iPhone Feature Requests

I absolutely love my iphone pleco, but it would be nice to have some Taiwanese Mandarin information added. At least some kind of area which highlights tonal difference between the mainland, which can be toggled on and off for the mainland users. Perhaps some of the major vocabulary differences can also be included. There are many books I see in the bookshops here along the lines of 大陸和台灣詞語差別詞典 or 大陸台灣習慣用語差別. Hopefully something you can look into. Thanks!!!
 
We'd love to offer better support for Taiwan, but launching a Taiwan-centric Chinese-to-Chinese dictionary is tricky; it's likely to still cost us a fair amount up-front to license a title like that, but I'm not sure if we've got enough users who are both interested in Taiwanese Mandarin and read Chinese well enough to use a Chinese-to-Chinese dictionary to justify licensing one. A Taiwan-centric Chinese-English dictionary is a better bet, but really the only people who make those are Far East and they've consistently refused to even discuss any sort of licensing deal with us, so unless that changes about all we can do is try to license more dictionaries from Hong Kong or the US.
 
Still hard at work on them - main problem as I've said elsewhere has been the card management stuff; just putting up a screen to show / prompt for answers on flashcards is relatively easy, but providing a good way to organize them is not, and there are a huge number of different UI screens required for card management functions like editing individual cards / adding them to different categories / choosing which order you want to search dictionaries in during an import / etc.

We think we've got a card management interface we're satisfied with now, though, so most of what's left is some minor tweaking / polishing along with a modest redesign of that actual test screen. Won't really be as polished as we'd like until after a couple of releases, though in some respects it should be an improvement over Palm/WM even from day one.
 
A few ideas:

1) It would be very handy is to have half-screen HWR in addition to a keyboard. I know the screen would be crowded, but I'm finding that I have to switch between HWR and KEY a lot and those are extra steps that I don't have to do with my old Treo 650, so I end up reaching for the Treo more often than not.

2) This is more of an issue with the iPhone OS, but could you add an option to have directional controls on the keyboard? I find it hard to move the cursor to the middle of a word (if, for example, I want to go back and add a tone after the first syllable of a word I'm searching for).

3) Under the character info screen, is it possible to show a list of all the flash cards that contain that character?

Keep up the good work!
 
js96 said:
2) This is more of an issue with the iPhone OS, but could you add an option to have directional controls on the keyboard? I find it hard to move the cursor to the middle of a word (if, for example, I want to go back and add a tone after the first syllable of a word I'm searching for).
Click to expand...

I like js96's idea of having directional controls on the keyboard. I also find it difficult to put the cursor in the right place when I am changing a search entry (for example, putting pinyin in front of a character that is already in the search input box).
 
js96 - thanks for the feedback.

What do you mean by "half-screen HWR" - an HWR panel you can put at the bottom of the screen like the keyboard (leaving space clear to see the results), or a handwriting box that appears above the keyboard so that you can combine handwriting and keyboard inputs without having to switch tabs?

The former is already achievable if you set the handwriting background to "transparent" in Settings / Panels, though that feature is a bit wonky at the moment (drawing strokes is kind of laggy / rough compared to doing it in the non-transparent handwriting box).

The latter is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how we'd accommodate it space-wise; we'd have to eliminate the HWR/Rad/Key bar altogether, which I suppose isn't such a big deal if we're combining two of those anyway, but there'd be no easy way to toggle fulltext search or insert wildcards and you'd still have a relatively cramped space to write characters in.

We've had a few requests for a better way of moving the cursor around - it's actually very difficult for us to provide an alternate way to move the cursor in Key mode, though, we'd have to replace Apple's text input field with our own (their field doesn't allow programs to independently move the cursor around, oddly enough). Which we already do in HWR/Rad modes, but doing it in keyboard is tricky since then we also have to roll out an entirely new Pleco version of the iPhone's keyboard - there are some changes in the next iPhone OS release that should make this easier, though, so there's it's likely we'll be able to do something about cursor movement then.

A flashcard search in Char Info would be painfully slow unless we added a separate character index to the flashcard database. Which we could do, but it would significantly slow down the process of adding / editing cards, so I'm not sure if the tradeoff is worth it.
 
