Much better 2.0 screenshots posted

[mikelove]

So the first round of screenshots was a little lame and didn't really show off the new features in 2.0 very well, but now that development is almost complete we've finally got some much better ones to show you:

http://www.pleco.com/pdpreview.html

Some things to note:

* The new icon at the top left corner toggles the dictionary between what we're calling View and Search mode. Basically, the UI can be configured independently in each of these modes and you can then toggle between them easily with this button or (optionally) through a number of other methods; for example, tapping on a list entry to go into View mode or entering / deleting a character in the Input Field to go to Search Mode.

* The 'tou'-character button toggles between headword and full-text search modes; each of these can be configured to fall back on the other if it doesn't find any results, of course.

* We're making an effort to more tightly integrate handwriting / radical and the new keyboard input in this release, so they've now been combined into a single palette (and separate screen) to faciliate this. Could be particularly useful for custom entry editing, since you won't have to keep jumping back into the handwriting input screen for each character you want to enter or to switch between entering characters and entering English.

* Pinyin/Zhuyin->Chars inclusion in the keyboard screen is tentative and it may be missing in the beta version (though we do think it's a good idea for the aforementioned custom dictionary entry editing).

* On saved sessions, they work and work well, but you can only have one saved session at a time, and you can't access any of the other flashcard screens until you delete or finish it; you can still add new flashcards from the main dictionary interface, though.

* We have very little experience with ZhuYin (personally I never even learned the alphabet for it) so we're going to be extremely eager for feedback on ZhuYin support. Incidentally, the same system that lets us switch seamlessly between Pinyin and ZhuYin would also make it very easy to add support for other romanizations, so while we're only planning to ship 2.0 with those two, if there's a substantial lobby for Wade-Giles or GR or another romanization (NOT Tongyong Pinyin, don't even bother asking) we could certainly consider supporting one of those too.

Anyway, hope these whet people's appetites a bit - I have to say the new flashcard modes are both fun and invigorating, spending 20 minutes just pounding away on tones feels like visiting some sort of beautiful mental gymnasium.

 

[gato]

Looking good, Mike.

For the new reader, is there a mode where the dictionary only appears when you request it? I notice that in screen shot, only 6 lines of text is displayed. On a smaller screen of a smartphone like the Treo, it might be even less than 6 lines. In the interest of conserving space, it'd be nice to be able to turn the dictionary display off until needed. The large characters (“彻国家") at the bottom also seems a little redundant and take up a lot of space. It might be able to achieve the same effect by asking the reader to highlight the text with the stylus on the main screen (a la Wenlin).

 

[mikelove]

There's no way to hide the dictionary altogether at the moment, though it's an interesting idea... that toolbar would get a little tight with another button (there are already four, the dictionary switch button is missing but it should be to the left of the other three) but I suppose people don't really need the name of the document to be showing all the time.

The big characters can easily be turned off, though, there's already an option for that. And the dictionary area is resizable, so if you turn off the big characters and shrink it to just 1-2 lines of text showing you'd have about 2/3 of the screen free for reading.

Not depicted in that reader screenshot are the new split-screen and hierarchical document features, both of which will almost certainly be included but which aren't quite ready yet - the main idea behind those is to let you put a bilingual version of a verse-based document like the Analects or the Bible on your Palm and then read sections of it in Chinese and English side-by-side. The PDA end of that is mostly done, we just haven't gotten around to writing a program to convert documents to the necessary format yet.

 

[gato]

Just wanted to note that since "instant access" probably will no longer be available in 2.0, the built-in reader should be laid out with the idea that it'll be users' primary Chinese document reader, even for reading long documents like books. I currently use TealDoc with "instant access" to read books. I'd like the built-in reader to be just as useable; otherwise, I might be tempted to stay with 1.0. In that vein, I would aim to provide as much reading space as possible to minimize scrolling and provide an option for the dictionary to be displayed only on demand. And when the dictionary is requested, you could display the definition as a pop-up (like with "instant access"), so that one doesn't have scroll through the definition too much, as would be the case if it's only limited to two/three lines at the bottom of the screen.

