comprehendable, maybe there already is a way to solve this and I just haven't found it yet...

There's no way to do this yet, but it's a good idea. We decided to limit the number of boxes because it makes testing much smoother when your response is automatically scored as soon as you finish entering it; having extra boxes means that you need to press an extra button to indicate when you've finished inputting your answer. But we could certainly add an option in a future release to always show the maximum number... thanks!

 

[yoose]

Hey, first of all thanks so much for this awesome iOS app! It's definitely worth every single euro!
My question: Is there any way to hide/cover the blank character boxes in flashcard mode?
Scenario: I'm testing myself on characters, Pleco is showing me definitions and is prompting for characters. Now if I can see (for example) three blank character boxes at the top, I already know the vocabulary asked for has to be tu2shu1guan3, without even looking at the definition, since there is only one three-character-vocab in this specific set of vocabulary.
What I often do is cover the top of the iPhone screen with a piece of paper, to make sure I can't see the number of blank character boxes, but it would be cool, if I could just hide the blank boxes or make Pleco to always show (for example) 5 blank boxes, no matter how many characters the vocabulary has really got. That way, my mind couldn't just cheat instead of practicing sometimes.. :wink:
I hope my inquiry is comprehendable, maybe there already is a way to solve this and I just haven't found it yet...

There's no way to do this yet, but it's a good idea. We decided to limit the number of boxes because it makes testing much smoother when your response is automatically scored as soon as you finish entering it; having extra boxes means that you need to press an extra button to indicate when you've finished inputting your answer. But we could certainly add an option in a future release to always show the maximum number... thanks!

on a similar note, would it be hard to add an option to make the automatic scoring only activate if all the boxes are filled in? sometimes there are multiple boxes but i cant remember the first one right away and will jump to the last box but when i fill that in the automatic scoring finishes and i cant go back to fill in the other(s)

 

[mikelove]

on a similar note, would it be hard to add an option to make the automatic scoring only activate if all the boxes are filled in? sometimes there are multiple boxes but i cant remember the first one right away and will jump to the last box but when i fill that in the automatic scoring finishes and i cant go back to fill in the other(s)

Already exists - "Only score if filled" in "Test Settings."

 

[yoose]

on a similar note, would it be hard to add an option to make the automatic scoring only activate if all the boxes are filled in? sometimes there are multiple boxes but i cant remember the first one right away and will jump to the last box but when i fill that in the automatic scoring finishes and i cant go back to fill in the other(s)

Already exists - "Only score if filled" in "Test Settings."

Thanks Mike, but the auto score does not quite work. If i were to fill in the second box then go back to the first box then it will not autoscore after that. I have to 'fill in' the second box again instead of it automatically detecting that it is already filled in. Or I have to manually press done and then check answer.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks Mike, but the auto score does not quite work. If i were to fill in the second box then go back to the first box then it will not autoscore after that. I have to 'fill in' the second box again instead of it automatically detecting that it is already filled in. Or I have to manually press done and then check answer.

Hmm... you're right. I'd actually forgotten that feature existed before I replied to your previous post, but I believe we added it originally on Windows Mobile because some people were finding that they were accidentally hitting the "answer" button before they were ready (it stayed visible even with the keyboard open on those). But it would make a lot of sense to have it work as you've described, so we'll add that to our list of changes for the next flashcard UI update.