Beta 3 and Design Changes

[mikelove]

So Beta 2 is mostly focused on fixing some of the more serious / annoying bugs in Beta 1, but with Beta 3 along with of course a lot more bug fixes we're also contemplating some changes to the design.

In general, I think the UI in 2.0 as it stands right now is really way too complicated, too many options in confusing places with much less 'zen' than the previous version had. So a couple of things that are definitely / probably going to change:

* The View/Search Mode business is getting dropped, as is the embedded text-reader palette (not the "real" document reader, just the one embedded in the main dictionary screen); with the ability to easily pop up the definition for a word in a window the whole thing seems kind of superfluous, and it's a whole bunch of extra options which we'd be better off avoiding. This will likely mostly be done in Beta 2, we'll disable the option and leave it in Search all the time and then evict it more completely in Beta 3.

* Tap-hold popup menus will be implemented both on Pocket PC *and* on Palm, and if we can get this working well they'll display the grayed-out Pinyin for the selected characters in the first item of the menu, so if you're quickly trying to look up a word's pronunciation that would be one way to do it without having to bring up a whole separate interface.

* You'll no longer be able to customize the Search Bar (second row) toolbar buttons like you can the Command Bar (first row) ones; we'll go back to the old system where you check boxes to include specific options, though with perhaps a bit more flexibility about how the buttons are ordered. There may also be one or two non-customizable slots on the Command Bar; allowing some of this stuff to be adjusted dynamically depending on what you're doing will I think ultimately make things a lot nicer.

* Dictionaries will be able to be put into user-defined "groups" instead of just lumping all of them into E-C or C-E, so if for example you prefer to have the Standard Dictionary in its own group you can do that. And of course the order of dictionaries in these groups would be customizable.

Now for the reason why I'm posting all of this: does anyone have any suggestions about other ways we can make the UI of any part of 2.0 better? Not looking for big/complicated changes here, just little stuff like rearranging a form a certain way, adding a quicker way to access some command / function, things along those lines. Since there's all of this rewriting going on anyway it seems like we might as well see if there's anything else we can improve. I'm mainly asking about this for dictionary functions, though certainly if there's any glaring flaw in the flashcard UI we'd be interested in hearing your feedback about that too.

 

[ipsi]

With regards to these Dictionary Groups, how will they work? Will you replace the language button with a Groups button? Will there be another button for groups? Or what?

Actually, one random thing that would be nifty would be the ability to specify a custom JPEG for Dictionaries you create. That's quite off-topic though.

I'm a bit sad to loose the ability to customize the search bar, though I doubt I'll miss it much.

I can't say there's actually much I'd like changed about the UI. It works fine for me, though the huge number of preferences you have is slightly insane...

 

[Alexis]

A couple suggestions:

1) For the male/female/random voice settings, it would be nice to have an "alternate" (verb) and "both" settings (I would find them much more useful than the current settings).

alternate: alternate between male/female voices every time one clicked on the speech icon.

"both": A "male, then female" setting would have the male voice followed by the female voice (and vice versa with "female, then male"). So, the word would be spoken twice per click in this mode. This is the mode I would use most often.

2) Would be nice if the "slow" option in the stroker order diagrams was a bit slower.

And more of a beta 4 wish list suggestion:

3) For the stroke order diagrams, it would be cool to have "test" mode. This would show the outline of the characters, and then you have to draw the strokes in proper order. As you dragged your pen across a stroke, it would fill in on the screen. A big X would cover the character if you get it wrong. This would help reinforce and test character writing. You could also possible have a mode where there is no outline and it tests if you drew it correctly and in the correct stroke order. This could work in flashcard mode (and possible even when regularly viewing stroke order of a character?).

 

[ipsi]

There is currently a stroke order testing mode in the Flashcard System. Have a look .

I'd like the Male then Female thing as well, come to think of it. Also, to stay slightly on-topic, could it be made so the 'Play Audio' button will come up with, when pushed and held, a list of possible voice options? While not so useful now, it would be more useful combined with Alexis' suggestion. Might also be nice to have it allow N repititions?

