User Interface Feedback Thread

Not sure if this is the right place to post my suggestion or not, but I just want to let you know that I would love to see something that would make pleco's layout more comfortable for stylus users. Generally, it's fine for most tasks, but when I'm inputting characters by handwriting in the dictionary search it becomes a royal pain.

While using your fingers to write and tapping with two fingers to move onto writing the next character works amazingly well, I'd love to see a similar function for stylus users. I don't personally know a feasible workaround (beyond a swift double tap with the pen) but at the moment, I'm just tapping the character I just correctly drew on that bar at the bottom of the screen. Now, I don't know if this is extremely nitpicky or not but it seems so unintuitive and slow to me, especially when compared to the two finger tap function.

Furthermore, as I assume the majority of stylus users use larger screened devices, myself personally using the wacom digitizer screen of the Samsung galaxy note 2, that stretch to the bottom left corner of the screen just is gargantuan. I cannot imagine what it's like on a tablet. If for whatever reason some sort of swift stylus gesture matching the functionality of the double finger tap couldn't be implemented into pleco, a customisable layout would go some way to making a more comfortable experience i.e. the ability to move the bar on the bottom of the screen, to switch it to vertical rather than horizontal, to be able to move the undo last stroke button would be great too.

Thanks for your astoundingly great product, I use it every single day and apologies if any of this has been mentioned on the forum before or if indeed fixes already exist within pleco.

Cheers!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks for the feedback.

Have you tried going into Settings / Dictionary / Input Methods / Handwriting Input and turning off "Use Full Screen"? That will put the handwriting area in a smaller box at the bottom of the screen, which seems like it would help greatly with the ergonomics aspect of this at least.

As far as a clear gesture, it seems like the easiest solution there would be to press a button on the stylus - is there one of those on the stylus on your Note?
 

radioman

状元
I would like to see this as well. I have posted previously that I thought I thought it would be useful to be able to use a single stroke gesture to clear the screen (rather than hitting a button). This is similar to Skritter, where you could simply use an upstroke to delete. Make it an option to "clear and accept". In this way, there would need for fancy stylus with buttons.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
iOS stylus adoption is so low that I'm not inclined to make that a priority - might make more sense if/when Apple comes up with an MFi stylus program, though. Android stylus support only makes sense because Samsung's been pushing them so aggressively.
 

ckatt

状元
Would it be possible to have a exposure adjustment in the OCR? often i find when trying to using it with my TV the camera is to bright and the white subtitles turn into glowing white blobs.
thanks
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Not possible, actually - Apple doesn't seem to provide us with that level of access to the camera system; we can set an auto-exposure 'point of interest' but that's about it.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
No - at the moment the algorithm wouldn't distinguish between those in any case. However, if you turn on Spaced Repetition or activate the option for "prompt for recall quality" in Scoring, that will let you manually rate how well you remembered / how badly you forgot a card after a correct / incorrect answer.
 

JimD

Member
Thanks for the quick reply. I think it's worth it to note the difference between not knowing a character yet vs knowing the character and selecting the wrong definition. Is this something you would consider including or is it just not possible with the way the algorithm works? I'm fine not using the definitions if that's the case. Just curious.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We're in the middle of totally re-doing the algorithm anyway, so it certainly could become possible, but I'm not sure how we would really treat it any differently from an extremely incorrect answer in any case - did you have a specific idea about how you wanted the software to behave in this case?
 

JimD

Member
You guys are clearly the experts in this and I'm a major noob so forgive me if I'm not sounding too sharp.

Think of it this way, if I can only identify two animals (dog and cat) and you show me a picture of a turtle, I should be able to say, "I don't know" rather than forced to select between dog, cat, turtle and rabbit. I know it's not dog or cat but I'm merely guessing between turtle and rabbit. That act of guessing doesn't help me to really retain the information. I would just be playing a game of chance and maybe getting lucky. If you show me a dog and I select "cat" then I'm just wrong rather and my score should suffer. I should know better!

Maybe Correct vs Incorrect answers could be included in the actual score. If I select "I don't know" I could then see the definition but the card would be excluded from the score and saved for me to "review previously unknown terms." This would help me to reinforce what I know so far and gradually introduce new terms to the flash cards. This would also help me to revisit and look up terms that I don't know yet. In the example above, I could look up "turtle" and include it in my practice sessions.

