We're doing a couple of final design tweaks on the iPhone version, and there's a particular issue I wanted to see if I could get a few opinions on.
The ability to switch between displaying a list of search results and a list of all of the entries in the dictionary has been part of our software for almost its entire existence, but we never seem to get much feedback about it - it's not something that people discuss in suggestion e-mails / product reviews / etc, nor has anyone written us to complain about how you're always taken back to the first result when you switch from 典 back to 果 (which we're nonetheless fixing in the next update).
However, since iPhones don't have persistent list selections (all you can to do is tap on a list to do something to an item in that list), there's not really a natural mechanism by which you can select a search result and jump to its location in the dictionary. We've come up with a couple of alternative methods: the leading idea at the moment keeps that button but simply goes to the dictionary location for whatever entry you looked at last (or the first one in the results after a new search), but we've also experimented with tapping on that button and then tapping on a dictionary entry, or with adding a button next to every entry in the list (a mechanism we can then use for other entry-specific functions too).
But before we actually ship the product with any of these (and hence are pretty much committed to continuing to offer 果/典 in our future iPhone releases) I thought I'd at least double-check to see if anyone actually uses that function, and what they use it for - finding related words with the same starting character, searching for a single character and then quickly jumping to all of the entries that start with it (we'd turn off the "1-char results for..." option by default if we removed 果/典), randomly scrolling through the dictionary, or something else we haven't even thought of?
Thanks,
--Michael Love
The ability to switch between displaying a list of search results and a list of all of the entries in the dictionary has been part of our software for almost its entire existence, but we never seem to get much feedback about it - it's not something that people discuss in suggestion e-mails / product reviews / etc, nor has anyone written us to complain about how you're always taken back to the first result when you switch from 典 back to 果 (which we're nonetheless fixing in the next update).
However, since iPhones don't have persistent list selections (all you can to do is tap on a list to do something to an item in that list), there's not really a natural mechanism by which you can select a search result and jump to its location in the dictionary. We've come up with a couple of alternative methods: the leading idea at the moment keeps that button but simply goes to the dictionary location for whatever entry you looked at last (or the first one in the results after a new search), but we've also experimented with tapping on that button and then tapping on a dictionary entry, or with adding a button next to every entry in the list (a mechanism we can then use for other entry-specific functions too).
But before we actually ship the product with any of these (and hence are pretty much committed to continuing to offer 果/典 in our future iPhone releases) I thought I'd at least double-check to see if anyone actually uses that function, and what they use it for - finding related words with the same starting character, searching for a single character and then quickly jumping to all of the entries that start with it (we'd turn off the "1-char results for..." option by default if we removed 果/典), randomly scrolling through the dictionary, or something else we haven't even thought of?
Thanks,
--Michael Love