One other thing: While I suspect the data you have doesn't allow it, I'd love to see the option to have different components of a character highlighted on the stroke-order screen in different colours.

 

[ldolse]

I'm all for making the command bars more like V1 - I really miss the BACK button right now.

Tap and hold to get to character info and see pronunciation would be great(also copy/paste please) - better than the existing highlighting option we have right now, which can be a bit problematic.

Dictionary grouping seems a different direction of overly complicated, what's wrong with the 1.0 system? I can see this potentially getting out of hand if a lot of new dictionaries get licensed, but even then I'm not sure it's a big deal. Under the current system we lost one chinese dictionary (Unihan) and replaced it with the new C-C dictionary. 1.0 didn't have that many E-C dictionaries, so I don't think it's a big deal to add one more to the list.

Customizable order would definitely be good though - right now it always seems to come up with the two new dictionaries first, and as these are both advanced level dictionaries they're definitely not what I want to see first.

If we're talking about GUI organization for ease of use then the big thing I'd like to see reorganized is the flashcard interface. The current system seems a lot more complicated than the old system, and the old system wasn't exactly easy. Some ideas below. I'm not begging for these to be followed to the letter, but I hope it gives some food for thought.

If you think about it from a logical perspective, there are three discrete functions needed for flashcards:

• Drills/Review - Used all the time, needs to be as easy as possible to launch into, minimal clicks
• Test Preferences configuration - rarely used after initial setup, extra complexity is ok
• Flashcard/List management - used intermittently

Right now all these functions are pretty much jumbled together in one relatively complex interface. I'm quite intimidated by all the options every time I want to start a new test session. The old interface was also intimidating, but at least there was a nice friendly 'start session' button I could count on and ignore everything else. I understand that a big factor driving the change in the new system is that there are many new test types, but I don't think this has to mean abandoning the big friendly button concept.

I don't think this means a radical redesign of what's there - I think under the modules menu you just need two menu items - one is start flashcard session, the other is manage flashcards. This is basically identical to 1.0, and I think that's fine. Clicking on "start flashcard session" would take you to a screen with lots of big friendly buttons, one for each test type, and clicking a button would immediately launch into that test type based on your current test and repetition settings. Aside from this the view would need two links (preferably NOT buttons) - one to get to test preferences (which takes you to the existing test pref tabs), the other to choose the the lists/cards to review (existing cards and categories tabs). I'm not sure if Pleco saves settings for each test type right now, that might have to be added. Each test type is also different enough from one another that I think things could actually be made easier by giving each test it's own tab/panel. I would also suggest moving the two flashcard tabs that are hanging out in general preferences over to this location.

Manage flashcards would pretty much look and work like the existing UI, except you could remove the big 'start flashcard session' from that view.

One other function that might be nice is to allow shortcut/cli type argments in the same way that windows does. I'm not positive windows mobile supports this, but I believe it does. This would allow a user to create different shortcuts to Pleco - one to go straight to flashcard test view described above, one to go to the reader, etc.

 

[mikelove]

Dictionary grouping would replace languages, yes. But ldolse makes a good point, lately it seems like my design approach to everything is to simply add a new settings screen and that's not necessarily always a good idea; still, some sort of mechanism for ordering / disabling dictionaries is definitely a must.

A nicer alternative to fixed dictionary groups might be to have a separate Search dialog box which people could bring up if they wanted to do a particular search on a specific set of dictionaries; this could be integrated with the Input dialog to make it easy to get everything set up without going back to the main screen, and would also let us pull a couple of other options (like full-text) out of the main UI by default and still have them be accessible to people who occasionally wanted to use them by putting them on that screen. This would be in addition to a separate dictionary ordering screen.