Perhaps I go through 100 cards. I get 40 correct, 40 incorrect and 20 of them are ones where I select "I don't know." My score would be 50% and then I could prompted to "review cards you did not know." That would allow me to spend some time reviewing the 20 I didn't know.

Hope that's not too confusing.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Ah, sorry, wasn't putting it together - makes sense to have a 'guaranteed wrong' choice rather than occasionally guessing correctly, even if for repetition algorithm purposes those 'guaranteed wrong' choices aren't really any different from words that you tried to answer correctly but failed.
 

JimD

Member
Mike... Thanks, again, for the replies. I'm not clear on your last response. Is this something you are considering adding to the app? The flashcard add-on just isn't working out for me. I love having the definitions but the inability to select "I don't know" / being forced to guess invalidates any scoring for a particular round and, I fear, will throw off any of the repetition algorithms.

For example, let's say I am presented with this flashcard and do not know the answer:
f0soav.png


I randomly guess and get it correct.
29e6flv.png


I am then forced to select to what degree I remembered the definition when, in fact, I don't know it and merely guessed. I'm assuming the app then considers that card as "known" and will not be rotated as frequently. The result is that my lucky guess has then forced the card out of regular circulation when I truly need to practice more. This also throws the ending score / percentages off after the round has been completed. I have found the option of tapping back / forward / edit / something else / then selecting "don't know" but that is a lot of back and forth.

In this scenario, if I had 3 definitions (rather than 4) and one was "I don't know," then the lucky guess would be avoided, the app could classify the card as unknown and hopefully it would be rotated more frequently until I have mastered it.

If I'm doing something wrong (of thinking of this in the wrong way) please let me know. Otherwise, is it possible to get a refund on this particular add-on? I only upgraded to get the multiple choice definitions but find the resulting lack of accurate scoring and potential corruption of repetition / mis-classification of unknown cards as "remembered perfectly" "remembered" or "barley remembered" to not be as functional as the default / included tests.

Please don't take this the wrong way. I love this app and use the hell out of it. It's amazing. It's just this one particular add-on that has been a disconnect for me.
 

gato

状元
I'd suggest that you don't guess on the flashcards if you don't know the word. It shouldn't treated as a test that you are trying to outsmart. If you don't know a word and get it right because you guessed, it's really a form of cheating. The flashcards are not going to work if you cheat. This would be the case regardless of the program you use.
 

JimD

Member
If one does not know the answer, the only option in this app is to guess. Not trying to cheat anything. Careful throwing that word around.

If I were using physical cards I could simply pass on the card I don't know and move on.

Having a "pass" or "do not know" only seems logical.

The way the app is now, if you don't know then you are forced to guess... hardly anything near cheating or an attempt to outsmart.

Additionally guessing should be encouraged. The spectrum of barely remembered to mastered encourages the user to take their best guess. That is wholly different than not knowing at all and being forced to guess.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry, for some reason I thought I'd suggested this a few posts ago but I think I had it tangled up with another discussion: if you go into "Scoring" and change "Button Layout" to "123456" or "654321" or "alternating" (which shows 654321 on correct or 123456 on incorrect for easier default-button-pressing-without-thinking-about-it), that will give you all 6 score choices regardless of whether or not your answer was correct, so that you can mark a card as incorrect even if you happened to guess correctly.

I realize this is not a perfect solution, but it should at least address the meat of the problem for the time being. (if it doesn't, though, let me know and we can certainly set up that refund)
 

JimD

Member
Thanks. I'll give it a try. How will correct answers that are flagged as "6" be handled? Seems like that could present a conflict over time or maybe that just cancels things out.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
What do you mean? 6 is a correct answer, 1 is an incorrect one. The score selection totally overrides whether or not you answered correctly - if you get it wrong but mark it 6, it'll be treated for all purposes as a correct answer, while if you get it right and mark it as 1, it'll be treated as an incorrect answer.
 

mfcb

状元
maybe its just me, but in my experience "cheating" like decribed above is no real problem. in fact, when i cheated (by just guessing) the next time i see the word or character i know it most times... somehow with cheating it sticks better in my memory ;)
 
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