User Interface Feedback Thread

[mikelove]

would it be possible to show the addon-pricings in different currencies. i mean, you surely know how many euros, dollars, renminbi or philippine pesos... you will charge for each addon - at least as far as i remember from iOs interface - so why not show it on android?

Unlike Apple, Google doesn't provide us with an API to fetch the localized prices from their catalog, so this would actually be rather complicated, particularly given the extreme unreliability of Google Play store region detection - we could very easily end up displaying the price in one currency and actually billing the user in another through no fault of our own.

 

[siamesefightingfish]

When you click on organize, and you can see the whole list of cards, it would be great is the audio could be accessed from there as well. Before I study the cards, I like to read through the list and get familiar with the words and sounds, going straight to flashcards point-blank can be self defeating, adding unnecessary study time if you haven't already reviewed the cards to some extent.

 

[mikelove]

When you click on organize, and you can see the whole list of cards, it would be great is the audio could be accessed from there as well. Before I study the cards, I like to read through the list and get familiar with the words and sounds, going straight to flashcards point-blank can be self defeating, adding unnecessary study time if you haven't already reviewed the cards to some extent.

Also (partially) supported by the new beta - there's a "View as dict entry" option in Organize Cards that will let you scroll through your cards in the dictionary definition screen, from which you can easily play audio.

 

[siamesefightingfish]

Yes!! Thanks for the link, I upgraded to the new beta and now I can access the sounds fairly efficiently through "view as dict entry". How awesome, thanks so much

 

[ckatt]

So, I find it a pain to get to the card info screen from the main dict, Often when i see a word the has the plus with the dotted boarder i want to know what category it is in. To get tot the card info screen that fastest way seems to be to add the card to the current category then tap add again to bring up the "this card already exists screen" then i can tap card info and see what category it is in. after that i have to remove from the newly added category because i didn't actually want it there. is there another way to get to the card info from the dictionary i don't know about?
How bout if we long tap on the flash card plus icon, on the right side of the list view, it takes us to the card info screen?

One other thing, when going from the pop up dictionary to the full entry, it would be nice if we could specify the part of the entry it goes to. It's a bit redundant taking us to the definition since this was already visible in the popup dictionary and more often that not, the reason i got to the full entry is to see the stroke order or sometimes other words that use the character. What do you think?

 

[mikelove]

So, I find it a pain to get to the card info screen from the main dict, Often when i see a word the has the plus with the dotted boarder i want to know what category it is in. To get tot the card info screen that fastest way seems to be to add the card to the current category then tap add again to bring up the "this card already exists screen" then i can tap card info and see what category it is in. after that i have to remove from the newly added category because i didn't actually want it there. is there another way to get to the card info from the dictionary i don't know about?

Try switching the "Not in category" duplicate handling option (in Settings / Flashcards) to "Prompt" - that will give you that same screen with the option to get to Card Info that you already have when the card is in the category.

One other thing, when going from the pop up dictionary to the full entry, it would be nice if we could specify the part of the entry it goes to. It's a bit redundant taking us to the definition since this was already visible in the popup dictionary and more often that not, the reason i got to the full entry is to see the stroke order or sometimes other words that use the character. What do you think?

We could consider making this a setting in a future release, I suppose - maybe just a generalized remember-last-place option or some such. But actually the architecture of those screens is already likely to change soon - on iOS the plan is to consolidate everything that isn't a dictionary entry into a single "info" tab (which will also be where you'll access non-dictionary-entry info on multi-character words, like frequency / synonyms / antonyms / possibly a list of flashcard categories the word has been added to / notes you've added on the word / consolidated list of all examples in any dictionary that contain the word / etc), which you can rearrange / reorder to put your most-used functions on top, and assuming everybody doesn't hate that (it's certainly an improvement over the current iOS Character Info screen anyway) we'll probably do something similar on Android - right now we're constrained because we can't add any more tabs and can only awkwardly group two functions together in the same one, whereas a single Info list can scroll and so has no specific restriction on how many sections we might break it into.