So essentially the above two paragraphs are saying that my response to one new dialog being too complicated is to add *two* new dialogs, but I think in this case the overall interface actually gets simpler by trying to jam fewer options on to the main screen and do fewer things with any specific dialog.

ipsi - interesting idea about custom JPEGs, probably would be some much simpler format (like BMP) but it wouldn't be too difficult to add a little extra binary data to a dictionary header at some point. The main problem would be scaling them up to work on a variety of display resolutions, we can pretty much forget about grayscale displays now but you're still talking potentially 4 different sizes assuming we eventually get around to creating some Pocket-PC-sized icons instead of just drawing the Palm ones really small as we do now. Good point about a tap-hold menu for audio, and there actually is an "allow N repetitions" option in audio flashcards which we haven't gotten around to enabling yet but likely will be soon.

Alexis - very good idea about alternating, there's really no reason why 'random' makes sense in any case so this should probably just replace that. And a 'both' would make sense too. Is the stroke order screen too fast because the strokes themselves are drawn too quickly or because there's not enough of a delay between them? (or both) And yes, there already is a stroke order test mode in flashcards.

ldolse - we've actually already designed a "Simple Flashcards" interface with just one configuration screen which will hopefully get implemented at some point between now and the finished release. The screens are already laid out, we just haven't put any UI code behind them yet. The first screen of flashcard session setup should address pretty much all of the common settings, though, at least that's what it's designed to do - once you've gotten the other stuff set up correctly you really don't need to look at that again unless you want to review a different set of cards altogether.

I'm not sure about maintaining separate settings for each test mode, though - that's really what the Profile feature is for. A lot of people might want to switch between reviewing the same cards multi-choice one minute and free-answer the next and they shouldn't have to configure the same settings twice every time they do that. CLI-type shortcuts we could actually do with a simple launcher program, about 10 lines of code would be enough both on Palm and on Pocket PC; not sure how important it would be when you can already access flashcards with a single toolbar button tap, though.

 

[Alexis]

Hi Mike,

1) It took me a while to figure out what looked unnatural regarding the speed of the stroke order diagrams, but I think this is it:

Each stroke gets drawn in the same time period (variable fill rate). It would look more natural if the rate of filling was the same for each stroke. For example, a stroke that is 100 pixels long should take 4 times as long to draw as a stroke that is 25 pixels long. In that case, The speed on "slow" would be fine if the fill rate on slow strokes was kept the same, and the other strokes used the same fill rate.

Tried out the stroke order tests on the flashcards. Works marvelously!

2) Would be nice if you tap and hold on the Dictionary Icon if it would display a drop down list of all the available dictionaries to choose from.

 

[sfrrr]

I use a PPC and think its interface is more attractive than the Palm's. At this stage of mobile development, that pure, stark Palm layout looks primitive (to me), and I'm sick of that typeface. I use a PPC for a bunch of reasons, and one of them is the skinnability of its apps. I haven't seen anyone talk about the superficialities, such as GUI, but I like typefaces and good, elegant (i.e. simple and direct) design and I very much like to see those sorts of pages on my most used apps.

Another thing: I would very much like to be able to choose my Chinese (as well as English) typeface. In PD1, I sometimes switch to one of the handwriting faces in order to see how to write a word or phrase the way ordinary people do everyday.

I'm all in favor of simplifying the toolbar. There are way too many clicks to get to most functions, including auto searching. Nowadays, I favor the kind of toolbar in which one click on a given button produces a drop down list of tasks (or subdirectories)--a sort of menu toolbar but faster to use that the menu bar at the bottom of the screen.

I started this reply yesterday morning and am sending it off today's afternoon, so this may no longer fit into the topic. Sorry.

Later:

I agree with Alexis about the dictionaries. In PD1, one could hold down the dictionary soft button and see a list of every installed dictionary. Now, with the all Chinese dictionaries, that function is even more important.

Also, are there enough dictionaries one can install into PD2 to make the groups worthwhile? I'd rather a dropdown menu of dictionaries than the ability to group them, although I wouldn't complain if I had both.

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for all of the feedback on this.

