Latest on Beta 5

[ldolse]

I'll chime in on Stephan Hodges comment on totally unusable, I pretty much agree that they really aren't usable for day to day use or even extended testing. I think based on the comments I've seen about flashcards that few people have tested them, that's true. By the same token the official goal of the two beta threads was one for feedback, and one for massive, pleco crashes your handheld type bugs. I posted some general feedback about the portions of flashcards I could get to work, but frankly I couldn't get about 80% of the stuff to work under flashcards. I just didn't report the problems because they weren't hard crash bugs. I could run test sessions if I just left everything to defaults, but if I tweaked any preferences or card filters at all 9 times out of 10 I'd break or corrupt the flashcard settings preferences, preventing new sessions. I can imagine that a lot of people who may have attempted to use the flashcards changed a preference and gave up after things didn't work.

One example I could use here is repetition spacing - this would be the mode I would prefer to use, but even attempting to choose repetition spacing in any beta screws up the profile - sometimes I could get it working again, but never had much luck with that.

Looking forward to a beta that can let me do a bit more testing. Pleco 1 corrupted my flashcard DB a while back, been looking forward to rebuilding it using the new features in 2.0. I don't think the file format needs to be perfect for me, but I do realize there have been a lot of nervous people waiting in the wings for a stamp of stability to copy their DBs over.

 

[Mator]

Hey Mike,
I understand why people are nervous about their flashcard files being currupted - I have many hours invested in mine. I think it would be helpful with the next Beta release to explain clearly (as I think you have before) how to copy the backup flashcard file on their computers to a remote folder so it doesn't also become currupted (during a hotsync). They have nothing to lose except a little time to restore the file.
Sorry I missed meeting you when you came to Beijing several months ago - let us know if you plan on coming again. Thanks, TK

 

[mikelove]

ldolse - makes sense, we've added a "Reset to Defaults" option in the Manage Profiles screen in the latest builds that should help with that if there are any options left that can cause problems (though in general it should be a lot more reliable now). The database is pretty solid now, fortunately - we've made a few tweaks to the format since Beta 4 but nothing that couldn't have been done in a software update without losing data, but the only big change (and a big part of the reason for the B5 delay) is to the IDs of dictionary entries which the flashcards link to, and those mixed-up settings don't affect the actual cards / scores / etc. Seems very good at avoiding corruption, too - we've imported, managed, exported, and deleted stacks of 60,000 cards or more without anything getting messed up.

Mator - we'll provide some sort of explanation for that, but thanks to the fact that the exporter now exports *all* of your flashcard data including histories / scores / etc the easiest bet for a lot of people will just be to use that - it's in a nice friendly XML format that should be extremely durable.

 

[Dan_78cj5]

Mike, sorry if this is a bunch of whinning, but since you have been asking for flash-card feedback, and seem puzzled as to why people aren't using the flashcards in beta 4 - here's some babbling feedback on flashcards. I am not asking for new features and other options at this stage, I just want you to get out what you have and help us figure out how to use what's there already. I really miss having a Pleco I know and love to use, right now I feel it may be very capable - but just not too useful, and admittedly mostly because I don't understand it.

I for one haven't used the flashcards too much yet because I don't understand the new system. Do you have a tutorial,a thread going, or some info on how the new flashcard system works. I spent a good long while with only one entry in my flashcards even though I often use the add button. Lately that got fixed or I just realized I AM adding flashcards and didn't know how to find them, though I don't get the visual 'flash' to let me know I added a card. I also really really liked controlling lists. For me it was really usefull to have a list for each chapter of a text-book, or each 'pian' of Sunzi Bingfa, or each trip I took traveling into China/Taiwan/HK/Singapore/SF. In this way I could connect the vocabulary to a mental reference, and even review just the relevant vocabulary right before reviewing a specific text, trip or event. I feel like now I just have 10s of 1000s of words in a random jumble and date is the only way I have had success in controlling or limiting what I review - and I rerely feel like remembering or writing down what day I inputted each chapter to try and control the list by date when giving the list a name was much more useful.