 

[Aunty]

Not depicted in that reader screenshot are the new split-screen and hierarchical document features, both of which will almost certainly be included but which aren't quite ready yet - the main idea behind those is to let you put a bilingual version of a verse-based document like the Analects or the Bible on your Palm and then read sections of it in Chinese and English side-by-side.

At my early stage I'd more likely be using a split screen for my lessons with characters and pinyin side by side, if that's possible. It takes so many hours to learn each character and perfect pronunciation, that the English becomes redundant quite early. The current best alternative is scrolling up and down in a memo.

 

[ldolse]

Radical Lookup screen

The screenshots look awesome - it could use some captions, as I didn't always understand what was being conveyed.

I didn't see a screenshot of the radical lookup, but I saw some things in the handwriting recognizer that I'm hoping are in the Radical lookup as well. Namely the ability to choose simplified/traditional/rare by checkbox. I struggle with the current radical lookup because it displays all these at the same time. The only way to reduce the characters displayed in 1.0 is to uninstall Unihan, but I find it too useful to get rid of. I don't really know what 'rare' means in the handwriting recognizer, but I think for radical lookup it would mean don't use Unihan to populate the table at a minimum.

 

[Shadowdh]

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod

*breath*

ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod...

I cant wait... only 4 weeks to go till I head off to China.... any hope for me yet??

 

[mikelove]

gato - yes, we're aware that the lack of Instant Access does put some extra pressure on the reader to be good. But since you can have 1.0 and 2.0 installed at the same time, a workaround we think a lot of people will use (at least until the reader's been through a couple of revisions) is to keep 1.0 too and use it only for Instant Access, occasionally exporting / deleting / importing-into-2.0 any new flashcard words you've added.

We've already got a pop-up definition window written, though, so we're considering including that in the reader as an alternative to an embedded dictionary definition - you'd highlight a word and tap on a button just as with Instant Access now.

Aunty - this is certainly possible; the reader just uses whatever text it's given in the source file, so if someone created a file that had each section in characters and Pinyin then you could browse a document like that.

ldolse - yes, this is in the (otherwise-unchanged) radical screen too, and since Unihan has now been moved into its own separate interface (third row of screenshots at the bottom of the page, right next to the document reader) it no longer mucks up the radical lookups.

Shadowdh - you're right on the border, kind of, in all likelihood the first beta will either be ready right before you leave or will annoyingly come out a week or two later.

 

[mikelove]

Just added two more screenshots to the bottom of the page, one showing off the new headword tone coloring option (before anyone asks, yes the colors will be customizable if you don't like the default settings), and the other showing off the new SD-card-based registration option, which we're pretty sure we're going to be able to make available to existing users upgrading (even for free) to 2.0 as well as new purchasers.

 

[ipsi]

Damn, that looks incredibly cool. I'm also very sad that it'll be another 4-6 six weeks before the first beta. I was hoping for something cool for my birthday (On the 18th of August). EDIT: I'm also likely to be back in New Zealand at that point

A couple of questions: I recently picked up the dictionaries I was missing from Pleco (ABC, C&T, NWP). Does this count as having purchased the Complete version of Plecodict for the purposes of getting a free upgrade?

What do the default colours mean in the screen shot you posted?

Could you make some improvements for Palms with a 5-way navigator? I seem to have issues with, for example, the flashcards when trying to use my Treo 680. I actually have to tap the reveal/correct/false buttons, rather than just pushing the left/right button and then the centre button to confirm.

What's going to come out with the Beta Version? I assume it won't have the stuff that we'd need to pay for? e.g. no new dictionaries, no stroke order stuff, no pronunciation?

 

[gato]

Could you make some improvements for Palms with a 5-way navigator? I seem to have issues with, for example, the flashcards when trying to use my Treo 680. I actually have to tap the reveal/correct/false buttons, rather than just pushing the left/right button and then the centre button to confirm.

Go to Menu->Dict->Preferences->Flashcards. Here you can choose your own hardware button for each of these flashcard functions.

From Preferences->Characters, you can also choose a hardware button for Instant Access.

All of this is also described in the PlecoDict manual.

