scrolling & cycling through dictionaries

[kevinoc]

Hi,

Just a couple of small things I've noticed on my TH55:

1. In the on-line help screen, the only way to scroll seems to be with the stylus. It would be nice if the buttons/jog dial worked here as they do in the rest of the dictionary. On the tips screens (opened by pressing the 'i' in the upper-right corner of the preferences screens), page-up and down buttons work, but not the jog dial.

2. Since you're now making several great new databases available, s/a the LDC English-Chinese word list, it would be nice if there were more flexibility in how the databases are used while searching or switching between E-C and C-E modes. I would like the option of having a search automatically check the other databases in the event that an entry is not found in the current database, and to be able to choose the order in which the databases are consulted. Also, it would be nice to be able to come back to the last database that was used when switching back to that language mode (i.e. E-C or C-E), or at least to be able to choose which database to default to. Currently it seems to always show NWP when I switch back to E-C mode, regardless of which dictionary I used last. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement this behavior, but I think it would make using multiple dictionaries a lot easier.

Thanks for all your great work!

Kevin

 

[herve]

1. How would PlecoDict make the difference between using the jog dial for scrolling in the result area and using the jog dial for scrolling the dictionary list ? A multi-button solution might require "some practice" to be actually usable :wink:

2. I already raised this point in an other thread.
I agree with the need of a "search within current dict / search in all dict" option. This should be simple to implement, I guess.
In particular, I started building french-based dictionaries : there is absolutly no need that PlecoDict continue search in english-based dictionaries.....
The order of dict is interesting also. However, thinking more about it, I would need order + sublist. I mean : when I want PlecoDict to search in different dict, I might want to exclude very specific dictionaries.
Specifying dict to switch on when switching language : I did not checked what happens, but the idea sounds good.

 

[goulniky]

As Mike commented in another thread :

There's no way to force the dictionaries to open in a particular order (though there probably should be) or to only consider the currently-selected dictionary (again, there should be, and it would actually be very easy to add)

I think it became essential the minute you allowed users to build their own dictionaries: in yet another thread, s.o. said he'd been compiling a Chinese Grammar DB, now we have the French-Chinese (or reverse) case. Then of course there's the prospect of a Chinese-Chinese and other future products

I'm not sure how generic the dictionary concept is with its E>C and C>E modes, but it seems that once you've solved the remaining bugs, you'd want to offer at least 2 choices : 1) search all/search one and 2) select dictionary search order.

 

[mikelove]

kevinoc - good observation about the help screen scrollbar, this should be fixable but unfortunately the same is not true of the 'i' screens (since those are drawn / managed by the Palm OS).

I agree with all three of you that there need to be some changes to the dictionary management system. A lot of the infrastructure for this is already in place, actually - we already use "language IDs" instead of a simple Chinese-English/English-Chinese flag, and it would be trivial to enable the use of other languages at whatever point we wanted to do so.

I suppose the ultimate thing might be to replace the languages switch button with a more elaborate mode-switching system, something where you can define particular sets of dictionaries that might be searched in particular modes. Combine this with a good file manager and you would theoretically be able to wrangle dozens of dictionaries at once. This probably won't happen until version 1.1, but it's certainly something to think about anyway.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

 

[herve]

Mike,

It is very nice to see that you have all these good ideas in mind ...... we should stop discussing and let you go further :wink:

However (my opinion, and I hope that at least a few others share it...):

Althought it might be a good approach, changing the language button, I would prefer to start discussion with the "preference" approach.
First I personnaly don't think I will change the way I want PlecoDict to behave very often. Because I do not want the language button to be complex to use every time, changing my preferences from time to time is good enough. Moreover, there is the possibility to add the "preference" menu as a button on top of the screen, so that acces can be quite easy.

The idea of defining "sets of dictionaries" looks very good : hundreds (dream or nightmare? :roll: ) of dictionaries, sorted into sets dedicated to particular usage of PlecoDict, plus dict order in each set (or no order if PlecoDict is to check only in the current dict), ...... all of that in PlecoDict 1.1.......?

 

[mikelove]

Well we certainly wouldn't force this change to the language button; what we would probably do is add in yet another Preferences screen where you could configure the dictionary switching in detail. By default it would define two dictionary "groups", one containing all English-to-Chinese dictionaries and one containing all Chinese-to-English, but you could change this around to whatever other organizational system suited you. If we really pushed we could even allow you to define multiple toolbar buttons to do this in different ways, or apply particular criteria to determine which dictionary is searched first for a particular query (Pinyin searches follow one sequence and character searches another)... there are a lot of options, and as we have not made and will not make any public commitment about when exactly 1.1 is going to be ready we should actually have time to do some interesting things with this.

(in fact, once the Pocket PC version is out we're going to stop speculating about release dates altogether - doing so for Pocket PC was important, because we've got a lot of customers thinking about buying new PDA's, but after that there's really no reason why we should ever guess about another release date again)