problem w/ moving categories

[sagilogo]

Hi I just purchased the full Pleco for iPod
Everything works great and above all expectations

but...

After moving flashcard categories, when I shut down Pleco
and restart I see the categories have jumped back to where they were before I moved them.

I am using iPod touch 4th gen.

Thanks

Sagi

 

[mikelove]

Sorry about that; this bug has already been fixed in the 2.2 update (just waiting for Apple to approve it), but as a workaround in the meantime, once you've finished moving categories, simply create a new category and then immediately delete it; that will cause all of your other category name / order changes to be written out to the database correctly.

 

[sagilogo]

OK that workaround worked, thanks

Id like to give some feedback on the Reader. I find it very important to highlight the new words in a text but this is not possible with simple text data (cant use bold, background color etc.) As a workaround I insert a special symbol character (the diamond symbol) before each new word (I do this using my PC not inside Pleco)

So my question is - can there be an option to use Bold text in the reader, or highlighted text? or maybe as a tradeoff - just a way to insert special symbols using the text editor?

Thanks
Sagi

 

[mikelove]

So my question is - can there be an option to use Bold text in the reader, or highlighted text? or maybe as a tradeoff - just a way to insert special symbols using the text editor?

We're planning to add text-range-specific bookmarks in a future release - won't be hard now that we've got iPhone-style tap-hold text selection implemented for 2.2 - and there should be an option to boldface (or at least box / color-highlight - bold might complicate word-wrapping) those; hopefully in 2.3 if not before.

In the meantime, though, you can actually insert special symbols using the editing function right now - just switch it into "Key" mode with the toolbar at the top of the screen and you can insert any character the iPhone's keyboard supports.

 

[sagilogo]

Studying new texts using the Pleco Reader has made a giant leap in my technique for mastering new vocabulary. I spend half of the time using it and the other half using the flashcards system. I look forward to the bold/highlighting text feature. Thanks for making this very helpful software!

Sagi

 

[sagilogo]

Re: problem w/ moving category

Actually I think it would be much better to let Pleco do the highlighting - It would be great if an option existed that makes words that have flashcards auto-highlighted in Reader. I think it is redundant to save the same set of words twice in the program's database - as flashcards and as bookmarks.

Thanks again
Sagi

 

[johnh113]

Re: problem w/ moving category

Actually I think it would be much better to let Pleco do the highlighting - It would be great if an option existed that makes words that have flashcards auto-highlighted in Reader. I think it is redundant to save the same set of words twice in the program's database - as flashcards and as bookmarks.

Thanks again
Sagi

Dear Mike,

I agree with this concept, not just in the reader but also in the dictionary. Often I see a word and don't remember if it is in my flashcards yet, so I try to add it, and then I cancel because it's already a flashcard. It's just a couple of keystrokes and a few seconds, but if there were a visual cue of some sort that indicated that the word was already a flashcard, that would be nice. Bold or high-lighted might be too much, but I'm not sure how else to signal it. And there is the added complication that 80% of Chinese words are two characters, so what if both characters are flashcards, but not the word, or vice-versa? It would get complicated.

John

 

[sagilogo]

For me the main issue is being able to review a text quickly - giving attention to sentences with new words and skipping the rest.

I would like to add to my previous suggestion - being able to link a document with a flashcard category - so only flashcards from that category are highlighted. When I start studying a new text I link it with a new set of cards and only those are highlighted.

Thanks
Sagi

 

[mikelove]

Actually I think it would be much better to let Pleco do the highlighting - It would be great if an option existed that makes words that have flashcards auto-highlighted in Reader. I think it is redundant to save the same set of words twice in the program's database - as flashcards and as bookmarks.

That would be dicey, for two reasons:

1) Performance. Getting this to run quickly enough that people could open / scroll through documents without being frustrated by lag would be very difficult; we'd have to generate some sort of optimized index of all of the flashcard words people wanted to have highlighted, and this index would have to be updated (introducing at least a few seconds' delay) every time you returned to a document after updating your flashcard database.

2) Text segmentation; word boundaries in Chinese aren't always clear, and right now we only use a very simple algorithm to tell whether or not the character you tapped on is the first or second character in a word. We could certainly upgrade that algorithm, but it would still be far from perfect even if it was at the level of the best text segmentation algorithms available - there'd be a lot of cases of the second character of one word and the first character of the next word being mistakenly identified as a different word / flagged as a flashcard.

 

[sagilogo]

I see your point(s) - I don't mind having to do it manually, as long as the bookmark positions are kept in sync when the doc changes etc.

In any case my last remark may be a solution to the first issue you mentioned - limiting the cards for a doc by using a link to a category. This way the user is responsible to not link too many cards for a single document, reducing the delay when the document is opened and parsed on the fly.

Sagi

 

[mikelove]

In any case my last remark may be a solution to the first issue you mentioned - limiting the cards for a doc by using a link to a category. This way the user is responsible to not link too many cards for a single document, reducing the delay when the document is opened and parsed on the fly.

That might help a bit, but the on-the-fly parsing isn't that difficult - once we've loaded the right list of words into an in-memory hash table we should be able to check them as you scroll through text with virtually no delay; the problem is in loading that list into memory, and updating it with the latest flashcard changes each time you start using it again.

 

[sagilogo]

Then why not re-populate a fresh in-memory hash table each time you open the document?

In my usage scenario I have ~350 highlighted words per document (which means iterating a category tree w/ 350 flashcards each time the linked document is opened)

Linking a category to the document also has the advantage that new cards created from the document can be automaticly added to the linked category, and they can be also added to the hash table so they are highlighted without the need to re open the document

 

[mikelove]

Then why not re-populate a fresh in-memory hash table each time you open the document?

It would delay opening documents by a few seconds - a lot of people feel like that takes too long already.

Also, I don't think people would be satisfied unless it updated while the document remained open - i.e., if you could switch into another tab, add / delete a flashcard, and instantly have that reflected in the reader when you switched back to it. And unfortunately it would be very difficult to make that sort of sync work unless we re-generated the list from your flashcard database every time people switched back into the document, which would impose another annoying delay; not a dealbreaker, but certainly something to think about carefully.

Ultimately I think this is what we'll do, but squeezing every bit of performance we can out of it will take quite a lot of work, and we still need to deal with that text segmentation issue I mentioned earlier also, so this probably can't happen for a couple of releases.

 

[sagilogo]

Auto highlighting would be cool, however the manual bookmarking alternative you suggested is also acceptable in my view. I hope to see either one in a future release.

Thanks for making this awesome Chinese learning tool

Sagi