I also used to keep topic lists, like traditional characters that I keep seeing over and over again and forgetting each time, military words, animal names, plant types, furniture, body parts, or Cheng-yu, etc. With topic lists I could easily reach into Pleco and get a set of relevant related terms I had seen and review them with purpose when I feel like studying a specific thing. My impression is the new flashcard system has been turned into one large data-base of "all words I should know" and that becomes quite overwhelming to 'want' to go into their and study it.

Granted flags, ranks and lists may have been a bit much to get your hands around, but I mostly just ignored flags and had a good system running between my user controlled lists and the rank system. For a newer simpler system this flashcard set-up is very intimidating and doesn't feel simpler. I don't yet understand profiles and catagories (how are these better or simpler than lists ranks and flags?), and I am confused by three different buttons to 'manage' flashcards - none of which look familiar or appear to be fully functioning yet. In profiles it looks like all I can do is make, rename, or delete a profile, and I still don't know what a profile is or how it is useful to me. Under manage flashcards a list shows up that has only the first flashcard I ever inputted. If I select that card a screen appears with almost no buttons or text readable until I start poking around with my stylus, then I can't get it to close, let alone figure out how to manipulate or use this edit/manage flashcard function. In manage catagories I can make catagory names, but I can't see what's in those catagories. The promote and move keys appear to do nothing, and if I can't figure out what they are for I don't see any use in making, renaming, duplicating or splitting catagories that I cannot see into or figure out how to assign cards to.

With lists I could freely add in a large number of new cards, and not be committed to adding them into a master list of 1000s of things I had to learn. If I changed game plan I could easily dump a list of 50 words I had put in reading one specific magazine, book, or watching a movie or soap opera.

Pleco flashcard used to be the one shinning light in studying vocabulary. When I feel my classes and teachers fail in placing new vocab in a context and merely overload me with 1000s of unrelated words to remember each hour - Pleco flashcards allowed me to put them in relevance, review them in relation to useful mental/memory cues, and Now Pleco flashcards feels just as frustrating - like a single huge repository of words I should know but don't remember. Each time I open it up I either get so many words that I have no cue as to when or where I learned them, or I simply select a very recent date set and only get words I kind of already remember from yesterday. Granted this is mostly because I haven't committed time to figuring out the new system, but I am not sure I am yet motivated into seeing the benefit in learning a new system which appears just, very different, and not yet very better.

I admit I have avoided playing with them partly because I have been waiting to be sure the new flashcard bit is stable enough you will say 'we promise you won't lose your cards', but at this point I am several test beta loads away from the last time I had usable flashcards and it has been so long since I used Pleco for flashcards I am losing interest/habit in using Pleco for that purpose.

OK, so I hope this was of some use. Please do not commit time to changing functions, just put out something and help educate us on how to use it. I would much rather have a finished program and feel confident the time I commit to figuring it out will be of long term use, and make flashcards once again one of the major advantages of Pleco that I use daily and brag to my friends about. As my Pleco becomes more of just a dictionary, and takes more and more time to get a final release out - I am more interested in jumping to another finished stable electronic dictionary hardware.

Thanks for all the hard work Mike, love your product and your customer support and look forward to a finished product soon.

Thanks,
Dan

 

[mikelove]

Thanks - this crystallizes nicely what I think is the biggest single source of confusion with the new flashcard system, which is the switch from Lists (which a card can only belong to one of) to Categories (which a card can belong to unlimited numbers of). Ultimately I think the latter system is a lot better, since it lets you have just one card for a given vocabulary word even it shows up in two different textbooks (extremely common problem) and it lets you mark cards with additional categories like "actually heard this on the street" or "only used in Shanghai" (which is what the Flags system in 1.0 was meant to do, but virtually nobody used it), but it's a pretty big transition and we haven't really handled the interface for it as well as we could have.

