MintPastille
Member
This is nit-picking so I'll be terse: In night mode, when reviewing flashcards, the active button lights up an annoying high-contrast orange against the black. Perhaps you should something a bit more subtle?
User Interface Feedback Thread
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
MintPastille said:
Good point, but button colors are really tricky for us to change at the moment - have to redesign half a dozen different button types in each of three different screen resolutions. So this should probably wait until we make highlight colors customizable (at which point you can set it to whatever you want, though a more muted default might be nice).
lattenwald
Member
English language is not my native, and from time to time when translating from Chinese to English I have to use external dictionary application to translate English to Russian. Ability to select and copy text in Pleco dictionary card would be very helpful for this purpose. Usual "select word with long-tap, then copy on clicking selected region" would do just fine. Are there any chances Pleco will have that feature later?
Hi Mike
I just happened to run across this program when looking for a good app to show stroke order and it is good thanks. I am moving my handwritten flashcards over to Pleco. I imported my cards from a list as I am studying from a book and I wish to organize them into chapters since I am in the middle right now. When I edit my categories I found it was difficult to move cards quickly from a large list. I have two suggestions. When I try to use the quick scroll on the right side of screen sometimes I would pick up a card instead. Maybe you can move the card pick up to the left side? Also with a large list of cards it would be nice to quickly go to the card in question to move it to another category. Maybe you can go to a card directly with typing its pinyin in the edit mode so you can select it and make this process a lot quicker than scrolling all over the place? Over all I love how custom made this program is and it is the first program I am satisfied with while studying Chinese! Keep up the great work!
I just happened to run across this program when looking for a good app to show stroke order and it is good thanks. I am moving my handwritten flashcards over to Pleco. I imported my cards from a list as I am studying from a book and I wish to organize them into chapters since I am in the middle right now. When I edit my categories I found it was difficult to move cards quickly from a large list. I have two suggestions. When I try to use the quick scroll on the right side of screen sometimes I would pick up a card instead. Maybe you can move the card pick up to the left side? Also with a large list of cards it would be nice to quickly go to the card in question to move it to another category. Maybe you can go to a card directly with typing its pinyin in the edit mode so you can select it and make this process a lot quicker than scrolling all over the place? Over all I love how custom made this program is and it is the first program I am satisfied with while studying Chinese! Keep up the great work!
jkoch3 said:
I'm a little wary of that because it makes them much harder for right-handed users to move without accidentally tapping on them instead (equally bad thing), but perhaps we could add it as an option at least, both for left-handed users and for people with long lists to scroll through.
jkoch3 said:
You can do it a little more quickly via the "Search Cards" screen, though that's currently only available in the paid version of our flashcard add-on - adding a quick search bar to Organize Cards is on our to-do list, though, the system is definitely more cumbersome than it needs to be when you just want to find a specific card.
One other approach you could use would be to search for the card's pinyin in the regular dictionary interface, then tap on the + button - the duplicate card prompt dialog that comes up includes a button to quickly jump to the existing card's info / edit screen.
jkoch3 said:
Thank you!
Michaels1980
秀才
Hi Mike,
I am wondering if you would consider adding an option to make the OCR recognition area (the green box) remember its previous shape/size? At the moment, every time I start using OCR the recognition area will revert to the default and I need to change it, usually to the same shape/size I previously used. I'm thinking it would save a few seconds if it could start with the setting of the previous OCR session. Thanks, and keep up the fantastic work!
I am wondering if you would consider adding an option to make the OCR recognition area (the green box) remember its previous shape/size? At the moment, every time I start using OCR the recognition area will revert to the default and I need to change it, usually to the same shape/size I previously used. I'm thinking it would save a few seconds if it could start with the setting of the previous OCR session. Thanks, and keep up the fantastic work!
I have just downloaded free version and I am starting to play around. I have noticed few things that may have been already mentioned:
1. There is a bug in UI when you add duplicate card - the window does not resize properly and does not have scroll option. On my phone, I see only half of "Cancel" button - on some smaller phones it can be totally hidden.
2. I really think that "words" section should not remember position - when I scroll to the end of the list of words for "A" and then I move to "B", I don't want to start from the bottom. Now I have to scroll back to the top every time.
3. There should be an option to set a default flashcard category, so every new card would land there automatically, instead of "uncategorized".
