A few design suggestions.

[jdmce]

Mike, really awesome program. I feel lucky I found it. A couple of first impressions. It would be nice if the program had a "back" button similar to browsers where the state of the last activity were remembered so that you could one click back to it.

Finally, I noticed that when I copy a character in the english dictionary and try to past it into the lookup of the chinese dictionary, its a no go. I'd like to be able to do this.

So far the "character draw" works really well. At least 8 of 10 times I find what I'm looking for. What a great feature. I've mastered radical look up but there are so many "odd" characters without an obvious radical that its nice to simply be able to draw them. Thanks for your programming efforts.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks!

We've considered a Back button and we'll probably add one in some future release; in the meantime, if you tap on that downward-pointing triangle to the left of the Input Field, that will give you a list of the most recently viewed words and you can tap on those to go back to them.

I'm surprised that that copying feature doesn't work - what type of Palm are you running this on? Have you tried selecting a character in the English dictionary and simply tapping on the E-C/C-E button? That should automatically copy the character into the input field as it switches languages.

And we can't actually take credit for the handwriting recognizer, which was licensed from Motorola, but we're doing some preliminary work now on a new one which should be specifically optimized for learners - I'm not sure if it'll make it into our summer release or even if it'll prove effective enough to release at all, but if/when we do eventually finish it it should be well worth the wait.

 

[jdmce]

a further suggestion for learners and future beamers!

I can't help but imagine that the vast majority of people wanting your product are learners like me. The other night in Chinese class I was quickly and easily creating a flash-card list as the teacher gave us a few new words. Selfish me. I've got the word list, but not my classmates. Wouldn't it be nice if we could beam the lists to each other!

 

[mikelove]

That's actually a lot of work to implement properly, but if we have time it's certainly something we'd like to add at some point...

 

[MichaelK]

probably not possible, but why not ask

Hi Mike,
It would be great (for me at least) if I could write part of a complex character and paste the drawing into another Char Recog. window.
I'm having some recognition problems but when I draw one aspect of the entire character, it is recognized, together ... no go.

I know the code is licensed from Motorola, but copy, shrink and paste to a position in the window from a register(s)?

I'll throw out another. How about an optional animated tutorial on stroke order a.k.a. Graffiti 2's tutorial with one or two samples, or just a list of rules on stroke order in a help file.

Well, thanks, this software, along with my lonely planet, is indespensible.

 

[mikelove]

Kind of tricky actually; it isn't just a matter of moving an image, the Motorola software uses a complicated data structure that takes into account the speed with which lines are drawn etc. We're working on our own recognizer which should hopefully make this sort of thing possible, and since they use pretty much the same data files we'll likely also include animated stroke order diagrams if/when the recognizer gets good enough to release.