There are four big changes in 2.0 that should help with this. The first is that once again tap-holding on the Add To Flash button gives you a handy popup list of flashcard categories, so you can easily file away a new card into a specific one. We've also now added an "Uncategorized" category search option, so you can look for cards that don't have a category yet (the big useless pool) and easily give them one. Along with this, we've now devoted an entire row of Manage Cards to category assignments, a popup list and two buttons to let you add/remove cards from a given category, which should let you move cards around very similarly to how you could in 1.0 - pick the destination category and then run through the list tapping on a button to add cards to that category.

Finally, we've made the Manage Categories screen a lot less confusing by replacing the Promote/Demote buttons (terrible design idea in so many ways) with a simple "Group" button; you just select the category you want to group, tap Group, tap on the category you want to group it under and it gets grouped under that category in the hierarchy. This is what you do if, for example, you want to create a category for each lesson in a particular textbook series - create all of those lessons and group them under one big category for the whole series (or one for the series and one under it for each book), saving you from having a couple of hundred separate flashcard Lists in one big pile. There's also a Move button which lets you rapidly move a category to a position right next to another category in the list, and tapping on the New button now creates the category wherever the highlight is so you don't have to keep jumping to the end of the list to see it.

So between those and (finally) getting out some documentation I'm optimistic that people will actually be able to get some use out of the flashcard in Beta 5. Very sorry you've given up flashcards in the meantime, though - have you deleted 1.0 due to some sort of program conflict or do you just not like using both systems at once?

 

[radioman]

Mike,

I think this is along the same theme so I will ask it.

Right now, many of my category lists do in fact have the same word showing up in different lists, here and there, for whatever reason. My question is... Will the new system allow an easy way to gain visibility into what is repeated? Will it just have a single database entry for a given word or character with multiple tag possibilities mapped for each of the old categories?

Any feedback/insights into the mechanics of this would be appreciated. I figure it might dictate how and when I move to clean things up. Many thanks.

Ed.

 

[mikelove]

There's an option in the importer to allow or eliminate duplicate flashcards; if you choose the latter, it'll assign the one card it creates for a word to all of the categories that that word used to appear in, so all you lose is the separate score/rank data (there's no good way to merge it, so right now it just takes whichever score it sees first, though we may end up changing that so it takes the one with the highest rank instead). So there's probably no need to clean things up now since the importer takes care of most of that for you.

 

[Mator]

- have you deleted 1.0 due to some sort of program conflict or do you just not like using both systems at once?

Hey Mike,
From this recent quote it sounds like you can load 1.0 and 2.0 on the same device, but I had the impression from other posts that 1.0 had to be completely removed before 2.0 would function properly. I would definitely experiment more with 2.0 if I could still use 1.0 (which I use many hours each day). I just can't rely on 2.0 yet because of frequent lockups and partially unusable flashcards. If this is possible are all the dictionary files (which I believe have the same file names in both) accessed by both versions without a problem (for Palm OS)?
Thanks,TK

 

[mikelove]

The files are different, but the software won't mix them up (creator codes are different, so 1.0 won't see any of 2.0's files and 2.0 won't see any of 1.0's). The main problem is that while the internal database names are different, the regular filenames aren't, so on Palm you'd either want to rename all of them before installing or copy them to your memory card manually (preferably to a different directory than where your 1.0 files are).

 

[gato]

lets you have just one card for a given vocabulary word even it shows up in two different textbooks (extremely common problem) and it lets you mark cards with additional categories like "actually heard this on the street" or "only used in Shanghai" .

Was there a big demand for having the same card in multiple lists? I'm not sure how useful this will be. I just want to memorize a word and be done with it. I don't need the "tagging" facility (which is what "categories" sounds like) that's used on social websites to help people search for things they might not otherwise find. But if I am the only user of my PDA phone, do I really need to give the same word multiple tags?

The "profile" system the poster above mentioned also sounds like a way to have multiple users for the flashcards. If it's not, then perhaps a different word should be used rather than "profile."

The first is that once again tap-holding on the Add To Flash button gives you a handy popup list of flashcard categories, so you can easily file away a new card into a specific one.

Have you kept the feature of allowing flashcards to be added to a default category/list?