Will we be able to import flashcards created on the WM version of Pleco to the iPhone once the flashcards component is available? (Sorry if this has been asked before) I'm assuming the answer is "yes" but I just want to be sure.
 
Yes, it supports the same card list import / export format as our Palm/WM software, and it should also allow be possible to transfer over your entire database file from 2.0 directly without having to export / import.
 
Great! Thanks. I look forward to moving from my HTC2 to my iPod Touch for flashcard study, if it is anything like the improvement that the iPhone version of the document reader was over the WM version. I now used the iPhone version exclusively for reading text, and prefer it for quick word look ups as well. But I'm still wedded to the WM version for flashcards.

By the way, I saw that Apple announced a ship date for the iPad. I wanted to put in another plug for a feature that I'd love to see on the iPad, if you decide to do a iPad optimized version, a feature I mentioned when the iPad was first announced in January. I'd love to have a "virtual whiteboard" for practicing writing characters.
 
Feature Request:

*** Add an option to "Split Characters" in the input field which would return a one-line basic/most common definition and pronunciation of each character down in the search results below. ***
-The option could be displayed as a popup upon tapping and holding onto the characters in the input field ( "Split Characters" or just be an icon of scissors)

At the restaurant...
I sometimes search items on a menu such as "毛血旺" through HWR. These searches usually won't show up in the dictionary, so then I have the tedious task of re-drawing all of the individual characters to get their individual meanings and pronunciations.

As of now...

I search for "毛血旺" through HWR
Result:: Definition of 毛

**start over**

1. HWR 毛
2. HWR 血
3. HWR 旺

(By the third character I've often forgotten what 毛 and 血 mean and how to pronounce them)
 
nihao pengyou / character - a split function like that was actually mentioned a few pages ago; I actually think it's a more elegant solution than adding cursor control buttons, I'm just not 100% sure yet if we can get the performance to be acceptable. But we'll play around with it for a post-flashcard release, anyway; I don't think there'd be a separate button to invoke it, we'd just quietly fetch results for additional characters / words past the end of the longest match (sort of like we do with the document reader) and display those inline in the result list (separated by headers).
 
What about just making the characters you are searching for tapable, so you can either bring up a popup def, or just go to the char info for that character. If it's problematic to tap because tapping would bring up the edit function, maybe you could just have the chars being searched for appear below the search bar like: Searching for: 毛血旺.
 
What do you mean by "half-screen HWR" - an HWR panel you can put at the bottom of the screen like the keyboard (leaving space clear to see the results), or a handwriting box that appears above the keyboard so that you can combine handwriting and keyboard inputs without having to switch tabs?
The latter is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how we'd accommodate it space-wise; we'd have to eliminate the HWR/Rad/Key bar altogether, which I suppose isn't such a big deal if we're combining two of those anyway, but there'd be no easy way to toggle fulltext search or insert wildcards and you'd still have a relatively cramped space to write characters in.
Click to expand...

The latter is what I'm referring to. It would provide a similar setup to the Treo (half handwriting/half keyboard), but I understand it would be rather cramped. I don't ever use the full-text, radical, or wildcard keys any way, so to have the option to remove those keys to free up space wouldn't bother me. If I also turn off the pinyin tone # keys, I think it would be manageable. It would be an interesting option to try out, at any rate.

I already use the full screen HWR with the transparent background and find it very helpful; just looking to optimize a little more.

One more thing- do you foresee having a way to import flashcards from Palm/Windows onto the iPhone version when it's complete?

Keep up the good work!
 
mikelove said:
[...] I don't think there'd be a separate button to invoke it, we'd just quietly fetch results for additional characters / words past the end of the longest match (sort of like we do with the document reader) and display those inline in the result list (separated by headers).
Click to expand...

I often struggle to extract something useful from long search results lists. This is esp. a problem with pinyin searches. Targeted lists with some controls would really improve going from a search to results:

To use the 毛血旺 example:

When Pleco has a search entry which doesn't match the database, it could start a list of segments that do:

毛 results >
---
血 results >
---
旺 results >

Going to the 毛 list would show that character's definitions.

