Plecodict 2

[PietStevens]

Dear Mike,

I would be interested in the following features:
a. search: include awk/grep-like wildcards in order to find words that sound similar.

b. fonts: I am looking for a way to have sentence patterns in my flashcards, and fonts or colors would be a good way to distinguish the pattern from example words.

I really like that you propose to use SQLite so that I can get at my flashcards and statistics.

Best regards,

Piet.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the suggestions. B) should almost certainly be possible in Pleco 2.0; we've already gone to considerable trouble restructuring dictionary databases so that they're now stored in terms of data type (example sentence, grammatical note, etc) instead of formatting (bold here, space here, circled number here, etc), and with that system in place it should be very easy to set up an example sentence field that would be differently colored/sized from a sentence pattern field and so forth.

A) is a little more doubtful, since the last thing we need is to add something else to the flashcard system that an average / non-technical user won't understand. However, with the more powerful search options and the new "add all results to flashcards" command we're working on, you should be able to get pretty much the same effect by doing a search for the cards you want and then adding them to the list. A dynamic flashcard list might be an interesting option to explore for a future version, though - I know "saved searches" are very popular in e-mail clients, photo organizers, etc now and it certainly might be something for us to implement too.

 

[gato]

Piet, have you tried the wildcard searches that are already available, i.e. '$x' to find all phrases ending with 'x'?

mike, I have some suggestion, too.

Could you make the characters clickable (a la "instant access") while in flashcard mode? Sometimes I want to look up a character that's either in the phrase being test or in the definition, but would have to interrupt the flashcard session to do so.

It would also be nice to be able to see the overall statistics for each set of flashcards: avg. number of times tested, % correct, last used, total time spent reviewing, etc.

 

[PietStevens]

Sound searches

Dear Mike, thanks for the fast reply. What I am really after is a way to set up a test on similar words, i.e., words that only differ in the tone, or that sound similar (difference in -uan vs -uang, or sh- vs ch-). I frequently have the problem that I have learnt a word, and then I come across a very similar one, and wonder what exactly was the other one again?

Best regards, Piet.

 

[mikelove]

gato - we've gotten quite a few requests for instant access in flashcards and it will almost certainly happen, in fact this sort of pop-up should be available just about anywhere in PlecoDict where Chinese characters are displayed. By set of flashcards are you referring to individual flashcard lists? We're actually replacing lists with "categories" in 2.0 (and a flashcard can have more than one category), so it won't really be possible to keep track of statistics like this for a particular category, but we might be able to calculate them on-the-fly on the basis of individual flashcards' statistics - that might not work with time spent reviewing but it should be fairly straightforward for the other things you mention.

PietStevens - I think I understand. I suppose this really wouldn't even have to be a flashcard feature, just some sort of a link or menu option to "show similar words" which could find other words that resembled the current entry in some way (same length and first or second character, similar Pinyin, similar-looking characters, etc) - these could then be directed to a flashcard session. It's an interesting idea but it might still be beyond what we can do in 2.0.

 

[PietStevens]

Right

Mike - your understanding is correct, and, yes, it does not have to be in the flashcards only - that is even better. However, it would be nice to be able to access this feature also during a flashcard session. If that is too advanced, then a resume of a flashcard session is nice, so that you can interrupt the session, find the similar words even with the current search facilities, and then resume the flashcard session.

 

[mikelove]

Yes, the resume feature will almost certainly be part of 2.0 - it's one of the top 5 most requested flashcard features and something we probably should have done in the initial release.

 

[gato]

For overall statistics, you might think of a giving a percentage correct only counting the last time each card was reviewed (ignoring cards that are brand new and have never been reviewed). This number would give a better idea of how well the user knows the overall list/category. A cumulative "percentage correct" that includes the every test since the card was created is not so useful because that could have been ages ago.

You might also a give a separate statistic showing how many cards have never been reviewed in a category.

 

[caesartg]

Hi Mike

How about the option when clicking on a character or word for instant lookup in the doc reader to be able to see the jian and fan tizi side by side?

Cheers man

Ben

 

[mikelove]

gato - yes, that would make sense for the % correct; easier to calculate and probably a better reflection of the current review status than a historical record that might be a year or more out-of-date. Unreviewed cards would probably be covered by the same stat screen that also gave you the distribution of ranks in a particular list/category.

caesartg - also makes sense, the main reason we don't do this in the current Instant Access is that most Chinese text systems on Palm can't handle simultaneous display of simplified and traditional characters (and we have to rely on them to display text since we're so limited in how much of our own code we can run).

 

[caesartg]

Hello Mike

When you talk of hiding the complexity of the flashcard system, but allowing people to go into it to fine tune if they want, does this mean that you will be having some kind of flashcard preset buttons that we can customise (E.g. For learning brand new cards, I use a different system to revising old ones, or just increasing my kouyu - if there was a button or drop-down that would allow me to select different settings, rather than go in and change everything every time, that would be great)? If so, will you be providing a standard set of algorithm settings and allow for people to exchange algorithm settings and back them up? In fact, while we're talking about algoritm settings in a config file, why not bung everything else in as well? - the preferences, file locations, etc. I've reinstalled Plecodict many times, and each time, I had to set it the way I like from scratch.

Of course, I know you've already got a lot on your plate and can't reasonably be expected to implement everything, so whatever you decide to include or exclude, I'm sure it'll be excellent. I hope you get a decent return for all your hard work somewhere down the line.

And you guys following the world cup? The US are still in there, but only just. They need to beat Ghana, preferably thrash them, to get a chance at the last 16.

Ben

 

[lmcjipo]

Footprint size for 2.0?

Hi Mike,

Do you have any ideas at this point whether the footprint size for version 2 will be less than the footprint size for version 1.0.3?

Being able to move the PlecoDict Flashcards (close to 1 MB for me) and the PlecoDict HWR Database (about 1.2MB) off of my Treo 650's RAM and onto my 2 GB SD memory card would free up a lot of room on my device (provided that the other components in version 2 that need to reside on RAM don't take up a lot of room.


Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

caesartg - yes, presets are a big part of this, and in addition to storing their own settings we also plan to allow them to independently track flashcard progress so that you can (for example) separately track your progress in listening and writing skills.

We haven't actually decided whether to go ahead with this in 2.0 yet, but adding some sort of way to package up flashcard and other settings is definitely on our radar, not so much for backup purposes as for schools (which might want to quickly provision several dozen new Palms with our software with the same preset settings) and for synchronization of settings with the desktop version.

Haven't been following the World Cup too closely (personally I'm more of a baseball fan) but I was pleased to see that we didn't get completely humiliated in the game against Italy. Though even if we make it to the Round of 16 our most likely opponent is Brazil, and barring a "Miracle on Ice"-esque shocker they'll probably give us a solid thrashing.

lmcjipo - the footprint will probably be pretty similar, it should be possible to put flashcards and user dictionary entries on an SD card (which would free up some space) but the new features and the ARM-accelerated database code will add several hundred K to the size of the application file. And the handwriting recognizer database will still have to be in internal memory.