I will make more comments after I purchase the normal version
1. There is a bug in UI when you add duplicate card - the window does not resize properly and does not have scroll option. On my phone, I see only half of "Cancel" button - on some smaller phones it can be totally hidden.
2. I really think that "words" section should not remember position - when I scroll to the end of the list of words for "A" and then I move to "B", I don't want to start from the bottom. Now I have to scroll back to the top every time.
3. There should be an option to set a default flashcard category, so every new card would land there automatically, instead of "uncategorized".
I will make more comments after I purchase the normal version
mikelove said:
I feel like the input methods on the iOS version of pleco is a bit easier to use. One circumstance in particular where I prefer the iOS version is having the option to switch between input methods while inputing via handwriting, radical, or keyboard (via the “HWR”, “Rad”, “Key” toolbar buttons). The interface design for android requires users to first select "done" in either handwriting, radical, or keyboard input mode, and then to select a new input method. I find myself often entering text using more than one input method in a single search. For example, when performing a combined character+pinyin search (ex. "yi定") I prefer to sometimes enter the pinyin by keyboard and the character by handwriting. This is only one example of when I utilize multiple input methods when performing a search so regardless of opinions about whether or not my method is sensible or quicker, it is what I prefer in some circumstances and the android interface makes doing this more complicated. I feel like the best interfaces are the ones which are most intuitive and adding unnecessary extra button pushes (even an extra 1 or 2 in every search) greatly reduces the intuitive nature of the overall interface.
I am sure that there are many people who are not bothered by this aspect, however, there are probably some people who share my sentiments on this. If there are enough comments made on this aspect of the UI to warrant action, I'd appreciate at least having the option of including an iOS style toolbar below the search bar. I realize that there might be some concerns about this taking up more space on the screen, however, I run the iOS version of pleco on my iPod and I have absolutely no complaints about screen space on that small of a screen.
mikelove said:
My second comment is also about an aspect of the UI when in search mode compared to how it is in iOS. I realize that the Android version of pleco retains the ability for both full text searches (placing "#" at the beginning of an entry) and wildcard searches (using both "@" and "$" symbols for single and multiple wildcard searches respectively) however, as you have mentioned before, the “wild” and “full text” buttons have been removed from the android version of pleco for thematic and space reasons.
mikelove said:
Personally, one of my favorite aspects of the Pleco dictionary (and one of the features that I use the most) is the ability to perform wildcard and full text searches. And as I have purchased more and more add-on dictionaries for Pleco (both Chinese to English and English to Chinese) I have come to rely on those search features even more and more. The problem is, using these functions in the android UI is very slow, complicated, not user-friendly. On almost every keyboard for android that I have seen, accessing these buttons requires switching to a subset of inputs, finding the desired symbol (#, @, or $) in a mess of other symbols, selecting it, switching back to the primary qwerty keyboard inputs, and then a resuming your search. This is not to mention the extra trouble necessary in a scenario where you want to do a full text search after you have already began your entry, in which case you have to move the cursor to the beginning of the text, perform all the extra button presses to get to the “#” symbol, and then moving the cursor back to the end of the text to complete an entry. The iOS interface makes doing this much more intuitive and user friendly by locating specialized buttons for these functions on the always visible toolbar and by automatically placing the “#” symbol for full text searches at the beginning of the entry.
I realize that again it comes down to an issue of “space”, but I believe that this would be a very wise use of space given the frequency of which these functions are used. In my opinion, the iOS version of Pleco nailed this aspect of the UI and had everything perfect. To change this takes away from the intuitive design of Pleco that has made it my go to tool for everything related to studying Chinese.
At the very least, I would appreciate the option of enabling an additional toolbar similar to the one on iOS with “HWR”, “Rad”, “Key”, “Full”, and “Wild” buttons. Having this option would allow people like me who rely heavily on these functions to have them right at our finger tips, and it would allow people who never use these functions to free up a bit of extra screen space.
Maybe this is a bit out of scope for this application, but it would be quite nice to be able to "tie" audio to a certain text file in the reader. Play/pause/rewind 10 seconds would be helpful =)
This is not something overly important, since you can you start you podcast in the music player and then fire up the reader, but when you start having a bunch of different ones it turns a bit complicated and messy.
This is not something overly important, since you can you start you podcast in the music player and then fire up the reader, but when you start having a bunch of different ones it turns a bit complicated and messy.