(I should note that this is still under some debate on iOS - easy thing for us to change at the last minute and we don't entirely love the prototype now - so we may end up with, say, an Info tab just for characters and the word stuff handled from the dictionary entry side of things, or even with no tabs at all)

 

[ckatt]

Try switching the "Not in category" duplicate handling option (in Settings / Flashcards) to "Prompt" - that will give you that same screen with the option to get to Card Info that you already have when the card is in the category.

I tried this as it seems to fit my needs ok but it has one undesirably side effect. Now i am unable to use the ocr to "scan to flash card list" for characters that already exist in another category. if its a new card its ok but if it exists some place else then i get the duplicated card message which before i only got if it already existed in the same category i was scanning two.

 

[HW60]

I would like to delete the built-in dictionary groups (mainly because I do not know what they are good for) and therefore marked "Disabled" and "Hide in Menu" in Manage Dictionary Groups for all 3 dictionary groups, but nothing happens. I still see them when I cycle through the dictionaries in the main screen, and they still can be selected when I tap and hold the dictionary icon.

 

[mikelove]

I tried this as it seems to fit my needs ok but it has one undesirably side effect. Now i am unable to use the ocr to "scan to flash card list" for characters that already exist in another category. if its a new card its ok but if it exists some place else then i get the duplicated card message which before i only got if it already existed in the same category i was scanning two.

Hmm... true, I think we could safely ignore the prompt option in that scenario (rather than having to add another setting to deal with this) since I don't see a compelling reason why someone would want a prompt to appear in that case. Though I have a feeling that 6 months from now I'm going to be pointing somebody back to this post when they disagree with that decision, and that 9 months from now we'll finally bow to pressure and add the extra checkbox we're not adding now

I would like to delete the built-in dictionary groups (mainly because I do not know what they are good for) and therefore marked "Disabled" and "Hide in Menu" in Manage Dictionary Groups for all 3 dictionary groups, but nothing happens. I still see them when I cycle through the dictionaries in the main screen, and they still can be selected when I tap and hold the dictionary icon.

Thanks, we'll investigate. Though if you don't want merged multi-dict search you can simply turn it off in Settings / Dictionary / Search Results, in which case you'll go back to the one-dictionary-at-a-time search behavior.

The basic idea with merged multi-dict search is that it lets you search multiple dictionaries all at once and see their results merged together (with duplicates combined); this is useful because (for example) you might type in a Pinyin search and get a few results from the dictionary you're currently in, but not be sure if any of them are the right word and have to switch through all of the others in case the word you wanted was simply missing from that dictionary. Also extremely useful in full-text English searches, since again the word you want might not be in your current dictionary (or might not match with the English word you typed in).

Dictionary groups let you limit this to just a subset of your dictionaries, rather than all of them, so that in a sense they become a "super-dictionary" that incorporates all of the content from those but excludes words from other dictionaries. They're mainly intended to allow you to have specialized / topical dictionaries that don't interfere with your other search results; for example, you might keep the 古汉语 dictionary in a separate group from PLC/ABC/CC/etc, because you're not generally going to be interested in results from that and will only want to switch to it when you're actually reading 古汉语 texts.

It's an extremely powerful / useful feature (which we put a tremendous amount of time / effort into) and I'll happily defend our decision to activate it by default - I think the vast majority of Pleco users will find it makes the software significantly better without really requiring them to change the way they use it or learn anything new.

 

[HW60]

Thank you for your detailed description of the dictionary groups. When I wrote my post, I had been full text searching in my user dictionary for a word I knew it was there in several entries, but I did not even see my user dictionary icon, only the C icon. Only some time later I found out, that the index of the user dictionary needed rebuilding. So C was not responsible ...

But looking at Manage Dictionary Groups I saw I could neither see which dictionaries belonged to which group, nor could I add a dictionary (e.g. my user dictionary) or delete one from the group. Maybe that could make usage more enjoyable.

 

[ckatt]

Ok so i know you brought back the undo button to the flash card writing pad because of popular demand but i actually find it a bit of a pain because i hit it accidentally all the time when trying to write a word that is two or three characters long.
no, i don't want you to remove it, i just think it should be moved. In landscape view it is placed on the bottom and i don't have the problem there since i can draw into the undo button and not erase a stoke. ideally i'd like to see the undo button on the bottom right of both screens since no characters begin a stroke in the bottom right, as far i know.