For pinyin, a way to jump to the different tones would be helpful, as well as a view which showed all the characters with that pinyin, allowing a user to select the character and jump to its definition.

----

Aside: I just noticed Pleco's search results are real pains to navigate with the left hand. Mike, could you add an option to center the characters/pinyin on result lists? That way the left index finger wouldn't obscure them when scrolling.

Aside 2: I wonder if there's a fuzzy 'looks like' search for Chinese charcters, so Pleco could show results for words for which the user picked a similar-looking but different character (zhe for kan4 in kan4bao4, for example)

----

mikelove said:
What do you mean by "half-screen HWR" - an HWR panel you can put at the bottom of the screen like the keyboard (leaving space clear to see the results), [...]
Click to expand...
I suspect it would just be too small to use w/o resorting to a capacitive stylus.

Since I often write a character and then try to go to a result without pressing Done, how about in transparent mode, shrinking the writing space a small amount so that along the RHS there is just enough room to press and scroll the search results?

[...] or a handwriting box that appears above the keyboard so that you can combine handwriting and keyboard inputs without having to switch tabs?
Click to expand...
This sounded interesting to me until I tried toggling between HWR and Keyboard; it's so fast I can't see the benefit of a hybrid mode. I have turned some animation/delay settings off; not sure if those affect this.
 
kenianbei - the problem with making characters in the search field tappable is that there are too many other things there to tap on. The iPhone has a very funny way of processing touch events - buttons have a sort of "magnetic" effect, and often seem to pull touches away from other buttons or non-button objects - so while in a large block of text like a definition / reader document it's easy to make characters tappable since there's nothing else to tap on, in the input field there's too much potential for tapping on the wrong thing.

js96 - true, might be worth experimenting with dual-panel input here at least, though maybe we really just need an easier way to toggle between handwriting / keyboard input (it's very fast, as character says, but the finger movement up to the search bar each time could get annoying).

And yes, Palm/WM flashcard database or export files for version 2.0 should transfer seamlessly over to iPhone; for version 1.0 you'd need to run them through the 2.0 converter utility on your Palm/WM device first.

character - I think in that case we'd be better off showing you the results for all of the parts in one big list; searching the database to break down the search query into segments with valid dictionary entries would take about as long as pulling results from it for those entries. Since in the 毛血旺 case you're really only interested in the single-character entries for 毛 and 血, we'd have an iPhone list header "entries for 毛," followed by single-character 毛 entries, then "entries for 血" followed by its entries, etc, with only the last part of the search covering words beginning with that search term too (in case what you entered was only a prefix for something longer).

I think this would only be for character searches, though, not for Pinyin ones - too much ambiguity in the Pinyin case, and anyway with that you can easily see that you've hit the longest match that Pleco can give you and backspace, review it, then clear and enter the next part of the search term.

As far as scrolling with the left hand, interesting idea but I'd rather right-align the characters / Pinyin instead of sticking them in the middle; if we're going to move the interface around for easy thumb scrolling we might as well go all the way. A "looks like" search might be possible with our character component database, but it would be a lot of work - I guess one option might be to pull the strokes for the character out of that database, feed them to the handwriting recognizer, then see what results it comes up with other than the original character, but that would be tough to control and would probably pick up a lot of characters that didn't look at all alike but happened to have similar stroke shapes / orders.

I think the handwriting partial-sensitivity option has already been mentioned once or twice; I think it would work best if we disabled stroke capture in that area when the box was blank but enabled it once you started writing, though that'll require some tricky event-passing code.
 
Hi Mike!

Could you add a highlighted border around the HWR area? I use the transparent background so I can see the definition updating in the background (to avoid writing too many characters then having to backtrack, etc). However, when I pass Pleco to someone else they invariable touch too high (invoking the keyboard) or too low (selecting the wrong character) then getting all frustrated before handing it back to me to reset. I think that would be an easy addition and relieve A LOT of new user frustration.

Thanks!
 
So we'd be adding some sort of a thick border around the entry list in the middle of the transparent handwriting screen? I'm worried that might cover up useful text, though - would it maybe help if we just added the option for a button to quickly toggle transparent handwriting on and off?
 
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