User Interface Feedback Thread

[ziggy]

I turned "score immediately" on, and it works (it was apparently not "on" by default). Very good, that was irritating, thank you.
I have version 2.4.5 (non-Market). Can you please clarify ?

 

[mikelove]

I turned "score immediately" on, and it works (it was apparently not "on" by default).
I have already version 2.4.5 (non-Market). Could you please clarify ? Thank you.

Type pleco.com/getandroid in your device's web browser to update.

 

[HW60]

Japanese flashcards work very well with Pleco since some of the last updates. Compared to chinese, there is
- no dictionary (but user dictionaries with japanese words can be made),
- no audio pronunciation (which is less important in japanese),
- no HWR for Kana and some special japanese Kanji (which would be nice to have, because the Android Kanji HWR I know only work with copy and paste, not as input method)
- and no search for pronunciation.

I would like to ask for this search (as I have done in a previous post.

I think it should not be to difficult to implement:
- Kana search works when the headword consists of Kana only or Kana+Kanji (I can find コーヒー as headword, but not as pronunciation).
- The pronunciation fields can easily be identified, because they all begin with @
- If it helps (and different to Google Chrome input ...) the search string could start with @ to immediately identify this as a non pinyin search and make it an almost full-text search

 

[mikelove]

- and no search for pronunciation.

I would like to ask for this search (as I have done in a previous post.

Honestly, absent a more concerted push into Japanese (with Japanese specific dictionaries etc) we can't really justify it - supporting Japanese-specific kanji is something we can justify given our push into more scholarly Chinese character dictionaries, and that will be coming when we next upgrade our handwriting engine, but there simply aren't enough people who'd benefit from Japanese pronunciation searches in user dictionaries to take time away from Chinese-related features to implement them.

 

[mfcb]

i'd like to extend HW60's idea of a @ search in the pronounciation to korean that at least doubles the potential user base (at least HW60 and me)

 

[mikelove]

i'd like to extend HW60's idea of a @ search in the pronounciation to korean that at least doubles the potential user base (at least HW60 and me)

But why does this need to happen in Pleco? That's the part that confuses me... why not just get an app designed around Japanese or Korean?

 

[HW60]

But why does this need to happen in Pleco? That's the part that confuses me... why not just get an app designed around Japanese or Korean?

That is not easy to answer:
- Pleco's flashcard system for Japanese is already almost perfect even without any changes
- I started learning Chinese, then added Japanese, and now I am happy not to need to change the flashcard system
- Pleco's flashcard system is almost perfect
- Anki's flashcard system can be used with lots of different languages, but Pleco's system can be configured much better
- Many years ago - younger people will not remember - Pleco for Windows Mobile was able to do Japanese flashcards including search for pronunciation even without any @ in pronunciation, and some users used it and got accustomed to it, without knowing that it was not official usage
- With user dictionaries for japanese words working the biggest step to completion has been done with the last major updates - thanks again for that!
- There are only 2 little steps missing to make Pleco for Japanese flashcards perfect: HWR for Japanese Kanji and Kana (which seems to be within reach) and the search for pronunciation (which is really easy to implement, as the same search already works with japanese kana headwords)
- Pronunciation search with @kana is not the most important improvement Pleco needs, but now I export all my japanese flashcards to an Excel spreadsheet and do pronunciation searches in Excel - not very comfortable
- The treatment of duplicates with the same headword and different pronunciation would be an improvement not only for Japanese flashcards

 

[LantauMan]

i'd like to extend HW60's idea of a @ search in the pronounciation to korean that at least doubles the potential user base (at least HW60 and me)

But why does this need to happen in Pleco? That's the part that confuses me... why not just get an app designed around Japanese or Korean?

I'm with Mike. I also don't get it, HW60's subsequent explanation notwithstanding. Aside from the fact that Japanese uses a largely similar set of Chinese ideograms (and Korean uses a mainly dis-similar set), there is almost no other overlap between those languages and Chinese. Near-zero grammatical overlap. Many characters have similar, yet not identical, meanings in Chinese and Japanese, so definitions won't be exactly relevant; a large proportion of Japanese character combinations have no meaning in Chinese and vice-versa. I studied Japanese for three years, so I know somewhat of what I speak.

I read so many requests from HW60 asking Mike to shoehorn in functions so that Pleco acts as a Japanese flashcard system, it has baffled me. Though he/she explains that Pleco's flashcards are a wee bit better than AnkiDroid, yet he/she also explains how much troublesome tweaking he/she has to do to get Pleco to run in Japanese. My main worry is that accomodating Pleco for Japanese and Korean could bloat the software unnecessarily for 99.9% of users. I don't expect my Spanish-English dictionary to include French, though they share Latinate roots. Clearly HW60's requests are well-intended tips of the hat to the brilliant--I would say genius--design of Pleco. The better solution would be to license Pleco's UI to other dictionary developers, and have something just as useful for Korean.