Hi,
Apologies if anything in here duplicates postings; I did a basic search, but haven't thoroughly read the other 7 pages in this thread.
I want to comment on a couple of things that I've found irritating in the android release
1. When handwriting chinese, the results show up in real time behind the handwriting on the iOS release, but there seems to be no setting to enable this on android, meaning you can't see if you've made a mistake, or matched a phrase, without hitting 'done', checking results, then clicking twice in the input box (once for focus, once to clear the selection so the next letter doesn't overwrite what's there).
2. When I used to run pleco on my now antique zire 72, I think there was back and forward buttons to go through my search history. I thought the iOS version had this too, but looking now I can't actually see it there either, but I remember it being very useful to bring up words/phrases I had checked on recently. How about adding a history button somewhere and being able to select previously searched characters from a list ? **** EDIT **** I just found the 'history' button under the android menu.
3. There seems to be an issue with 囗, where I can only get a dictionary match if it's the first character entered. For example, 囗口 brings back two delimited results, showing entries for wei and kou, but if I turn that around and type 口囗, it shows results only for kou. This works fine on the iOS version(* - see end) Actually.. I think I see the problem.. the 'PLC' dictionary doesn't have an entry for 囗... if wei is the first character, then the dictionary gets forced to 'CC', but if kou is the first character, it selects PLC, and then finds no match for wei... perhaps the button to change dictionary needs to be applied to each result, rather than being global, or alternatively, display a psuedo result saying '囗 - no entry in PLC', when one character/phrase has matched, but other parts have no entry ? As for working on iOS, it selected the UNI dictionary, which had definitions for both characters.
Apologies if anything in here duplicates postings; I did a basic search, but haven't thoroughly read the other 7 pages in this thread.
I want to comment on a couple of things that I've found irritating in the android release
1. When handwriting chinese, the results show up in real time behind the handwriting on the iOS release, but there seems to be no setting to enable this on android, meaning you can't see if you've made a mistake, or matched a phrase, without hitting 'done', checking results, then clicking twice in the input box (once for focus, once to clear the selection so the next letter doesn't overwrite what's there).
2. When I used to run pleco on my now antique zire 72, I think there was back and forward buttons to go through my search history. I thought the iOS version had this too, but looking now I can't actually see it there either, but I remember it being very useful to bring up words/phrases I had checked on recently. How about adding a history button somewhere and being able to select previously searched characters from a list ? **** EDIT **** I just found the 'history' button under the android menu.
3. There seems to be an issue with 囗, where I can only get a dictionary match if it's the first character entered. For example, 囗口 brings back two delimited results, showing entries for wei and kou, but if I turn that around and type 口囗, it shows results only for kou. This works fine on the iOS version(* - see end) Actually.. I think I see the problem.. the 'PLC' dictionary doesn't have an entry for 囗... if wei is the first character, then the dictionary gets forced to 'CC', but if kou is the first character, it selects PLC, and then finds no match for wei... perhaps the button to change dictionary needs to be applied to each result, rather than being global, or alternatively, display a psuedo result saying '囗 - no entry in PLC', when one character/phrase has matched, but other parts have no entry ? As for working on iOS, it selected the UNI dictionary, which had definitions for both characters.
smeenz said:
We generally recommend that people download a third-party IME for those sorts of usage cases - Baidu's one is free, and while it's not quite as accurate as our recognizer, it's pretty solid and supports a transparent handwriting overlay. It's actually really really hard to get transparency working well on Android; we hack around it in the flashcard fill-in-the-blanks test by (essentially) taking a screenshot of what's underneath and then drawing that in the handwriting box, but we can't do that so well with search results that are being updated in real time - have to wait until we're sure that the updated list has finished drawing and it means all sorts of weird timing and synchronization issues. Android 4.0 has made effects like that a bit easier, though, so we may be able to add this as a 4.0-exclusive option in the future. (perhaps around the time that we start charging for our handwriting add-on again)
smeenz said:
This is actually an issue on iOS too - have you maybe changed your dictionary priority order in Manage Dictionaries on iOS to rank Unihan higher? Anyway, fixing it is definitely in our to-do list but there shouldn't be any chance in it compared to iOS.
mikelove said:
I have a comment about an aspect of the UI when in search mode compared to how it is in iOS. I realize that the Android version of pleco retains the ability for both full text searches (placing "#" at the beginning of an entry) and wildcard searches (using both "@" and "$" symbols for single and multiple wildcard searches respectively) but I can't find toolbar buttons on my Android version. I checked other previous posts to see if you had addressed this issue before and I guess that the “wild” and “full text” buttons have been removed from the android version of pleco. Is this right?