 

[ipsi]

Ok, I somehow missed that first one. The only problem I have with the instant-access button is that I want to keep my other hardware buttons free for something useful, so I've set one of the buttons on the left hand side of my 680 (*not* the volume buttons, the other one), and I find that if I push and hold it to get to the program specified as the push-and-hold app, Pleco still appears, which is kinda annoying.

I'll check the buttons thing, thanks

 

[mikelove]

We actually haven't decided how we're going to handle free upgrades for people who bought our software before the cutoff but upgraded after yet. People who paid to switch platforms most likely will get a free upgrade, but with dictionaries, giving them to anybody who's upgraded a dictionary seems possibly a bit too generous (given that most of them only cost $30), so the question is if we should give free upgrades to people who bought the ABC or ABC+NWP, only the ABC+NWP, or not give them to dictionary upgraders at all. If you bought the Basic version after the cutoff, though, I'm pretty sure we'll offer free upgrades in those cases.

The idea behind the coloring system is that each tone has a different color associated with it - first tone red, second tone green, third tone blue, fourth tone gray in this case. 5-way navigator support should improve a little, actually it'll probably be the only (non-keyboard) hardware butotn that does anything since we still can't seem to get the application buttons working correctly.

We're actually trying to put as many of the new paid features as possible into the beta version; audio and stroke order will almost certainly be in there (audio is particularly key since we want to make sure it works on the full range of PDA audio reproduction hardware), and the new dictionaries most likely will be too, though they may be a little glitchy since we won't have finished copy-editing yet. (same goes for the Oxford, actually, the only dictionary that's likely to be be completely clean/solid in the beta is the ABC)

 

[ipsi]

Hmm... Sounds good for me then (Bought basic after the cut-off, now own all your dictionaries).

Out of curiosity, can you say why you can't offer cheap upgrades to the people who purchased *before* the date? I'm assuming this is the majority of your customer base, and probably the most loyal part. Seems a bit strange to offer new customers a cheap discount and shaft your older ones with a higher price. Is this due to licensing stuff again?

Tone Colouring - Cool.

Beta Version - So how's that going to work? Are you basically going to give away all the (admittedly buggy) features in the new version? Is it going to be open-to-everyone, invite-only, time-limited, or are you just trusting to the general bugginess to make people pay for the polished, complete version?

5-Way: I see how the buttons work, but they don't quite work in the way I'd like. I can, for example, push the button that marks something as true, and it will do so *even if* the card hasn't been revealed yet, which is quite annoying. To say the least. What I would like to see is the very simple ability to have the buttons highlighted (like most other programs) and then use the navigator to move amongst them, with the center button to select.

I've also noticed that I can't use the navigator properly in the menus, as pushing the down button won't go through every box. I'm not sure if this is the fault of your software, or of Palm. It's also worth nothing, that when trying to select the action for my hardware button to perform, if I had a box selected in the right-hand column, and then pressed down, it would go to the one in the left-hand column, one row down, *not* the one in the right hand column. Kinda annoying.

 

[mikelove]

Well remember, pretty much everybody is getting most of the new features in 2.0 for free; the only ones we're limiting are the ones we have to pay new royalties on. And $30 is not really that expensive an upgrade by our standards at least.

The reason for limiting the completely-free upgrades to new customers is that we can't really afford (in that it would literally cost us about half a year's profits) to give those new features to our entire customer base. When we announced the July 1st cutoff, it was with the expectation that we'd be releasing a first beta of 2.0 by early '07, and basically we did it to make sure sales wouldn't dry up completely during the wait; in hindsight, as it's now been more than a year since then we probably would have been better off not extending free upgrades to anyone, but we obviously can't go back and change that policy now that we've already promised those upgrades to people.

We are exploring a way we might be able to offer everyone the audio portion of the 2.0 upgrade to everyone for free, though, which would leave only the stroke order diagrams as a paid upgrade. But really, given the number of new features people have already gotten for free and the number of new features they're getting for free in 2.0, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask them to pay for a couple of features that we ourselves have to pay royalties on.