We've also now added an "Uncategorized" category search option, so you can look for cards that don't have a category yet (the big useless pool) and easily give them one. Along with this, we've now devoted an entire row of Manage Cards to category assignments, a popup list and two buttons to let you add/remove cards from a given category, which should let you move cards around very similarly to how you could in 1.0 - pick the destination category and then run through the list tapping on a button to add cards to that category.

That sounds complicated. I hope there's a way to allow people to easily have just one category for all cards. Under Pleco 1.0, if somebody wanted to ignore the flags, they could and no extra clicks were needed. I hope similarly one could ignore the category system under Pleco 2.0 if one wished, without the extra work of assigning a category to cards that don't have a category (Why is "non-categorized" useless?).

 

[mikelove]

Tagging wasn't the main reason we created categories, actually, the main reason was words cropping up in multiple textbooks - if you want to use the repetition-spacing / frequency-adjusting / etc features then it's silly to have two cards for the same word, you end up studying it twice as often as you actually need to.

Profiles actually aren't meant for multiple users but for multiple test modes - saves you from having to tediously reconfigure things if there are a couple of different ways you like to review flashcards.

Uncategorized replaces the default category system, basically. It's certainly not useless, I used that term in response to Dan_78cj5's unhappiness about all of the flashcards being lumped into one big central place - cards don't need to be in a category to be usable, by default if you start a session it'll include all cards (categorized or non) and you can also select those uncategorized cards specifically just like any other category. People were complaining about how easy it is to forget to change the default category and end up with a bunch of cards in the wrong place, so this way there's a nice simple way you can look at all of the cards you've added recently and file them away in the appropriate place - feels a lot cleaner interface-wise.

If there's widespread unhappiness with the idea of having a card belong to multiple categories at once, though, it would be trivially easy for us to add an option that restored the one-category-per-card system - we'd just check for any existing category assignments whenever a card was assigned to a new category and remove them if found. Combined with un-checking the "Don't allow duplicate flashcards" option in Preferences, this would essentially put things back to the way they were in 1.0 category-wise. Does that sound like something a lot of people would find useful?

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Just my two cents worth: I prefer having categories. I think it is a great idea for people who like to organize.

 

[ldolse]

Going to chime in for categories being awesome too - always have duplicate cards popping up in V1 for exactly the reasons you mention. I really like the idea of grabbing a set of flashcards from a source and not worrying about dupes getting created, but the new/updated lesson categories automatically getting that card. This always happened with 1.0 even with the dupe prevention features....

 

[ipsi]

Duplicate cards annoy me greatly as well, and I'm quite looking forward to being able to 'tag' stuff so that I can e.g. focus on being able to read all characters, but only write characters from texts 1 and 2, for example (ignoring supplementary words). Which would also lead nicely to having two profiles - one for reading, one for writing.

 

[radioman]

Well, I will just add, that I can see a need for the same card in multiple lists (categories...). For example, I am still screwing around with HSK lists, that contain hundreds of words, but the HSK lists serve to define an important "category" of information that can be used for certification (If I understand that correctly). However, a word might might also have appeared in lesson 14 book 2... so I would like to keep that housekeeping as well.

With that, I agree that at least for me, tracking a card (e.g., word/character) and having its own unique score makes a lot of sense. If I know the word, I know the word, and it goes back into the frequency repetition bins. Thats fine.

 

[gato]

Profiles actually aren't meant for multiple users but for multiple test modes - saves you from having to tediously reconfigure things if there are a couple of different ways you like to review flashcards.

Maybe just label it "mode" instead of "profile" then? People are used to "profile" referring to people. I think that's the way it's used in a number of browsers.

 

[johnh113]

Dear Mike,

I'm probably the odd man out on this one. Having duplicate cards, even with repetition spacing, doesn't bother me in the least. I have lots of duplicate cards.

I don't post this to have you change anything in the 2.0 design, just wanted to give you another data point.