mikelove said:
Personally, one of my favorite aspects of the Pleco dictionary (and one of the features that I use the most) is the ability to perform wildcard and full text searches. As I have purchased more and more add-on dictionaries for Pleco (both Chinese to English and English to Chinese) I have come to rely on those search features even more and more. The problem is, using these functions in the android UI is very slow, complicated, and not user-friendly. On almost every keyboard for android that I have seen, accessing these buttons requires switching to a subset of inputs, finding the desired symbol (#, @, or $) in a mess of other symbols, selecting it, switching back to the primary qwerty keyboard inputs, and then a resuming your search (this is not to mention the extra trouble necessary in a scenario where you want to do a full text search after you have already began your entry, in which case you have to move the cursor to the beginning of the text, perform all the extra button presses to get to the “#” symbol, and then moving the cursor back to the end of the text to complete an entry). The iOS interface makes doing this much more intuitive and user friendly by locating specialized buttons for these functions on the toolbar (is it called the quick input toolbar?) and by automatically placing the “#” symbol for full text searches at the beginning of the entry.
I realize that it comes down to an issue of space, but is there any way that we could have the option of which buttons we would like to have on our toolbar? I don’t have a camera on my phone that works well enough to be able to take advantage of the OCR and I don’t really utilize the speech function so personally I would prefer to be able to have the wildcard and full text buttons on my toolbar along with the keyboard and hand writing buttons (similar to the options currently available on the iOS version). Everyone is bound to have different preferences so it doesn’t make sense to eliminate the OCR and voice buttons, however, having an option to choose which buttons are on the toolbar would be nice.
You all have done a great job of adding options for us users to be able to customize pleco so that even minute details like the color and size of words can be different according to users’ preferences. I know that you all spent a long time working on the android version of pleco to get it ready for release so the last thing you all probably want to be doing is major interface changes like this, however, if its possible to get in a change like I suggested on the next update of the android version I would really be greatful.
Thanks for all the hard work, the android version works great and I’m really enjoying having pleco on my android phone now. Also, thanks for allowing us to transfer our iOS purchases to the Android version, you all are awesome.
sdnorat said:
Yes - we've had a few emails about this and plan to add Wild and Full back as an option in a future release, but in general we like that bar better as nothing but input methods so that will likely remain the default option. (there are a number of customizable Android keyboard IMEs available in Android Market, so we made the change originally assuming that people would simply download one of those and add buttons for wildcards if they wanted them, but it seems like some people would prefer to have that built-in)
One thing I've noticed doing a lot is looking up to similar words and trying to decipher the difference between them. Something that would be really helpful would be to be able to split the screen in half for each dictionary entry in landscape mode or so... I'm not really sure this is actually is implantable in a nice way, but would certainly be a very useful feature.
Since I discovered the "send to reader" feature in OCR, I use it in my classes to read the lesson texts ("take Picture" (of a complete text book page) → make sure all characters are selected → "send to reader").
I love it, because I can simply digitize the content, and then easily check up all unknown words instead of writing / scanning unknown words separate and time consuming when they occur.
However, there still is a flaw: Sometimes, I have to interrupt my reading to look up a single word in the dictionary, e.g. if a teacher is explaining the content using different unknown words. If I go back to the reader, the text is lost – and I have to go through to the whole process again.
The reader should store the send text, till there is new text in the clipboard, or, better, till I choose a new text.
Also, is there a specific reason why it is not possible to copy text from the reader into the clipboard or to save it as file? I noticed the lack when I thought about using the clipboard as work around for the described problem.
I love it, because I can simply digitize the content, and then easily check up all unknown words instead of writing / scanning unknown words separate and time consuming when they occur.
However, there still is a flaw: Sometimes, I have to interrupt my reading to look up a single word in the dictionary, e.g. if a teacher is explaining the content using different unknown words. If I go back to the reader, the text is lost – and I have to go through to the whole process again.
The reader should store the send text, till there is new text in the clipboard, or, better, till I choose a new text.
Also, is there a specific reason why it is not possible to copy text from the reader into the clipboard or to save it as file? I noticed the lack when I thought about using the clipboard as work around for the described problem.