EDIT: I should add that as a (struggling) Cantonese speaker, I appreciate the recent moves toward Pleco's accomodation of that troublesome dialect, and never would have thought of pushing Mike in such a direction. Though if Pleco is going to expand to accomodate more than Putonghua, then emphasis on Cantonese and, in the future, Shanghainese and other Chinese dialects, is more the way to go than toward unrelated East Asian languages.

 

[ziggy]

I have a suggestion relating to the "speaker" button location.

When I read an entry on the definition screen (the one specific to one entry, without an input window), the speaker button is at the bottom. When I highlight a character in the definition, this button jumps at the top, making it less comfortable than at the bottom (with one single hand..), and less intuitive in my opinion. I would expect it to stick to where it was, if possible...

I know that there is a setting to switch from "arrows at the bottom" to arrows at the top.. But it's not the same, since arrows + speaker go together in my opinion,when exploring unknown word(s) in a definition (especially in the very useful example sentences, bravo).

I think there would be enough space to put this speaker button, far right, far left or in the middle. In the middle would be best for me, albeit not very orthodox. In this case, it may even be possible to also put it at the center in the previous screen (it would be from left to right : dict. abbreviation, "+", Speaker, arrow upwards, arrow downwards)..so as to keep it in the same place when switching from the main definition to the pop-up bubble.

Also, and we discussed this earlier, I'd like the "return" Android button to make the search screen "browse" backwards to previous words, instead of "unexpectedly" close the app. Not sure this feature was implemented or not... I see that tap-and-hold this button actually closes the ap, so a short tap bringing back previous search would be ideal for me. Any hope ?
Thanks.

 

[HW60]

I should add that as a (struggling) Cantonese speaker, I appreciate the recent moves toward Pleco's accomodation of that troublesome dialect, and never would have thought of pushing Mike in such a direction. Though if Pleco is going to expand to accomodate more than Putonghua, then emphasis on Cantonese and, in the future, Shanghainese and other Chinese dialects, is more the way to go than toward unrelated East Asian languages.

In April 2010 Japanese flashcards could be used with Pleco for WM without any change of the Software (viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2250). This included search for pronunciation and included user dicts. I made more than 5000 japanese custom flashcards with Pleco. With Android this did not work any longer, and all the "shoohorning" and "pushing" was to restore the old capabilities of WM also in Android, which is now almost achieved (no search for kana pronunciation yet), and "over-achieved" to a great extent like full-text search in user dictionaries.

Pleco is very well suited to study japanese and chinese at the same time. Many of the words only have different pronunciations. Maybe you are right, and there are only 0.01% of the Pleco users who are fond of Japanese. But I would not mind using Pleco for Czech because I like the flashcard system and am accustomed to it - and it works.

 

[LantauMan]

I'd like the "return" Android button to make the search screen "browse" backwards to previous words, instead of "unexpectedly" close the app.

I second that.

 

[mikelove]

When I read an entry on the definition screen (the one specific to one entry, without an input window), the speaker button is at the bottom. When I highlight a character in the definition, this button jumps at the top, making it less comfortable than at the bottom (with one single hand..), and less intuitive in my opinion. I would expect it to stick to where it was, if possible...

Jumps are always difficult, yes... the thinking on this was that the functional grouping (navigation in one bar, things to do with the word you've selected in the other) was more important than locational consistency, and that the ergonomic benefits of having the arrow buttons in the easy-to-reach bottom bar were also valuable, but I can see how an option for more consistent audio button placement might be helpful.

However, we can certainly consider adding an option to rearrange these toolbars when we next update the reader. Though this probably won't happen until later in the year, since we're heavily revamping it on iOS (with draggable selection handles, among other things) and want to see how that plays out before porting it to Android - platform-neutral upgrades generally will show up on Android first, to take advantage of its easy beta-testing and quick bug fix update turnaround, but platform-specific upgrades (UI stuff like this, and other platform-API-specific stuff like support for direct tap lookups in PDFs and Word documents) will generally show up on iOS first because it's still producing 3/4 of our revenues.

Also, and we discussed this earlier, I'd like the "return" Android button to make the search screen "browse" backwards to previous words, instead of "unexpectedly" close the app. Not sure this feature was implemented or not... I see that tap-and-hold this button actually closes the ap, so a short tap bringing back previous search would be ideal for me. Any hope ?