Alexis - makes sense, yes. It actually goes by the number of segments now, which isn't really the best way to do it since you have some very long strokes with only one or two segments and some very short strokes with lots of them. Wouldn't be too difficult to calculate the length of the center line and time it by that, so this is definitely something we can work on once we finally get to the tweaking-and-polishing stage.

The tap-hold dictionary menu not working is purely a Not Quite Beta Yet issue, and should be fixed soon.

sfrrr - making Pleco look nice has never really been a big concern, and it's actually gotten considerably harder now that the Palm and PPC code bases have been merged; we've put as much code as we possibly can into the platform-neutral engine layer, to reduce the amount of time we have to spend updating each version separately, and this actually includes a large chunk of the user interface; even things like lists and text fields consist of a tiny bit of Palm or PPC-specific code to link it to the OS and a platform-neutral backend. Since adding new platforms really doesn't help our sales that much (particularly now that we're letting people switch for free), the only way we can justify keeping our software on both Palm and PPC, let alone adding new platforms like Symbian and iPhone, is to keep as much code as possible platform-neutral to minimize the amount of extra time we have to spend updating each one. And that, unfortunately, means that it's going to look very similar on every platform, regardless of how much prettier that platform might theoretically enable it to be.

As far as switching typefaces, the main problem there is Pinyin tone marks; the vast majority of Latin-alphabet typefaces don't include those, the built-in Pocket PC Tahoma font actually doesn't either but we add them with our little PlecoPinyin font files. If you switched to another English typeface you'd either end up with characters from a different font for Pinyin tones, which would look very ugly, or you'd have blank boxes where the tones were supposed to be, neither of which is an appealing option. Switching Chinese fonts is something we may enable eventually, but it's actually gotten a lot harder in this release thanks to the new font system, and since the current font is perfectly serviceable (if not particularly pretty-looking) there are a lot of other things we need to work on first.

Simplifying the interface is something we definitely need to do, hopefully in Beta 3 we'll have something that's at least as user-friendly as 1.0 if not a bit more so, and making the Pocket PC UI a bit less ugly (getting rid of the button borders and putting in larger icons and making the dictionary switch button not quite so hideous) will certainly happen before the finished release, but if you want a super-beautiful Pocket PC version you're going to have to wait until Microsoft kills off Palm, Nokia, and Apple and we can go back to developing for a single platform like we did in the good old days before every freaking technology company decided they had to have their own mobile OS.

 

[FUmminger]

One small change that I would like to see is a file browser for selecting text files for PlecoRead or flashcard import. It is a real pain to have to type in a long path to the file and get all of the spelling and capitalization right. Also, there is just no easy way to see what files you have available without exiting PlecoDict. And every time you do this the dialogs close and you have to start over. Extra bonus points if the file browser was Unicode-aware so that file names could be written in characters, although this isn't crucial.

I expect to be using PlecoRead a _lot_ to practice reading sample texts, so this would be a big usability boost for me.

Frederick

 

[MALAILI]

Wish List

I like many many others am anxiously awaiting the release of 2.0. I have read all of the above and it sounds great, but very complicated, maybe even a little too good.

Anyway, I use pleco almost constantly and add about 150 or more new words a week to my flashcards. When trying to learn a new character, sometimes I like to know the meaning of each of the characters. I find this helpful, but having to look up each of the characters separately takes a lot of time.

Wenlin has a feature that is very useful in this regard, it's called instant look-up and when you pass the cursor over a word, it displays information about each of the characters in the word. If you could offer something along the same line, I think it would be a big benefit.

If I have missed the boat somehow, please tell me.

Keep up the good work.

All the best,

Ma Lai Li

 

[gato]

Wenlin has a feature that is very useful in this regard, it's called instant look-up and when you pass the cursor over a word, it displays information about each of the characters in the word.

The new pop-up function in 2.0 does this.

