PlecoDict Modification Suggestions

[johnowenschinapalm]

PlecoDict Team I love the product. I haven't had a problem since working out the serial number entry difficulty.

The Wildcard search feature is great, but I have one suggestion that would make it even greater:

Instead of using the @ symbol in the way that most Windows programs use the "?" for a single character wildcard. It would save a lot of time if we could have 2 wildcards. ie. * and ? or something else with simular functionality. * would search for any number of unknown characters and ? would search for only one unknown character.

Example:
?设计 would find 再设计 but not 编辑设计
Where as: *设计 would find 编辑设计 and 再设计 plus many others.

Presently we need to do multiple searches. If we want to find all occurrences of words ending in one character, we would need to do the following:

Search 1: @设计
Search 2: @@设计
Search 3: @@@设计
Search 4: @@@@设计

As you can see this takes a lot of time, where as in one search *设计 would find them all even if there were 100 characters in front.

Anyway for what it is worth, that is my suggestion. Like I said earlier, I love the program and appreciate all the blood, sweat, and tears you put into it.
Thanks

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the suggestion. We're still going back and forth about whether or not to implement something like this - it's certainly doable, but it would be rather slow (equivalent to running searches for every position one after another). Still, programming-wise it's not too tricky so we probably will get to it eventually.

The @ was chosen mostly because keyboard input wasn't working at all until the day before PlecoDict preview was released and we wanted a character with a very easy-to-draw Graffiti symbol - drawing an @ in Graffiti is simply a matter of tapping on the screen and drawing on a circle, and in our experience at least tends to be easier to draw correctly than a ?. (the strokes for * are difficult to even guess) In the final version there'll probably be a preference setting for this.