Pleco v2 story/bug/feature/questions.

[stisev]

Hi Mike Love & All,

I was at the library study room hastily studying Chinese for my class, when I heard someone practice-speaking Chinese with his PDA. I got really curious (and I needed a break), so I figured it's a good time to converse with a fellow wai4guo2 ren2 (foreigner). That's when I realized and he introduced me to Pleco v2.

MY GOD!!! Where have you been all my life, Pleco!? He showed me one by one all the features and the fact that he was still learning to use the software. My jaw seems to drop a little more each time.

I finally reached a stage of stupor and began drooling incessantly when I used the flashcards with integrated chinese I + built in voice. I frantically scribbled down all of the information (Pleco, and the flashcards needed), studied a bit more alongside him, and went home. I consequently researched my brains off, read the instruction manual, etc.

Some suggestions he had + I agreed with.
1) When moving to next flashcard, cut off sound to previous and play next. This is hands down the biggest problem with flashcards. I move very quickly through a few of his flash cards, but the program wouldn't play the next file's sound as the previous one was playing and it got annoying after the 5th time. He had a button integrated to play the sound, but I found that to be troublesome.

2) He was saying that Pleco should give the user the option to allow to add MORE than 3 entries to top "bar" in flash cards and was indifferent at first, but then I agreed with him when we tried to figure out how long we had been doing the flashcards. For example, he had 1) card #(67/137), 2)(Session C:I) 3) (Card C:I), IIRC, but I also wanted *time*. (The max limit is 3 according to the website so I hope this can be increased to 6.

Pleco bugs? questionable behavior:
3) He had the female voices (which I do not see mentioned anywhere on the site other than manual!) The voices do not 'truly' alternate in the flashcard format and this drove him nuts. Let's say the male speaks.. then you hit next button, the male speaks again. I don't know if this is intended, but I kind of liked it. I get to choose which voice (WITHOUT going to preferences) I want by hitting the voice I want to hear and then click next. Not complaining this one -- just reporting it, in case it's unintended behavior

Pleco questions!
4) Can we use this program for flash cards for "general" subjects like, say, biology? I don't see why not. If so, it would increase its usefulness ten fold, because I could also use it for all my other subjects!

5)


PS: If you were the person at the library and you see this post, make sure to POST!! *waves*

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! Though I'm sorry we didn't manage to reach you sooner, another sign that we need to figure out a way to improve our marketing efforts.

Anyway, re your suggestions, it'd definitely be nice to get audio to pause on flashcard advances like that, but audio playback is a rather finicky / bug-prone part of Pleco's code so I'm a bit nervous about opening it up in a minor update - certainly something we can try to fix in 2.1, though. Adding more options to the top bar is also a good (and oft-requested) idea, but we'd probably have to do this by having 2 rows of text instead of 1, and that would make things a bit cramped, particularly on square-screen devices - we'd have to require that the top / bottom bars remain hidden (they can optionally be made visible in the current version) and perhaps also shrink the control buttons on the bottom of the screen a bit to make room.

The female voice is officially "unofficial" at the moment since it's kind of buggy (a few hundred recordings don't match the syllables Pleco thinks they are, and there's a lot of static), but we actually have added better support for alternating voices in 2.0.2 - if you download/install the beta version of that you can now configure the audio to truly alternate, or to alternate but always start on male / female for each new card.

You could probably set up Pleco for general-purpose flashcards like that if you imported / created them as English-to-Chinese, the software doesn't really care what's in the headword or definition in that case, but it hasn't been designed / tested for that so you might encounter some unexpected problems - probably not anything too serious, though.

 

[stisev]

I'm a bit nervous about opening it up in a minor update - certainly something we can try to fix in 2.1, though.

Great! I look forward to that update! This is a huge 'bug' or buggish behavior IMO, but I know you have a lot on your plate.

The female voice is officially "unofficial" at the moment since it's kind of buggy (a few hundred recordings don't match the syllables Pleco thinks they are, and there's a lot of static), but we actually have added better support for alternating voices in 2.0.2 - if you download/install the beta version of that you can now configure the audio to truly alternate, or to alternate but always start on male / female for each new card.

