New icons for Pleco Dict

[mai]

Hi everyone,

I had some time to kill yesterday and so I played around a little bit with some new icons for the pleco dict (at least I did the uppermost row and just a hires version and of course I don't know anything about any technical limitations). Well, this is just how I would like my personal dictionary What do you think?

Happy holidays to everyone else in China!

 

[mikelove]

Interesting... this particular style might be a little difficult to translate to low-res, but I agree with the general principle that simpler is better. And you've certainly fixed a lot of the major blunders in the old design, e.g. our confusing "Aa" that looks like it has something to do with capitalization changes rather than font sizes.

We've actually toyed with the idea of adding some kind of a facility for users to install their own icon sets - of course anyone with a Palm OS resource editor can already do that, but it might be nice to make it more widely accessible. I don't think this is a 1.0 feature but it might crop up in a future release...

 

[Jianchuanbrit]

Mai,

Your icons are certainly a big improvement. I still don't really like the light bulb, and the character drawing might be improved.
Apart from simplicity, I also think a consistent colour theme running through aids the overall effect. Your theme is basically blue and that looks good.
Having user customisation functionality is OK, but not necessary if the icons look good to start with.

 

[Smoodo]

Changing between English and Chinese and back.

Hi there,

Please please please, no matter what the icons become in the future, make the changing language icon flip or invert, or do something consistent and different so i can distinguish between lookup languages earlier.

I do like the new icons that this poster drew up. I also agree with the reply about the lightbulb. To me it is not symbolic of flashcard review. Maybe just simply the character for "Study (xue2)学"。 People learning Chinese probably know that word, or it would be a suitable third word to know besides "Nihao!". Wouldn't you agree? :-D


When is that next release coming anyway?

Brandon

 

[sf954]

Automatically detect Englsih and Chinese in the input field

Please please please, no matter what the icons become in the future, make the changing language icon flip or invert, or do something consistent and different so i can distinguish between lookup languages earlier.

What about getting rid of this button altogether and having Plecodict automatically recognize English and Chinese in the input field? This is one great feature of Dr. Eye. :idea:

 

[mikelove]

(Brandon, sorry for not noticing your message earlier)

We're definitely going to improve the change language icon - it'll probably be something more obvious, like the old E-C/C-E. And I'm not sure about "xue", partly because it has both simplified and traditional variants and we'd need to add an option to let users select which one (in order to avoid angry e-mails from people who prefer traditional). Does anybody have any objections to that "doors" icon design from the Oxford E&C flashcard system? Maybe we could use it as the flashcard session button as well as the "reveal" button.

And sf494, we can't get rid of the change language button altogether because of Pinyin input (which Dr. Eye doesn't support AFAIK) - if someone enters a word without tone numbers then there's really no way to determine whether it's Pinyin or English. I suppose we *could* try switching to English whenever a word contained a character sequence that wasn't proper Pinyin, but that would be annoying for people who entered letters incorrectly while inputting a Pinyin string.