sync flash cards

J

JM1

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Please add support for sync flash cards between devices to Pleco 4.0+

And also a web based version for adding, editing, and maybe even testing would be nice. It would make importing and managing much easier.
 
We've done most of the work for that schema-wise in 4.0, but the actual sync system won't come until a later release.

Web-based version is a bigger lift, not impossible but I'm not sure if enough people would subscribe to such a version to justify its development / maintenance costs.
 
You are doing a great job.

For what it is worth... I tried out the school version of Scritter hoping it would provide a way for me to work with my teacher to create decks of vocabulary to memorize. Turns out it doesn't really do any of that well and it has so many problems that It was useless for the purpose of teacher web based vocabulary lists. The school features of scritter are totally undeveloped and not useful.

You already have the base required of everything required to allow a student to dump in a vocab list and for cards to be self-created. If you one day though a web interface allowed some sort of student-teacher management of a vocabulary deck you would have something very good. You already have most of the hard stuff done.

Imagine how powerful this would be as a student-teacher tool if you tracked known words and could report student specific difficulties of texts (like http://www.wumaocorp.com/hskcheck/) to allow teacher to personally manage students. It would be amazing. But now I'm just dreaming.

P.s. remember how much scritter sells the subscriptions for. Examine it as a business model some day.
 
It's not a direction I've totally ruled out, honestly I just personally find web development incredibly tedious and so it's the kind of thing that I'd really only undertake if a) I had so many people working for me that I wouldn't have to work much on it at all myself (unlikely), b) I was forced to do it by some combination of platform restrictions (also unlikely but something that keeps me up at night), or c) the money was incredible. But offering a comprehensive Chinese solution for schools could well fulfill c).
 
Mike, one other option that would be useful is if the sync were available via API. Then people like me could start building out web or desktop workflows and share them with the community.
 
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mike_h said:
Mike, one other option that would be useful is if the sync were available via API. Then people like me could start building out web or desktop workflows and share them with the community.
Click to expand...

Yeah I would also be interested in this. I could definitely see a client-server approach with a F/OSS GUI. Kind of a red-hat approach. I've been a web developer in the past (5+ years experience in FE) and I think it'd be really fun to work on F/OSS web-pleco.
 
I don't think we're likely to provide an API - just in general we don't do a lot with APIs because a significant majority of our users are on iOS where those aren't really viable for anything more complicated than 'pop up a definition for a word' - but it's a regular old SQLite database, both in our old and new apps (the new app stores a bunch of indexes in LMDB but it'll regenerate them if you delete the file they're in), and the new app also assigns GUIDs / tracks sync modification dates for pretty much everything, so if you wanted to take a stab at writing your own sync client (with the understanding that we were making no guarantees that the data format wouldn't change) there isn't really anything to stop you from doing that.
 
How would one access the database file?

I'm also interested in something like this and have done plenty of SQLite work in the past. Can definitely respect not wanting to do this internally at Pleco so I might be able build an integration myself. But where is the db file?
 
The file is in /Android/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files/databases - it's a regular old SQLite3 file, should open in any SQLite browser app or in a current version of SQLite itself.

EDIT: sorry, realized you're on iOS. The file isn't readily accessible on that, as iOS doesn't have an open filesystem - the best bet would be to manually back it up via Import/Export / Backup Database. But there isn't really any way you could write a background service / daemon / whatever on iOS that would automatically sync your Pleco flashcards for you.
 
Thanks Mike! Yeah that's what I was worried about re: iOS. The evidence is mounting that I should switch. Until then, glad to know I can still use the db just without syncing.
 
mikelove said:
We've done most of the work for that schema-wise in 4.0, but the actual sync system won't come until a later release.
Click to expand...

Hey Mike, I’d love to know if there are any rough timelines on a potential sync feature. I create flashcards both on my iPhone and iPad but it gets tricky when trying to review them.

Thanks!
 
No, to be honest if you’re trying to make a decision based on how soon sync will be ready I’d say you should assume that it’ll take longer than whatever your cutoff is.
 
Bash: 
adb pull /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files/databases $HOME/Pleco

Just to confirm for any future viewers, as Mike suggested you can get the pleco db from your android phone using adb. The path will depend on your phone (I guess?) but on a Samsung it's probably the same as above.
 
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