Reviewing all premium features of Pleco app for Android on video. What should I test?

[icebear]

@mikelove

A nice feature in the flashcard addon would be graphs - both of study history (e.g. time, cards learned, etc), and more importantly of cards due - it would be nice to have a graph where the next 24 hours are on the x axis and the cumalative reviews due (excluding new cards that may be added) are on the y axis - which, on days where I only may give the flashcards a go once, I can try to hit it a time when there are some/most cards due as opposed to few/none. Typically I review multiple times during the day (and thus want to stick with the hours system), but this would help on days with less study time (and, might look cool).

[mikelove]

Slightly technical question - say that I've studied a handful of cards recently which are not yet learned (score < 600), and then add them to this "Banned" category. Will they still count against my total number of unlearned cards being studied when I am using the option to limit the number of unlearned cards being studied at any given time? Ideally those in the excluded/banned list would not count towards this figure...

No - the "limit unlearned" count / check is done after all of the various filters / category selections / etc.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine most testing takes place on books indoors, where people will tend to use their phones differently. When outdoors, use of devices is quite different. The reason I rotate is because in landscape mode it's easier (or more comfortable) to take a good photo or hold the camera still, especially with a somewhat bulky phone like mine. It also feels more natural to hold it landscape, because most text I am scanning is left to right (on menus). However, I actually use my phone in portrait mode for everything else. In landscape mode it's difficult for me to press the "view entry" button based on the way my thumbs naturally go up along the side of the device.

Makes sense. Anyway we've now implemented this for the about-to-be-released next update. Also managed to make the system do a better job of keeping the recognition area the same size, which should reduce the number of situations where you get it just the right size and then are annoyingly forced to resize it when you accidentally rotate your device.

I mean the I can see all the buttons but the camera is not operational until I press the focus button or something like this, when it instantly appears. This does not occur most times when I first access OCR, only when I go back to it from somewhere else in the app. Perhaps there is a conflict with another app I'm running as you suggest, but I only really have popular apps so you may want to make sure there isn't a conflict. And if this were the case it would also happen when I FIRST access the OCR, which it generally doesn't do. If you need me to make a bug report of some kind or more details of the apps I'm running, let me know by email.

Haven't reproduced this one yet, but we'll keep at it. How are you launching OCR from "somewhere else in the app" though? Are you activating the separate OCR launcher icon or have you switched to another screen via the "view entry" or "settings" or somesuch button within OCR?

What's your OCR technology based on? Is it custom or also licensed? I've noticed several other apps with OCR support for Chinese (and also Japanese and Korean) on the market, e.g. CamDictionary and DoCoMo's OCR IME. How does Pleco's OCR compare to them?

It's licensed - very accurate, but also really good at handling complicated text layouts, which a lot of those other systems fail at; we can use it for document scanning too (already do to some extent, and we're working to add PDF recognition support in a future update).

A nice feature in the flashcard addon would be graphs - both of study history (e.g. time, cards learned, etc), and more importantly of cards due - it would be nice to have a graph where the next 24 hours are on the x axis and the cumalative reviews due (excluding new cards that may be added) are on the y axis - which, on days where I only may give the flashcards a go once, I can try to hit it a time when there are some/most cards due as opposed to few/none. Typically I review multiple times during the day (and thus want to stick with the hours system), but this would help on days with less study time (and, might look cool).

This is also in our plans - actually very closely tied to the iCloud sync feature, since they both involve more detailed statistics-tracking (needed for iCloud so that we can sync up reviews of the same card conducted on two different devices since the last sync).

[irishpolyglot]

Returning back to the original topic, I've created and uploaded that video review. Check it out here:

http://www.fluentin3months.com/pleco/

[icebear]

The video but it mostly seemed a fair review to me.

I would have presented the cheaper add-on package as a must for beginner to intermediate Chinese learners and left comments on the professional pack alone - since I think a new learner isn't really qualified to describe the value of that package to it's target audience (advanced Chinese learners or those with specific, technical word needs).

Also would have focused a bit more on the flashcard app - which handily beats Anki in convenience of Chinese flashcard creation and management. I think I'd only hesitate to use the Pleco flashcards if I already had a big legacy set of Anki cards I'd invested my time into - for fresh students of Chinese (not multiple languages) Pleco is clearly the easier way to get up and running and stick with it. Even for legacy users, I think transitioning over slowly is worthwhile in the long run.