 

[mikelove]

no, i don't want you to remove it, i just think it should be moved. In landscape view it is placed on the bottom and i don't have the problem there since i can draw into the undo button and not erase a stoke. ideally i'd like to see the undo button on the bottom right of both screens since no characters begin a stroke in the bottom right, as far i know.

The problem there is that then it's right next to the Done button in the regular handwriting input box and people will be hitting that when they want to hit Done. And having the button in two different places depending on context is going to cause all sorts of confusion... anyway, if we get some other complaints about it we could look at adding an option, I suppose, but it's too late to change anything for the next release aside from bug fixes.

 

[ckatt]

The problem there is that then it's right next to the Done button in the regular handwriting input box and people will be hitting that when they want to hit Done. And having the button in two different places depending on context is going to cause all sorts of confusion... anyway, if we get some other complaints about it we could look at adding an option, I suppose, but it's too late to change anything for the next release aside from bug fixes.

ah yeah i see your point. how about this. what if we could draw out of the button? as it stands we start a stroke outside of the button, but it ends up touching the button it still properly draws the stroke. and if i tap the the undo button but drag my finger and release out side of the button nothing happens. so what if when doing this it also makes a stroke?
tap the undo button and it undoes but draw out of it and it just makes a line.
maybe this is difficult to implement but if it would work it would save me some frustration.

oh one other thing
it might be cool to have an overlay option in the flash cards too. like the classic kind of grind for writing characters. maybe where we could choose how many boxes the screen is divided up into. one big one or a few smaller ones.

 

[mikelove]

ah yeah i see your point. how about this. what if we could draw out of the button? as it stands we start a stroke outside of the button, but it ends up touching the button it still properly draws the stroke. and if i tap the the undo button but drag my finger and release out side of the button nothing happens. so what if when doing this it also makes a stroke?
tap the undo button and it undoes but draw out of it and it just makes a line.
maybe this is difficult to implement but if it would work it would save me some frustration.

Kind of tricky but we can certainly consider it for future updates.

it might be cool to have an overlay option in the flash cards too. like the classic kind of grind for writing characters. maybe where we could choose how many boxes the screen is divided up into. one big one or a few smaller ones.

We've actually thought about that before... would you really want more than one box on a phone, though? Even on a Galaxy Note it could get kind of cramped.

 

[skripp]

We can now see last searched time, which I can't quite understand why you would want. Would it be possible to see how many times you've searched for an item? Would be interesting, especially if you could sort by times searched. Could make finding entries to add to flashcards easier.

 

[mikelove]

We can now see last searched time, which I can't quite understand why you would want.

Had several requests, actually - people remember that they looked up a word last night and they want to dig through their history and find it again.

Would it be possible to see how many times you've searched for an item? Would be interesting, especially if you could sort by times searched. Could make finding entries to add to flashcards easier.

Much trickier because the history isn't exhaustive, it only goes back a few thousand words - making it limitless (or so-big-that-it-can-cover-every-possible-dictionary-entry) would involve some serious performance tradeoffs, we either have to keep our current format and write out a huge amount of data every time we save it or change to a more complicated format like SQLite that can efficiently update only the changed portion of the database and accept the performance tradeoffs from that.

 

[ckatt]

it might be cool to have an overlay option in the flash cards too. like the classic kind of grind for writing characters. maybe where we could choose how many boxes the screen is divided up into. one big one or a few smaller ones.

We've actually thought about that before... would you really want more than one box on a phone, though? Even on a Galaxy Note it could get kind of cramped.

True the phone screen is not that large, but i often use one of those rubber tipped styluses to practice characters on my phone. i have the headword size set to max and i can easily trace over the characters. portrait mode it fits three across and landscape is 4 or 5. and of course when i use my tablet i have lots of writing room, so it would be nice to have the option for 10 boxes across or something. speaking of tablets it would also be nice if the head word size could be even bigger on a there.

