iPhone Feature Requests

[estudiando]

1- Dictionary cycling when the entry is found through zi -> words -> entry. Right now you can cycle the dictionaries in the word list, but after a selection, you are restricted to the current dictionary.
2- Magnifier icon (shortcut to dictionary) in every screen

 

[changtian]

I have waited almost two years for this to come out on the iphone and it is definately worth the wait. My question/request is for the future flashcard ability on the iphone:

I want to be able to quiz myself on the most commonly used characters and I would like to be able to do it in order. I know other members have posted flashcards for the most frequently used characters, but I prefer this list found here: http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html . I plan to upload this list as a flashcard file in order of frequency, but I want the flexibility to be able to focus on certain groups at a time; i.e. the first 30 most frequent characters, the most frequent characters 600-625, etc. I don't know how else to do this other than divide the main file into tons of smaller files and upload them all which would take a while. Let me know what you think and thanks again for your help.

 

[mikelove]

estudiando - good point on dictionary cycling for words brought up from Char Info, that should be easy to fix. As far as the shortcut to the main dict view, we already have something like that in the tab bar - open it up and tap on the already-selected "Dict" tab and that will bring you back to the root level. We'd love to come up with an easier one, but we haven't figured out a good place to put it - there isn't really any room in the toolbar for one, we could cram it in but it's sufficiently destructive that it kind of needs a big target area away from anything else important.

changtian - you certainly don't need to break those up into separate files; you can take one properly tab-formatted text file and add header tags to the start of each list, like this:

// Characters 1-5
的 de
一 yī
是 shì
不 bù
了 le
// Characters 6-10
...

etc; just put a header tag with // followed by the name of the group at the start of each new group. That will put the cards into correspondingly-named Pleco "categories" which you can then study separately.

Oh, and you don't need to manually upload files one at a time if you do decide to break it up like that; just wrap them up in a .zip archive, upload that, then tap on it to unzip it to a folder.

 

[estudiando]

estudiando - ... As far as the shortcut to the main dict view, we already have something like that in the tab bar - open it up and tap on the already-selected "Dict" tab and that will bring you back to the root level. We'd love to come up with an easier one, but we haven't figured out a good place to put it - there isn't really any room in the toolbar for one, we could cram it in but it's sufficiently destructive that it kind of needs a big target area away from anything else important.
...

Mike, a fixed place for an icon to get back to the main dictionary place would be ideal. How about upper right corner? you can switch zi with magnifier glass in the popup screen; in the words/detail screen, the upper right corner is empty.

 

[mikelove]

In the dictionary entry screen the upper right corner is actually occupied by the previous / next entry buttons, which IMHO are pretty important in their own right - very very useful to be able to scroll between search results without having to go back to the main results screen. And I'm not sure where else we could put those without making them much less convenient to get to - upper middle, maybe, in place of the not-particularly-important count of which entry you're on, but that would make them a lot harder to use one-handed.

We could wedge in that button just to the right of the "Back" button, but we did some experiments with that and it seemed very easy to hit the wrong one by mistake - dropping all the way back to the main screen when you *don't* want to would be a very bad thing, since it might be tough to get back the word you were looking at if it was several screens deep.

 

[estudiando]

Do you mean the clock icon? I suppose if you are in the main screen, you wouldn't need a shortcut since you are already there
In the selection screen, you have up/down arrows, so maybe add the magnifier icon to the right of those arrows?
In the pop-up screen, you can swap "zi" with the magnifier icon
In the words/details you can add the magnifier icon in the upper right corner since it is blank now


Another request: sort results by frequency (is that possible)
Also what is "none" in the sort results by settings?

Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

Putting it to the right of the up/down buttons is very dangerous - much too easy to tap it by accident when you really want to scroll. We certainly can fit it in in Char Info, but there's just nowhere to put it on the dictionary entry screen.

Sort by frequency would require us to find a good list of frequency data, which we haven't managed to do yet unfortunately. "None" just spits out the results however they emerge from our search index, which usually means they're roughly in Pinyin order - it's there mainly for a speed boost on older systems.

 

[mikelove]

Though I suppose we could at least add it as an option - some people might feel like it's worth having the up / down buttons become less convenient in order to get that quick exit button.

 

[estudiando]

Mike, I was thinking the frequency sorting one gets when using a pinying chinese input in a computer. Where do they get the listing?

 

[estudiando]

I've requested this feature elsewere, but I'm logging it here since this is the request thread:

Option to display more details when choosing UNI dictionary. This way I would just cycle through the dictionaries without the need to go to zi -> details.

Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

I'm not sure where that frequency list comes from, actually - they may have developed it themselves. All I know is that we haven't yet managed to find a word frequency list that would be usable in Pleco.

And yes, more details in Unihan makes sense for a future release.

 

[estudiando]

Is this a possible source: http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/ for frequency list?

 

[estudiando]

Tone number insertion at the insertion point.

If I move the insertion point from the end, I can enter a letter from the keybaord, but if I enter a tone number, it automatically appends to the end of the word. I want to enter the tone number at the insertion point. Example, I enter "women", I wan to add a tone number at the end of "wo" as in "wo3men". If I move the insertion to point from after "n" to after "o", the tone number is appended to the word as in "women3"

In addition, the text in the magnifier bubble (when tapping to move the insertion point) is often off the screen -not sure how can this be solved...