Honestly, personally I don't like this at all (find it very annoying when the browser does it, in fact) and I'm also not quite sure how we'd implement it: do we mark the first search of a particular session and exit once you've gone past that, or do we go all the way back to the beginning of your search history? What about on tablets with the definition visible on the main screen?

 

[ziggy]

Thank you for considering my first suggestion, I hope it will appear in the next release.

Regarding the other point, "go backwards instead of exit", I'd say that either "backwards forever" (so to speak) or "since last access to the app", or even ten or twenty "pages" back, would be fine for me.
Of course everyone has his own habits, but I don't really see why a long-tap on button to exit wouldn't be OK for most users, allowing therefore this possibility of a short-tap to browse back. It's what Kostya Vasilyev did in his excellent Aquamail Pro (email) application for example - not to mention the universal use of the back and forth arrows on Internet PC browsers.
Anyway, I see that I'm not the only one who would like it (LantauMan..). Thank you anyway for considering this possibility.

 

[ckatt]

Thank you for considering my first suggestion, I hope it will appear in the next release.

Regarding the other point, "go backwards instead of exit", I'd say that either "backwards forever" (so to speak) or "since last access to the app", or even ten or twenty "pages" back, would be fine for me.
Of course everyone has his own habits, but I don't really see why a long-tap on button to exit wouldn't be OK for most users, allowing therefore this possibility of a short-tap to browse back. It's what Kostya Vasilyev did in his excellent Aquamail Pro (email) application for example - not to mention the universal use of the back and forth arrows on Internet PC browsers.
Anyway, I see that I'm not the only one who would like it (LantauMan..). Thank you anyway for considering this possibility.

I wouldn't mind seeing this work in some way. why not have the back button take you through the search history? in the old palm pleco the was a drop down box or something to see the search history. i liked how easy that was.
i think a long tap to exit would work fine for me too.

 

[HW60]

During flashcard sessions I sometimes see a pronunciation (or listen to a word) and do not remember the character nor the word. After revealing, I would like to see other characters with the same pronunciation. I could go back to the main screen and enter the pronunciation using the keyboard, but that is rather time consuming. It would be more comfortable when after tapping the character during the flashcard session and tapping the right arrow in the top right, there would be a "Pron" button (besides the other 5 buttons from Defn to Words) which shows a list of all characters with that particular pronunciation.

 

[mikelove]

During flashcard sessions I sometimes see a pronunciation (or listen to a word) and do not remember the character nor the word. After revealing, I would like to see other characters with the same pronunciation. I could go back to the main screen and enter the pronunciation using the keyboard, but that is rather time consuming. It would be more comfortable when after tapping the character during the flashcard session and tapping the right arrow in the top right, there would be a "Pron" button (besides the other 5 buttons from Defn to Words) which shows a list of all characters with that particular pronunciation.

Not unreasonable - we're actually planning to collapse this to fewer tabs (in part so that we can add tabs for other information on words - synonyms / antonyms / frequency / cross-dictionary example sentence search / etc) so we can look at adding this when we do that.

 

[monsieurdiarra]

Hi!

It would be amazingly comfortable if I could split my screen (I'm using Pleco on both an Android phone and tablet) while taking notes during my Chinese class!



T.

PS: For info, I'm using an Asus Eee Pad transformer TF201 and a Samsung Galaxy S3.

 

[mikelove]

It would be amazingly comfortable if I could split my screen (I'm using Pleco on both an Android phone and tablet) while taking notes during my Chinese class!

We're hoping Google releases an official API for split-screen support in Android 5.0 - if not, we might consider supporting Samsung et al's proprietary ones.

 

[radioman]

Sorta Related - I have an old iPad and a new one and an iPhone.

- iPad New - Pleco Master, for looking at documents via OCR
- iPhone - Pleco for periodic word lookup
- iPad Old - Notability - Using a capacitive pen to write on the iPad. Great for writing Chinese as it has block layouts. Automatically files your notes in Dropbox after every class.

But the main takeaway is that having one old iPad or tablet to "write" notes eliminates the need to even take a paper notebook to class, and being able to write Hanzi on the tablet is very 自然的.

 

[ziggy]

Hello,

I must be me, but I'm still having a hard time understanding how the flashcard system works. Another odd feature is that when I change my "Profile" selection from Weighted to Space repetition or to Simple , the Test type automatically changes...And I have to manually select "prompt for..." (etc). Is this normal ?

Also, by the way, I don't understand what is the menaing of these three Profiles (couldn't find it in the tutorial). Thank you ilf you can help me understand.

And finally, would it be possible to download HSK cards in French, top go with my French-Chinese dictionary ?
Thanks.