 

[mikelove]

FUmminger - couple of other requests for a file browser here, but we're still not sure how much work we want to put into that when most people will likely be using our Pleco-format reader/flashcard files (which will come up in a nice auto-generated list), so given how far behind schedule we are on 2.0 already this will likely end up getting punted to a later release. Particularly since it wouldn't even apply to the Pocket PC version thanks to the built-in file browser on that. Unfortunately, the Palm OS filesystem doesn't support Unicode filenames so even when we do implement a file browser it won't be able to handle international file names.

And yes, the instant lookup feature does this pretty well, though the lack of any equivalent of a "mouseover" on a pen-based device means it won't be quite as convenient as the Wenlin version.

 

[MALAILI]

SIRS:

As always you continue to please and amaze me! Thank you!

 

[Alexis]

Hi Mike,

Just tried out pleco beta 2. I like the simpler interface!

Grouping the dictionaries as either C-? or E-? would work fine for me and I wouldn't see a lot of a need for custom dictionary groupings. In that case it may make more sense to just have "C" and "E" icons instead of "C-E" and "E-C".

I'm glad to see the restoration of the dictionary listing when you hold down on the dictionary icon. As a further improvement, it would be nice if it listed ALL the dictionaries right away. Currently it only displays 4. You have to tap the 'down arrow' to show additional ones.

Also, I really like the stroke order testing. Would be nice thought, if it would consider the stroke direction when deciding if the stroke is right or wrong (especially for those troublesome "tiao" and "pie" strokes!).

Keep up the good work!

 

[MALAILI]

DEAR SIRS:

This is, I think, for all of the left-handed users. When I am learning to write new characters, I have to repeatedly stop and look and the character again as when I write, (with my left hand) I cover the character(s). Is there anyway possible to have or give us the option to display the character on the right side of the window?


With good intentions,

Ma lai li

 

[courtlandre]

I am currently learning Chinese (as most probably are here) and I would find it immensely helpful if I was able to view a list of my flashcards(specific lists, not the overview of lists). In other words, I want something similar to the edit lists view, except only one list. The reason this would be nice is, often, I am trying to remember a specific word that I put into a flashcard set. To find it, I start a new session and click through fast to find the word I am looking for. What I want, is to be able to click the list and just have it display, the character, the pinyin and the definition (as much as fits in 1-2 lines). If the word is clicked on, a small window could pop up with the full information (like a flashcard).

Something like the above would be very useful to me and most likely many many others!

 

[mikelove]

Alexis - both good points, that menu definitely ought to be longer and there's no reason we couldn't make direction-testing an option; it's already supported pretty much everywhere in our code, we made a late-breaking decision to disable it since we thought it would frustrate a lot of people but it would be quite easy to bring it back with a preferences setting.

MALAILI - there's going to be a full-on Left-handed Interface option eventually, which will flip that screen and several others to be more southpaw-friendly.

courtlandre - we actually thought about adding an option to display flashcard lists in the main dictionary view, but ended up dropping it along with so many other features due to lack of time. Anyway, it's still a good idea but with all of the other good ideas we're throwing away so that we can get 2.0 finished and start working on the desktop / iPhone / Symbian / web / overhyped mobile platform #37 versions I'm not sure if it'll get done.

 

[courtlandre]

courtlandre - we actually thought about adding an option to display flashcard lists in the main dictionary view, but ended up dropping it along with so many other features due to lack of time. Anyway, it's still a good idea but with all of the other good ideas we're throwing away so that we can get 2.0 finished and start working on the desktop / iPhone / Symbian / web / overhyped mobile platform #37 versions I'm not sure if it'll get done.

Hmm, any way you could do a band aid fix that would maybe at least allow the "edit lists" to show more than the few characters it does? In other words, instead of a duel view, have an option to just display one list, which would then give it more room to display content.

If not, oh well, so many new features in 2.0 that I am looking forward to using. I am also very excited for the overhyped mobile platform #37 version to be released, I heard it is supposed to kill all the other platforms.

 

[mikelove]

See my new Flashcard Changes post, we're planning to make the list on Manage Flashcards take up the entire screen width so you should be able to see a lot more than you can now. (particularly if you go into landscape mode, since we're eventually going to make the list resize around that)