Feature request (various things)

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The touch area for the top button should extend a good bit above it and the bottom one a good bit below - does that help any?

There's also an option in Settings / Definition Screen to add a floating button to play audio at the bottom right corner.

Enable zhuyin and it will show up in the middle!

Yep, also that.
 

Matt P

秀才
I’ve thought of several other ideas that really revolve around metrics for how I’m doing over time with studying.

1) it would be really nice to see a heat map (think the 6 HSK categories along the x axis, and the y axis being a vector of the flash cards in those categories) with the cell color coded based on the score. This would be a neat way to see how I’m actually doing with things. I think you mostly capture these stats already based on score ranges under statistics. This could also be implemented for say 1 to n categories you pick, or all flash cards.

2) when you finish a session of flash cards, you get a quick pop up with your session statistics. It’d be be able to see that again in the case you click it and forget what it said...and actually it’d be nice to see all session results. Perhaps in a list format where you could click on them and see the results again.

3) Expanding on #2, it would be nice to see trends over time, so I usually average a 98%, or am I all over the board? How many cards do I average “learning” a day? Etc.

4) I think a fun implementation and study tool would be a variant of the multiple choice test. I’d love for a way to setup a test (multiple choice I think might be best) where for every flashcard that meets the selection criteria, it picks a random example (obscures the character in question) and I have to pick the “right” one. It would be nice to limit the dictionary selection (to say GF if I wanted to make sure I was only seeing Chinese) also. This admittedly has a slight risk in that multiple words maybe be legitimate answers, however due to the binary nature of what I’m proposing would score as a wrong answer. (In this case for the less than x% case, one could simply choose to change the score) For example:
Prompt: 干_。
And I chose “干吗” instead of “干啥”.

5) it would be fun to be able to share your session results with others via the share menu. Say I just aced a hundred flashcard and wanted to post to WeChat or text my friends, etc.

6) the ablilty to set multiple test prompts and required answers in a space do repition test based on score values. I thought I could do this at one point...but for the life of me can’t remember now. Something like:
<200 prompt for tones
<400 prompt for characters
<800 prompt for fill in the blank (see #4 above)
<1600 prompt for definition, characters and tone only showing audio.

7) increase the numbers of characters to 12 for flash cards, I’d like to practice writing some one the idioms/sayings and can’t because they are too long. (“黑猫白猫抓到老鼠就是好猫”)

Let me know if that all makes sense.
-Matt
 

Kobmast

Member
Sorry, not quite sure if I understand - you want it to mark words that are not in your flashcards?

I am talking about "Reader" add-on , where we read books and articles with tons of new words, yes I add them to flash cards but thats not enough...
Would be great to mark that new words inside that documents , so after back to the document I can easy find that parts of text was new for me and check if I remember the meaning .
Or as alternative way : find and mark the words from your flashcards in the document :) add this function to reader

For example when I have real paper book/article I always highlight the words that was new to me so can check them next time in same context, I think many people do the same
Evernote Camera Roll 20171102 235903.png
 

pdwalker

状元
6) the ablilty to set multiple test prompts and required answers in a space do repition test based on score values. I thought I could do this at one point...but for the life of me can’t remember now. Something like:
<200 prompt for tones
<400 prompt for characters
<800 prompt for fill in the blank (see #4 above)
<1600 prompt for definition, characters and tone only showing audio.

Read here and see if that is what you are looking for:
http://iphone.pleco.com/manual/30200/flash.html#subjectselectionmodes
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
@Matt P - good suggestions, thanks.

On #1 I'm not sure if a heat map really makes more sense than other kinds of charts here - seems like we really just want a measure of performance per category, no?

#2/#3 make sense, we're actually collecting a lot of that data even now.

#4 sounds like basically just a single-word cloze test - doable, but there are a *lot* of ambiguous cases so we'd probably either need another clue to disambiguate (like the definition) or to accept multiple answers (which would be a giant pain statistics-wise so probably no).

#5 would probably work better with some nifty graphical design in a 4.x update.

#6 as @pdwalker says is available now within the same test type + will support multiple test types (and a lot more!) in 4.0.

#7 is already implemented for 4.0 - unlimited length.

@Kobmast - understood; can be a little tricky to save ranges in some documents reliably (e.g. those that are being parsed for us by iOS + so might have their format change on an iOS update) but would be a nice thing in a subset of our supported formats at least.
 

Matt P

秀才
@Matt P

On #1 I'm not sure if a heat map really makes more sense than other kinds of charts here - seems like we really just want a measure of performance per category, no?

I think the key is more of a comprehensive visual representation. I think there is value in seeing some sort of graphical representation of all the cards vs. just the percentage. You already have percentage per category via statistics.

