One piece of feedback comparing 4.0 vs the legacy version: I really miss the longer, full-screen-wide search bar at top of the screen. There are times I want to input a long string of words, or sometimes I use the iOS voice input to capture an entire sentence, but the short search bar makes it harder to see and navigate all of the words that were input. Is there any way we could have the same narrow long UI element just containing the search bar at the top instead of an abbreviated one constrained to the left pane? thx.
Search bar size
- Thread starter alanshi
- Start date
That would be dicey, I'm afraid - we'd have to rewrite a whole bunch of code in order to have a single navigation bar across the search and definition screens. Two easier changes that we could consider:
- Add an option to make the search panel take up a larger portion of the screen width (say, half).
- Add an option to have the search screen be full-width with the definition only showing up when you tap on a result, as on iPad.
Related to this, comparing my overall experience with the legacy UI, I think one of the things I missed the most about the UI stylings from before was the information density was higher. The search bar being wider let me easily see and enter a large number of words at once, which I use a fair bit, but I also increasingly notice that the new left search pane also reduces the information density because there are a lot of new UI elements (the Chinese | English tab takes up a number of pixels) and the result is that when I am using landscape orientation on my iPad, because the keyboard is often up (since I just entered a word), I can only see 1 matching entry and have to click again to dismiss and scroll. The older UI was much more compact, and comparing it head to head, I can see 3 entries in the search results with the keyboard up before I have to click to scroll, which I really liked.
The bounding boxes in the definition pane on the right give more contrast, but I also find those eat up pixels also reducing the information density. This is less of a problem, but also something I notice.
Sounds like this would be a fairly big change to get a more classic-styled UI, but FWIW, I really did like being able to see so much more information in the old UI. Thoughts?
The bounding boxes in the definition pane on the right give more contrast, but I also find those eat up pixels also reducing the information density. This is less of a problem, but also something I notice.
Sounds like this would be a fairly big change to get a more classic-styled UI, but FWIW, I really did like being able to see so much more information in the old UI. Thoughts?