Actually, I found the female voice to be rather good. The male voice is best (obviously), but the female is not too bad. Obviously, you have high standards Mike, so I can understand why you want to make it unofficial release/addon.

hough. Adding more options to the top bar is also a good (and oft-requested) idea, but we'd probably have to do this by having 2 rows of text instead of 1, and that would make things a bit cramped, particularly on square-screen devices - we'd have to require that the top / bottom bars remain hidden (they can optionally be made visible in the current version) and perhaps also shrink the control buttons on the bottom of the screen a bit to make room.

2 rows would be fine, but remember that it would an OPTION. The 1 line would be default, but the user would have the choice to make it two lines (if he/she chooses more than 3 items to be shown).



One feature I either missed or was completely missed was themes! Pleco should allow configuration of things like:

1) Background color
2) Text color

I know it already does that for tone-based characters (I saw this, well done!), but if I ever use Pleco, it's going be in bed with lights off. It would be great if the user could change the color of the screen/text. Would this be possible in a minor/major update?

I see here: http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1406&start=480 it's already been discussed.

radioman - Interesting - at this point, most Palm-specific new features like this are going to be dependent on a) whether or not Pleco works on the Pre via Classic and b) whether Classic would support the feature in question, but if both of those things are true then this certainly might be a nice thing to add. And if not I suppose there's still an argument for doing it on WM, even though that doesn't officially even support color schemes (well not very well, anyway) we're pretty much drawing the entire UI with our own code anyway so we could easily add one ourselves.

[/quote]

I would love to have a way to customize MY OWN theme (black background/white or gray text, whichever user wants) and save that as a "theme" in pleco. Then we can select the "theme" from the menu when in the dictionary.
This is on a Windows Mobile platform.

 

[stisev]

I'd also like to see what you're thoughts on:

1) A "back" button. We have a button to erase the entire line, but no one line back

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! W.r.t. the female voice, I suppose I should abide more by that old adage of not letting the perfect interfere get in the way of the good, but it's hard not to be aware of / bothered by all of the inaccuracies. 2 lines of status info would certainly be optional, yes - no reason to cram up the interface for people who don't want it that crammed. Color themes would probably be customizable if we did introduce them - no reason not to, really, particularly since we've got all of the code for choosing colors / rendering fonts with custom colors / etc in there anyway. The main issue would be determining when to invert the icons, but I suppose we could just do that with a checkbox - let users decide when the background is dark enough to warrant white-on-black instead of black-on-white.

There already is a back button, in fact there are two - one to go back to the previous entry viewed (left arrow), and one to go back to the previous search (downward-facing triangle next to the Input Field) - was that what you were referring to, or was this some other function like moving the cursor around?

 

[stisev]

There already is a back button, in fact there are two - one to go back to the previous entry viewed (left arrow), and one to go back to the previous search (downward-facing triangle next to the Input Field) - was that what you were referring to, or was this some other function like moving the cursor around?

Hi Mike,
No, I was talking about a "back delete" button. Instead of having to go down to my keyboard, having a small button that allows one to go "back" and delete the last text in back of the cursor. Do we have this?

 

[tianli]

No, I was talking about a "back delete" button. Instead of having to go down to my keyboard, having a small button that allows one to go "back" and delete the last text in back of the cursor. Do we have this?

The handwriting and radical input screens both have a very handy backspace-del button (small eraser with left arrow icon) and of course the pleco keyboard has the usual backspace key that you refer to. I have the input set to handwriting by default and at the bottom of screen ...so this backspace delete (if it is what you are looking for) is always on hand and reguarly used.

On an Ipaq 212 the OS keyboard also happens to be displayed on the bottom of every screen so I do not even need to pan through the input types to get to a keyboard and while I can say my newly acquired 210 fails to impress, for Pleco I am unsure it could be bettered (a wee rant and recommendation all rolled into one :wink: ).

 

[stisev]

Hi guys,

I finally got Pleco. I want to apologize for not actually reading the manual. My questions were answered there.

The handwriting and radical input screens both have a very handy backspace-del button (small eraser with left arrow icon) and of course the pleco keyboard has the usual backspace key that you refer to. I have the input set to handwriting by default and at the bottom of screen ...so this backspace delete (if it is what you are looking for) is always on hand and reguarly used.

Yes, it's not default, but I added it via prefs

On an Ipaq 212 the OS keyboard also happens to be displayed on the bottom of every screen so I do not even need to pan through the input types to get to a keyboard and while I can say my newly acquired 210 fails to impress, for Pleco I am unsure it could be bettered (a wee rant and recommendation all rolled into one ).

Yea, I was astonished as to the configurability of pleco!