[bogleg]

In preparation for the 0.7.0 final release, I'd like to know what are the things that irritate you the most about using the program. Or, what annoyed you so much that you stopped using it. I'll probably defer super complicated requests till later, but I'll try my best to see what I can get into this next release. And if you agree/disagree with someone, mention it, as that's useful info as well.

Thanks!

Chris

[drahnier]

Nothing annoying (it's already a great tool), but two things that I'd like to see:
- updated handedict plugin
- updated/extended stroke animation module

[bogleg]

Well, I'll have to ping mandarinboy to see if he's done any updates to the stroke animations. What do you want extended?

And you just want the handedict plugin to use the latest version of the Handedict dictionary file?

Chris

[drahnier]

- stroke animations: lot's of hanzi are missing from the stroke animations. I'd just like to see a more complete set.

- for the handedict: yes, I hope for a more up to date version (the handedict is much more complete and accurate than cedict, or adso, imho)

[damies]

The most annoying things about ZDT for me:

• Not being in the Ubuntu Repository, this stopped me using ZDT on my PC (but not my Mac)
  
• no help! took me quite a while to work out how to enter the pinyin tones.
  
• Meaning flash card has pinyin as optional, pinyin flash card doesn't have meaning as optional.
  
• scoring does not show how many with/without pinyin.

I don't mean to sound like a winger as this is an awesome application, this is intended as a suggestion list, I understand that some are probably easier to implement than others. I have listed in order of most annoying for me.

Some other great features in no particular order would be:

• stroke order flashcards, maybe an outline of the character and the user has to click on the strokes in the correct order.
  
• lookup character by radical
  
• adjustment of the font size for the flash cards

Thanks heaps for the great work.

Dave.

[bogleg]

Hi Dave,

1) I'll look and see what's involved in getting into the Ubuntu repository.

2) You should be able to access help from the menu. Help > Help Contents. There's also context sensitive help (based on the view your in) that can be accessed by pressing the Help key (on mac) and F1 on PC. Now, I haven't done a great job keeping it updated with all the recent changes, but it does have section on what needs to be entered in the flashcards.

3) You want to be able to toggle showing the definition in Pinyin Recall mode? I can look into that.

4) I'm not sure I understand this one. Can you explain more?

I've added your first two features to my list of features to consider. However, you can already adjust the font size of the flashcards. There are several functions in the Edit > Text Size menu that should help with that. The flashcard one adjusts the character font on its own, separate from the rest.

Hope that helps

Chris

[damies]

Hi Chris,

1) Thanks!
2) I see now, I was not familiar with CEDICT, actually I'd never heard of it, but found it with some googling. Some description of the tone numbers or a link would have helped me.
3) Yes, sorry if i wasn't clear, english is my first language, i'm just terible at it.
4) OK, I used the flash card in definition test mode with the pinyin off (to see if i can remember the meaning of the charecter without the pinyin) then only turn the pinyin on if needed, So I would like to have a count of how many characters I got right with out the pinyin as apposed to how many with the pinyin. Hope that makes sence.

I found the text size now thanks,

Dave.

[tiantian]

Annoying: Why is annotating and dictionary-searching when using the handedict-plugin so much slower? I know its almost twice as big. but there must be a quicker way...right now its so slow that the annotator is almost unusable (at least on my old Athlon XP 2000+ machine)

Suggestions:

wo....7 beta 3 is almost perfect. What I would really like to see is an option for being able to choose a seperate font for pinyin and translation and not just one global font. I like my hanzi to be displayed in my nice Kai font...but this causes pinyin and translations to be ugly.

and another question: might you be able to integrate the Hanzidict handwriting recognition into the programm? you can download the source here: http://www.kiang.org...re/hanzilookup/

Would be cool if one could activate it in the "Show View" dialog.

tiantian

[Luobot]

Hard to use the word Annoying with such a great program. After struggling to get over it, here are some suggestions (and I’ll admit I haven’t seen the beta, so I’m not sure it any of the following is already there).

1 - A really tiny thing: I’d like ZDT to remember the last column width that I set it to between sessions. I’m always expanding the columns and it’s always shrinking them back.
2 - A really medium small thing: ZDT is set to search automatically without the user having to click Search. Sometimes this is annoying when pulling up a word previously entered in the drop-down, but I also wanted to change the search filter between Exact Match / Begins With / Ends With, and it’s already off doing a search that will pull together 5 pages or so of results. On the other hand, sometimes this is just fine and probably is just the behavior that some have asked for (not having to click Search). I would prefer if you made it one of the options in Preferences:
o Search On Click
o Search Without Click
The default could be the current Search Without Click.
3 - A really big thing: Being able to attach my own soundfiles (as previously discussed).

[TapioT]

Hi,

For me the most annoying thing is the scoring algorithm - if I understood it correctly, that is. I like to dump any new words that I see to ZDT and then start learning them whenever I have time. As a result, before I get a word right, I may have to see it in ZDT perhaps 10 times. The default algorithm is that every wrong answer adds -2 to the score of that word, which means that I then have to type it correctly 20 times before I get back to the starting point. Or this is at least how I understood the algorithm.

I noticed that I can change the "-2" above to "-1", but I what I would really like is a TCP-like algorithm: every correct answer adds 1 to the score and wrong answer deducts 30 % off the total. When I get to 10 points or so, after one year or so, the word can disappear from the list.

Otherwise, I think ZDT is a really good program, congratulations!