 

[Ducksausage]

Here're a few off the top of my head:

• Ability to Prioritize Dictionaries
  • As I've learned from using Pleco heavily recently, not all dictionaries are equal. The better ones provide example sentences, additional usages, commonly used phrases which include the searched term, etc. (the 21C, ABC, NWP, and CT dictionaries seem particularly good), whereas the others simply dump the results on the screen and expect a novice to somehow discern the nuances in usage between multiple results for the same search. Ensuring that a preferred dictionary always gets the top spot would save on a lot of the frustration of frequently having to cycle between multiple dictionaries.
  
  Word List
  • Change the layout of the saved entries in saved 'word lists'! I just noticed that Pleco has the ability to do this and was very excited (I feel like it's sort of a short-term fix for the lack of Flashcards and, if exportable, might come in handy on my PC). I was excited, at least, until I saw the layout of multiple entries in a single word list. Namely, the problem is that there's no spacing or demarcation between one entry and the next making the list unmanageable and otherwise rough looking. Also, I saved a bunch of words, all at about the same time, and was surprised to find that the words seemed arbitrarily split into two different files. Do you have any ideas as to why this sort of thing might have occured?
  
  Ability to Create (Simple) Documents
  • Maybe this request is redundant since there're a couple apps that could potentially fill in this functionality, like 'Notes'. Unfortunately, when using these substitute programs, you can't conveniently look up a word as easy as you could if using something included in Pleco. Also, while I haven't really experimented with it yet, I'd imagine getting one's 'note' off of the iPhone/iTouch and onto the computer would present certain difficulties and/or might be impossible, whereas it'd be pretty easy with Pleco's upload feature within the document reader.
  
  Desktop Accessibility
  • Honestly, I think this would make Pleco the end-all-be-all app for Chinese. That and flashcards, of course.

 

[estudiando]

Ability to Prioritize Dictionaires: Settings -> Manage Dictionaries -> Edit: Drag the dictionaries with the handles

 

[DotComCTO]

Ability to Prioritize Dictionaires: Settings -> Manage Dictionaries -> Edit: Drag the dictionaries with the handles

Really? That's a cool find. I just tried that and rearranged the dictionaries; however, the search still doesn't follow the order I just set. Is there another option to set to enable that feature?

EDIT:
I should clarify...I set the C-E dictionary search to Tuttle, PLC, etc, etc (it was PLC first). I searched for something like 出租 and I still got PLC first. I *know* there's another option that affects the search order..I just have to find it! It's this downside of having everything completely customizable...a good problem to have.

Thanks!
--DotComCTO (嘉利)

 

[DotComCTO]

OK. I'm not sure if I've seen this feature request, but I had an interesting idea when trying out the Document Reader:

Why not let the Document Reader access the audio pronunciation module? Think of it as a poor man's text-to-speech option. Yes, I realize that it would frequently just say one word at a time and that it could be somewhat choppy. That said, another use for that feature could be as a travel companion/phrasebook. By this I mean that a user could create one or more documents of phrases, then select the phrase to play, and hear the audio.

Again, the results would likely be choppy, but could be usable for a traveler in an emergency.

Thoughts?

--DotComCTO (嘉利)

 

[mikelove]

estudiando - that list won't work, unfortunately, since it only covers bigrams (and not specifically segmented words). Though it would actually be very easy to build a word frequency list ourselves (using an open-source text segmenter) if we could just find a large enough text corpus - anyone know any good sources for those? (there's a link for one from that site you mentioned, but the link seems to be broken)

Tone number insertion has actually been fixed for 2.0.7, we didn't think we could do it without an undocumented API but it turned out it was very easy; just put the tone number you want in the clipboard and tell the system to execute a paste command. Offscreen text we can't do much about until we add our own (optional) custom keyboard in place of Apple's and hence no longer need to rely on their text field control at all.

Ducksausage - as estudiando said, you can set the priority order in Manage Dicts.

The "word lists" feature is just a stopgap measure until we get our full flashcard system implemented on iPhone, so the layout of entries in that is designed specifically to be compatible with the import format of our flashcard system, though I agree it's kind of awkward to actually read through. The file split is also designed for that - English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English entries have to be in separate input files for our flashcard system to deal with them correctly. It should be easy enough to fix these things in a text editor if you transfer the files to your desktop, though.

There actually is a very limited text editing capability built into the current document reader, though we've hidden it since it's kind of slow / buggy and doesn't do well with large (> 10k or so) documents; "Enable text editing" in the "Reader" panel of Settings will add an Edit button to the document reader screen. We're planning to expand this to a real / large-document-friendly text editor in a future release, though.

DotComCTO - you can set searches to always start on the first dictionary with the "Dict search order" option in Settings / Dictionary. That will jump back to the first dictionary in the search order every time you change the search term.

We've had a bunch of people ask about TTS in the reader, but the syllables are so slow / deliberate (designed for getting a handle on the nuances of individual Mandarin sounds) that I'm not sure how practical it would be; there's also the problem of reliably getting the pronunciation for characters that aren't already accompanied by Pinyin. I suppose as you say that it might be useful in an emergency, though.

 

[character]

Though it would actually be very easy to build a word frequency list ourselves (using an open-source text segmenter) if we could just find a large enough text corpus - anyone know any good sources for those?

You might start with the UN corpus and add a bunch of (contemporary setting) novels from the web, text from Chinese language blogs/forums/news sites, etc. Since you wouldn't be distributing the text, I can't imagine there would be IP issues.

 

[mikelove]

That would cover a lot of it, but we'd really want a good source for spoken dialogue too - maybe a collection of TV transcripts from somewhere? (though those have their own peculiar linguistic properties I suppose)