With the beta, we're actually planning to charge for those new features (except for the ones that people get for free, of course); it worked fine before with the release of PlecoDict 1.0, you pay for them when the software's in beta and get the finished versions too. Aside from compatibility-testing with the 2.0 audio files there really aren't that many aspects of the paid new features that are going to require extensive testing, the flashcard system and dictionary search interface are going to be far and away the two biggest sources of bug reports and those will be accessible to everyone. So basically anyone will be able to download the beta but they'll only have access to the features they'd get in the finished version.

We actually added the ability to mark cards as correct when they hadn't been revealed yet because several customers specifically requested it; some people want to quickly skip past cards they're certain they know (or don't know) without having to go through the extra step of revealing them first. Always funny how one user's bug is another user's feature...

The navigator doesn't work correctly with a lot of our buttons because we use our own non-standard button code instead of Palm's; we do this both to avoid a couple of annoying graphical glitches and to enable some extra features like tap-hold menus and (new in 2.0) automatically-generated dictionary icons. The button assignment glitch you describe sounds like a bug, I'm surprised nobody's reported it before...

 

[lmcjipo]

Mike,

Took a look at the new screen shots for Pleco v2 and I'm already salivating :wink: Can't wait for the beta and the final release!

Question about the "locking registration onto SD card": What happens if the SD card becomes lost or damaged?

 

[mikelove]

Good question, hadn't thought about that one. We'd probably handle this like we handle Pocket PC keyfiles now (and Palm keyfiles too as of 2.0), letting you generate a new keyfile no more than once in a particular time period, but we'd make the time period a lot longer - maybe 1 year or so. Or we might allow a permanent maximum of say 1 or 2 replacement SD card keyfiles, after which you'd have to switch back to device-specific licensing.

SD cards tend to last a lot longer than PDAs, so we obviously have to be a little more careful with these than we are with regular keyfiles, and since for most other intellectual property that's tied to a specific medium (video games, DVDs, and even a lot of software) if you lose that media you have to buy a brand new copy, we don't think it's too unfair to expect people to hang on to their SD cards.

 

[ipsi]

Hmm... I'm personally going to stick with the sync-name licensing. That's not going to change any time soon (like, ever), and I'm very unlikely to ever own more than one PDA.

Can you explain the benefits of SD Card Licensing? I'm not seeing terribly many, to be honest...

 

[mikelove]

It actually won't be sync-name as of 2.0, we're switching to device serial numbers for Palm as well as Pocket PC with that new release. Basically we've discovered that the average customer actually needs *more* keyfile replacements with username-based sync than device-based, thanks in large part to Palm technical support's habit of telling everyone with the slightest problem to hard reset their Palm and set it up with a new username - we've had customers keep the same Palm for 3 or 4 years but go through half a dozen keyfiles during that time due to the constant username changes. On top of which, if your Palm resets itself when you're traveling and you don't have access to a computer there's not really any good way to reset the username until you get back, even if you've got all of the Pleco data files on a memory card.

Of course there's also the casual piracy problem; spoofing a hardware serial number on Palm is not impossible but takes a significant amount of work, while any morally-deficient college student can easily figure out how to set up their Palm and half a dozen of their friends' Palms with the same username. And any shady PDA dealer can likewise configure all of their illicitly-bundled-with-Pleco systems using the same name.

Really the main benefit of SD card licensing is for people who have more than one PDA; we have quite a few users who own both a TX and a Treo (or a big-screen VGA Pocket PC and a small-screen Pocket PC smartphone), so they can take advantage of the larger screen at home but only have to carry around one device with them when they're traveling, and since they're not using the software on both devices at the same time it makes sense not to make them pay for it twice. Families also could benefit from it, everyone might have his/her own PDA but they might never need to use more than one or two copies of our software at a time. It's also useful for people who like to upgrade their Pocket PC ROMs frequently (we have a couple of customers who do so 2-3 times per month); depending on the device manufacturer, on some Pocket PCs the Device ID changes every time you upgrade the ROM, but the SD card ID would remain the same. (this is not a problem on Palm since they keep much tighter control over serial number generation)

 

[ssaito]

problem with internet explorer

screen shots look great, thanks for sharing.

could someone explain what "instant access" is referring to in the previous posts?

also, mike, have you guys found a way to correct the bug (windows mobile bug) where if plecodict is open, internet explorer has problems displaying characters (they show up as squares).

thanks,
steve