The improvement I'm most looking forward to in version 2.0

[mikelove]

caesartg - I see your point. Honestly a big part of my hesitation on this is that we're trying to make a concerted effort to make the flashcard system less complicated - there are way too many control panels / options / etc for the average user to understand, and tones-above-headwords is yet another confusing checkbox added to that mix.

But I know there are a couple of these rarely-used features (like having the fields displayed vary by a card's rank) that some people find essential, so we're probably already going to have a screen or two of "Expert Settings" in which we can stick options like tones-above-headwords. (or more likely character coloring, since that would be considerably easier to implement)

Ma Guo Tou - this is the sort of thing that we're hoping to enable with the desktop companion software (whenever we release that), but it's actually pretty doable now if you use the flashcard export function. Just add the words you want to share to a newly created flashcard list, Export them with "Include user entry text" enabled, and beam the exported file to someone else - they can then import that file into their copy of PlecoDict and end up with the same entries. In 2.0 we'll probably still only have the one user database, but it should be even easier to exchange subsets of that database with other users.

 

[caesartg]

Hey, I recently discovered that "having the fields displayed vary by a card's rank" and found it to be very useful. Hope you don't remove it in the new version.

 

[mikelove]

We're not planning to get rid of it, but as the status of Ranks in general is less-than-certain (50-50 we'll be doing away with them altogether and switching exclusively to a SuperMemo-esque "black box") there's some question as to what we would key those field changes to. A simple threshold system would probably suffice - display such-and-such fields for cards which you've answered correctly at least 5 times, 10 times, etc.

 

[gato]

50-50 we'll be doing away with them altogether and switching exclusively to a SuperMemo-esque "black box"

Maybe you can again give the user a choice between repetition spacing (the "black box") and displaying cards by rank.

I use ranks because I like having control over which card I see. Repetition spacing based on how long since you last reviewed a certain card leaves too much to chance.

If I have a list of 1000 flashcards, I'd like to be able to thoroughly memorize the first 100 (getting it correct four, five times in a row) before moving on to the next 100. I don't think you can do that with repetition spacing.

 

[mikelove]

Sorry, I should have been clearer - I wasn't referring to SuperMemo's repetition spacing specifically, just to the fact that it doesn't force users to configure how it computes that spacing. So there would still be non-repetition-spacing review options even if we did do away with Ranks. The final product may be sort of a hybrid - cards would still be grouped into rank-like categories based on how well you've learned them, but how they get into those categories would be determined in an easier-to-configure way; for example, a slider that lets you configure from 0 to 10 how aggressively you want it to promote / demote cards you've answered correctly / incorrectly.