 

[Lijie]

Hi,
I really like the application. I've been using it since I got to Asia. Not really used to the new interface but that isn't really much of a big deal. When searching words, seems a bit laggy on my Galaxy Nexus. Could there be an option to turn off the "add to user dict" whenever you look up something that isn't in the dictionary? Also in the image I uploaded, you can see the three dots on the top right that serve as the option menu. In the "old" Pleco version, it was on the bottom right where there's a little empty hole. It's just those little things that bother me but otherwise the application from the gods for Mandarin.
Thank you for reading.

 

[mikelove]

I really like the application. I've been using it since I got to Asia.

Thanks!

When searching words, seems a bit laggy on my Galaxy Nexus.

Does this happen all the time or only in certain types of search? Do you notice the lag in the results coming up or in scrolling through them afterwords? Also, I notice you're using CFDICT - have you updated to the latest version of that via the "Updates" section in Add-ons?

Could there be an option to turn off the "add to user dict" whenever you look up something that isn't in the dictionary?

That option only shows up if you've created a user dictionary and if that dictionary is unlocked / editable - if you "lock" your user dictionary via Settings / Dictionary / Manage Dicts, that will get it to disappear.

Also in the image I uploaded, you can see the three dots on the top right that serve as the option menu. In the "old" Pleco version, it was on the bottom right where there's a little empty hole.

That one we didn't have much choice about - Google is phasing out that bottom-right button, in fact it's impossible to support it if you want your app to also properly take advantage of a number of newer Android UI features, and on some devices (e.g. the very popular HTC One X) that button is hidden / very hard to get to - we actually get quite a lot of support email from people who can't find it, not to mention all of the users who probably aren't even aware our app supports features like flashcards and a document reader because they've never thought to look for it. And we'd rather not put the button in the bottom toolbar since it would then have to confusingly "jump" to the top whenever the keyboard was open in order to remain accessible - we made that mistake with a different button in our iOS UI design and we've gotten a tremendous amount of flak about it.

 

[Lijie]

I really like the application. I've been using it since I got to Asia.

Thanks!

When searching words, seems a bit laggy on my Galaxy Nexus.

Does this happen all the time or only in certain types of search? Do you notice the lag in the results coming up or in scrolling through them afterwords? Also, I notice you're using CFDICT - have you updated to the latest version of that via the "Updates" section in Add-ons?

Could there be an option to turn off the "add to user dict" whenever you look up something that isn't in the dictionary?

That option only shows up if you've created a user dictionary and if that dictionary is unlocked / editable - if you "lock" your user dictionary via Settings / Dictionary / Manage Dicts, that will get it to disappear.

Also in the image I uploaded, you can see the three dots on the top right that serve as the option menu. In the "old" Pleco version, it was on the bottom right where there's a little empty hole.

That one we didn't have much choice about - Google is phasing out that bottom-right button, in fact it's impossible to support it if you want your app to also properly take advantage of a number of newer Android UI features, and on some devices (e.g. the very popular HTC One X) that button is hidden / very hard to get to - we actually get quite a lot of support email from people who can't find it, not to mention all of the users who probably aren't even aware our app supports features like flashcards and a document reader because they've never thought to look for it. And we'd rather not put the button in the bottom toolbar since it would then have to confusingly "jump" to the top whenever the keyboard was open in order to remain accessible - we made that mistake with a different button in our iOS UI design and we've gotten a tremendous amount of flak about it.

The lag happened while searching for words, but doesn't really happen that often. Scrolling through them is seemless. Thank you for helping me resolve the user dictionary problem. Probably wouldn't have known how to do it by myself. I guess I'll have to live with the option button being there not really much of a problem, it was just an habit. One more thing and I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this because it doesn't have to do with the interface, but I noticed on my friend's pleco app when I downloaded it for her (Ipod) that she could switch between I don't know how to explain it besides saying 體 with the square(in the top left part) on the right and 體 with the square the left. I've been trying to find a way to get the one with the square on the right but I don't know if its a font issue or something else. If there's an answer to this in another thread could I get linked because I don't know how to explain this with the write words.