John

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for all of the comments. I'm a big fan of category-type organization too, and getting into that model makes all sorts of other cool things possible - setting up "filter" type categories based on specific criteria, for example, so that checking a particular one will automatically get you all of the cards with a certain set of parameters (say, cards added within the last two weeks that you've answered correctly less than three times). Even now there are some nice little additions like a category toggle button in flashcard sessions that shows a + or - icon depending on whether a card is already in the category - very handy if you want some way of flagging words you want to ask your teacher for a better explanation of, for example. The list model happened to work well with the 1.0 database format, but with SQLite we can pretty much organize things however we want.

gato - I'm not wild about Mode for user-created settings because it generally sounds more like something built-in and unchanging - repetition-spaced versus frequency-adjusted, etc. Profile certainly is most commonly seen in a multi-user setting, and I'm a bit worried people might think it affects the cards themselves too (it doesn't, they're shared between all profiles), but it's as clear a term as I can think of to describe different sets of user-configured settings - I guess "configuration" would be another option but that feels kind of intimidating.

johnh113 - don't worry, we're not changing anything in the 2.0 design, this was strictly being thought about as something to put on the feature list for 2.1. Though once we get through with it it'll probably have its own configuration screen, individual per-category exclusivity settings, "classes" of categories which a card can only belong to one member of at a time, and various other things which only 1% of our customers will actually use but which that 1% will absolutely love.

 

[gato]

I'm not wild about Mode for user-created settings because it generally sounds more like something built-in and unchanging - repetition-spaced versus frequency-adjusted, etc. Profile certainly is most commonly seen in a multi-user setting, and I'm a bit worried people might think it affects the cards themselves too (it doesn't, they're shared between all profiles) - I guess "configuration" would be another option but that feels kind of intimidating.

How about "Test Profile" or "Review Profile"? I actually think "Test Mode"/"Review Mode" would be clear, but that could just be a personal preference.

 

[ldolse]

'Mode' does have a fixed and un-editable connotation, though a mode could have editable settings. Profile does have a multi-user vibe in general, but it's not bad. The concern about it seeming to include cards is valid; the current layout always gives me an impression that 'everything' is contained in a profile, always have to remind myself that's not the case.

Sticking "Test", or better yet, "Session" in front of another word might help make it clearer. "Session Profile" or "Session Config", might work. Course the lack of space for long names becomes a problem then....

I'm not suggesting changing anything for 2.0, but perhaps profile could be handled a bit differently. I'm guessing many if not most users will just have one profile and leave it at that, for two reasons:

• Intimidated by complexity
• Don't understand the use case

I myself am confused about the potential use cases. In an earlier thread Mike said the idea was you could have different saved test modes - one for each profile type. I see now that you can actually create score files for each profile, and this actually satisfies a wish I had, which was to track scores separately for writing vs. reading, etc. That all makes sense, but I'm not sure if there are other worthwhile applications for profiles. If there aren't one option would be to just create a set of six hardcoded profiles, one for each of the six test types, and probably a default profile which only displays common settings and sets/overrides those settings across all the others.

Once they're hardcoded to those test types you actually can call them modes as well. This would also allow eliminating the "test type" choice you see after clicking 'New Flashcard Session', since the specific test type is tied to the profile/mode. That would also solve a separate issue that the current interface has, a test type can't be tied to a profile. Right now if someone went through the effort of creating separate profiles+scorefiles for each test type, they would need to be religious about choosing the right profile before starting a test. For example, my reading is far better than my writing or stroke order, so if I actually started a reading test with my writing profile I'd screw up my scores and repetition spacing. The current interface makes it pretty easy to use an unintended profile for a session.

Part of what gives 'Profile' this all powerful, all containing connotation is actually it's placement - it's sitting above all else, on the very first screen - one could easily assume that everything below that is a subset of what's contained in the displayed profile. What's actually contained in the profile? Is it everything configured under 'New Flashcard Session' and 'Advanced Settings'?

Calling it a mode does fix the conception that it includes everything, but in order for it to really be a mode each profile would actually need to really be tied to a specific test type. Since all profiles allow all modes it doesn't fit the current functionality.