A way to "alt-tab" within Pleco

Alexis

状元
The polls regarding launch and exit behavior have got me thinking. The main reason I use the Launcher Apps is to switch back and forth between the dictionary and flashcards. Often I am in flashcards, press the Home Button to return to my launch screen, launch Pleco, look up the word I'm interested in, then press the Home screen again and hit the flashcard launcher.

It may be very useful if one could just swipe left/right to switch between open modules (flashcards, reader, OCR, etc). It would only switch if the module was open. (ie. if you just started the dictionary and swiped, nothing would happen. If you opened the Flaschards, then swiped, you'd return to the dictionary, swipe again, and you're back in flashcards. If you exited flashcards, then swiping would no longer go back to flashcards, etc.)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Alexis said:
It may be very useful if one could just swipe left/right to switch between open modules (flashcards, reader, OCR, etc). It would only switch if the module was open. (ie. if you just started the dictionary and swiped, nothing would happen. If you opened the Flaschards, then swiped, you'd return to the dictionary, swipe again, and you're back in flashcards. If you exited flashcards, then swiping would no longer go back to flashcards, etc.)

This is interesting, but to be honest I'm not wild about the lack of any indicator about what happens when you swipe - it's not always clear what you're switching into. It also has very poor discoverability, since users who aren't aware of these swipe gestures will have a hard time finding them, and on top of that there's the ever-present issue of swipes conflicting with other gestures (especially in handwriting input). And it breaks the metaphor a bit to have screens that you both "go into" via the menu and "flip between" via a swipe.

We could consider moving to a system like what we have on iOS, where each major program function is its own (normally hidden) "tab" and you can switch between them via a pop-up menu, but that would involve a pretty major redesign - we probably won't do anything on that scale until Android 4.0 gets widely distributed enough that we can reasonably reorient Pleco around that.
 
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