@Matt P
#4 sounds like basically just a single-word cloze test - doable, but there are a *lot* of ambiguous cases so we'd probably either need another clue to disambiguate (like the definition) or to accept multiple answers (which would be a giant pain statistics-wise so probably no).

I agree the key thing would be defining how it works and clearly communicating it to the users. I'd say the simpler the better, it could be as simple as looking up a dictionary example that contains an exact word match to a given dictionary definition.

@Matt P
#2/#3 make sense, we're actually collecting a lot of that data even now.

#5 would probably work better with some nifty graphical design in a 4.x update.

#7 is already implemented for 4.0 - unlimited length.
Great! Can't wait!!!

Another idea: I often am using the OCR to collect vocab from a text book. It would be nice to have an option to select all text in the OCR box and make flashcards for them. (Usually it's in a column format) This would save time and may prompt more people to purchase the add-on for the amount of time saved.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I agree the key thing would be defining how it works and clearly communicating it to the users. I'd say the simpler the better, it could be as simple as looking up a dictionary example that contains an exact word match to a given dictionary definition.

True, though it might be easier at that point to simply use a sentence cloze :)

Another idea: I often am using the OCR to collect vocab from a text book. It would be nice to have an option to select all text in the OCR box and make flashcards for them. (Usually it's in a column format) This would save time and may prompt more people to purchase the add-on for the amount of time saved.

This might make sense once we add better editing capabilities to OCR so you can clean up your output before you try to make flashcards from it - raw OCR output is going to give you a lot of useless cards.
 
The ability to set up and quick-add tags within the flashcard test. This would allow the user to mark why they got that flashcard wrong/not perfect (i.e. recognised the 'spelling' but need to work on the tones, or need to learn the meaning a bit more precisely). The user could then group these together to organise a study session based on words which they need to work on for the same reason.

Sorry if this has already been suggested, I tried searching but couldn't find anything...I guess the current workaround is to use categories for this, but that takes a few taps for each card.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Shouldn't be very many taps, actually - triangle tab to make changes, folder button to change categories and then tap on a category in that list to add/remove the card from it. Is there a way we could make that more efficient? I'm reluctant to switch to something where you type in tags because I feel like in most cases it'd be a lot more work than selecting an existing one from a list, but we could add a 'create new category' option from that popup I suppose.
 
Hmm, maybe it could be something like if you long-press when choosing a score it presents you with a list of reasons your answer wasn't perfect. Yes, free type could be a bit chaotic, so it could be limited to pre-set ones like "Tones", "Meaning" "Pinyin spelling", "Confused with other character" and maybe a couple of user-defined slots.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Perhaps - 4.0 actually will let you add arbitrary buttons to the main UI at an arbitrary stage in a test, and those buttons can come with custom commands like 'add to category X,' so I'd be more inclined to leave this feature to that - if you want a couple of categories for wrong answers, you can add some buttons to the stage you're taken to after you answer incorrectly to let you simultaneously choose a category and advance to the next card.
 
Perhaps - 4.0 actually will let you add arbitrary buttons to the main UI at an arbitrary stage in a test, and those buttons can come with custom commands like 'add to category X,' so I'd be more inclined to leave this feature to that - if you want a couple of categories for wrong answers, you can add some buttons to the stage you're taken to after you answer incorrectly to let you simultaneously choose a category and advance to the next card.
Yeah, that sounds like it would do the job
 
Yeah, that sounds like it would do the job
Just following up on this... a couple of thoughts:

  • I have created a few "feedback categories". It would be good if I could show which of these (only these) categories a card belongs to during a test session (whether that's before or after revealing isn't a dealbreaker to me)
  • If I could keep track on cards which got added to a certain category during their last review (or, failing that, during the last <x> days), that would be really useful.
 

pdwalker

状元
The pleco input for iOS is really very, very good. Unfortunately, it is not always available for use within the application. For example, when editing a user dictionary entry, the stock iOS keyboard/input is used which leads to the next two thoughts

a) would it be possible to get the pleco input to work on any text field where Chinese could be input, assuming no iOS limititations

b) what about releasing a "pleco" keyboard input for sale using that wonderful recognizer as a general keyboard? I'd pay money for that. Not sure if it's possible, or if it makes sense from your development point of view.

Last thing/observation. I just realized I wanted to have pleco read me some of the books I have just so I can practice listening. Granted, the TTS is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing at all. I was just about to put in a feature request for this when I noticed that it is already there! Cool!
 

pdwalker

状元
Absolutely nothing. It’s just that I find the pleco handwriting recognizer better and I find the pleco pinyin input gives me better suggestions when I am unsure of the pronounciation or tone of what I’m typing.

Just an idle thought.
 

giokve

进士
I like to open physical dictionaries at random pages and go through example sentences of entries and whatnot. How about a random entry from (a) dictionary (ies) in pleco? Would that be difficult to implement?
 
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