-Tapio

[bogleg]

Tiantian -

Yeah, I realize the Handedict (and Adso) dictionaries are quite a bit slower then cedict. The handedict dictionary is actually almost 3 times larger then cedict. I've been playing around with things like database indexes and such, and while I've been able to speed up 'exact match' queries for character and pinyin, it doesn't help much with 'contains' or definition queries. Anyway, what I'm really saying is I need someone with more database experience than I have to help me out.

I like your font idea. Let me see if I can get it in to the next release. I've also thought about integrating Hanzilookup before, but it's licensed under the GPL which doesn't seem compatible with the ZDT's EPL license. http://en.wikipedia....e#Compatibility

Chris

[bogleg]

Luobot -

1 & 2) Let me see what I can do for this next release.

3) Not going to get into 0.7.0 final, but I definitely would like to make it one of the major highlights of the next, next release.

Chris

[PJPoon]

Could you create a feature and provide an update site so that I can install ZDT in Eclipse instead of running it as a stand alone RCP application?
Other than that ZDT is an amazing program.

[peterjez]

I want to echo what most people have said. ZDT is not annoying. It's a great program.

Here are some ideas I have:
1. Have some information about categories next to the category name: (number of words, maybe like an average score to tell you which category you should study).
2. Use flash cards from multiple categories. What if I wanted to just do this overall test that tested from all my categories at once, or maybe a specific category?
3. Make categories more like folders. I've been reading Dragonball Z in Chinese and I have a category for each book that I read. Now I have read 20 different books, and have 20 different categories and it's hard to navigate through. I wish I could just group them all into one Dragonball category. This could help with my idea #2. Previously I was just creating another category called AllDB and putting words in there from all the DB categories.
4. I want to be able to search a category for a word. Sometimes I find a mistake in one of the flashcards (like maybe the pinyin is wrong), but then the list is 300 words long. Finding that word is kind of annoying.
5. Are there really other plugins for ZDT? Because I haven't found any.
6. We need an online place to share categories. I've spent many hours just creating my dragonball categories for example. If only I could share them.
7. Here's a far out idea: what if I could enter in some text and then ZDT automatically extract flash cards for me. For example, maybe I read an online article that I want to study. Then I input all the article's text and then ZDT could extract all the relevant words (maybe based on your own scores of words, or frequency that the word appears in the language).
8. Why are scores stored in the word in the category and not universally? For example, I can have one word that I have in two different categories, but my score for that same word could be different. Scores should be stored in the dictionary itself or something, that way each time you access that word, you can update your score for that word.
9. Like Idea #1, why not put your scores next to the words in the category list?
10. My final idea which I brought to you in another post: make this tool usable for Chinese learning English.

Hahah sorry to overload you and thanks for hearing me out

[rabbit]

Dear Chris,

ZDT is really excellent!

There's just one small thing which I'm actually missing a lot: I'd like to have the option to see the definition instead of the character in the pinyin recall test mode.

If that functionality would be included, ZDT would be perfect for me!

Thank you so much!
Uwe

[bogleg]

@PJPoon - Can you explain why you'd like to do this?

@peterjez - I like a lot of your comments. I'm adding a link to your post to my todo list. Let me comment on a few of them though.

2) You can already use flashcards from multiple categories. In the flashcard dialog where you pick your category to test, use ctrl-click (Windows) to select more than one category.

5) Right now, the plugins not included with the main program install are the dictionary ones (adso, and handedict) and the sound plugins. I've written a simple chinesepod one for demo purposes, but I haven't published it.

6) Email me (fongcn at gmail dot com) any word lists you've created. I have a bunch of user submitted lists posted here: http://zdt.sourcefor...wordlist_index/

Chris

[PJPoon]

Well, I always have Eclipse open and I pretty much do everything with Eclipse, so wouldn't it be great if ZDT could also be used in Eclipse without having to run ZDT by itself? Since it's an RCP application, it shouldn't be too difficult to do this right?

[cming]

1. From a beginner's perspective the default font size is too small, just make it a few points bigger. (I know this is easy to do once installed, but better if you could somehow make it larger by default). I also agree with other comments here about having a different font for pinyin and hanzi, that would be a lot easier on my eyes.

2. Being able to jump straight to the stroke order when you are in the flashcards, without having to reset or end your session would be great.

[bogleg]

@PJPoon - Well, I'm not sure. I don't think you could just drop in the plugins into your Eclipse folder and have it just "work". Would you have a ZDT perspective? I myself have Eclipse open all day for work, and I've never had the urge to have ZDT embedded in it. Still, if you're an Eclipse guy, maybe you could do the proper modifications and show me the light.

@cming - The program just uses your system's default font and size. I don't really want to mess with the defaults since it's different on the every platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and everyone has their own preferences for what they like. For example on my Mac, the text is very tiny by default, but I just hit Ctrl + a couple of times and I'm good to go. I will try and incorporate your stroke animation idea though.

Chris

[toads]

Three small requests:

• The ability to batch import files into their own category. As it stands, if I want to import say all 11 wordlists for colloquial chinese into zdt it takes a *lot* of mouse clicks.
  
• The ability to see the stroke order of the characters on the current flashcard (maybe a keyboard shortcut?), as was mentioned before.
  
• The ability to give an "importance score" to a vocabulary item in flash card mode, i.e. a number from say 1 to 5 representing how important something is; a higher score could give the card a bigger weight in the interval filter or something.