grahamH Posted February 6, 2012 at 08:25 PM Report Posted February 6, 2012 at 08:25 PM I've recently made an app that some of you may find useful or just interesting. Hanzi Counter lets you paste in some text and shows you how many unique characters it has as well as how often each character occurs. So for statisticians it could be quite helpful, but for learners I added a filtering feature. If you input all the characters you know into the filter these will be removed from the results, and you will only be presented with characters you need to learn. The HSK lists from levels 1-6 can individually be filtered by flicking a switch, so if you know you already know all the characters from one of the levels the filtering process will be a lot more convenient. You can also load the HSK lists into your custom filter and remove the characters you are unsure of, this is quite useful if you don't know a small amount of one of the levels. You can long press on any character, in the list of unique characters, to copy that character and paste it into a dictionary, flashcard program, or into the filter if you already know it. Finally you can send your results via E-Mail in a CSV file which your spreadsheet program should be able to read. It's a universal app, and predictably a lot better to use on the iPad, it's workable on the iPhone, but I think the design is a bit cluttered and not so enjoyable, especially if you have a large body of text to work with. Anyway, it's free, I've found it quite useful for identifying new characters and words and I hope you find it useful too. Here's the link: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/hanzi-counter/id495517892?mt=8 I would also love to hear any feedback you may have or any suggestions for improvement. 1 Quote
character Posted February 6, 2012 at 10:34 PM Report Posted February 6, 2012 at 10:34 PM Have you considered a Mac version? It might be easier for people to get text into if it was a desktop app. 1 Quote
T-revor Posted February 7, 2012 at 06:43 AM Report Posted February 7, 2012 at 06:43 AM Wow, this is great! I will check it out and get back to you. Quote
T-revor Posted February 7, 2012 at 07:22 AM Report Posted February 7, 2012 at 07:22 AM K. So I just downloaded it. A few simple thoughts: Would be nice to have a set of hyperlinks to news or other articles that you could copy and paste to/from. You could create a uiwebview in your app to make it even slicker. A help link that explains how the filters work would be good. It's a nice feature how you have it set up, but it's not so intuitive. Which is ok. Just need a little more instruction. I like that you can send emails with the characters you don't know. Looks like a good first version of a useful app! Quote
grahamH Posted February 7, 2012 at 07:43 PM Author Report Posted February 7, 2012 at 07:43 PM I agree with you character, it does make a lot of sense to have this as a desktop application. There are browser based alternatives out there, although I'm not 100% sure if any can exclude characters, I also seem to remember a Python script being posted on this forum before that does the same thing. This app is to scratch my own itch as I do everything, except programming, on the iPad. Having a UIWebview would make acquiring texts to parse slicker and would keep users in the app, both desirable qualities, however, at the moment I think it's too far removed from the core of the apps purpose. I feel that mobile apps should be simple and focused and although it's a very simple add on I would be unnessecarily duplicating the built in browser. I'm glad you've told me the filter system isn't too intuitive, I have programmers eyes so I obviously it makes sense to me. Apple does discourage instructions preferring interaction to be intuitive, but if people are finding it a bit confusing then I can easily put a couple splash screens explaining it better. Thanks for the feedback and downloads! 1 Quote
yaokong Posted February 8, 2012 at 06:37 AM Report Posted February 8, 2012 at 06:37 AM i just copied a short book into this app, less than hundred pages, fifteen minutes have passed and its not ready, the only way for me to know its still working is to click on the button in the corner, for sending the results as an attachment, for the counters on the right are not moving. I just counted, it finds 45-50 new unique characters in a minute, so it might still take another twenty minutes until its ready... Maybe you might want to add a cancel button, currently the only way to cancel is to restart the app. Quote
grahamH Posted February 8, 2012 at 06:53 AM Author Report Posted February 8, 2012 at 06:53 AM 100 pages!! I tested it with the first two chapters of a book and that took about 7-8 minutes, at first I thought it was the sorting algorithm but I'm assuming the progress bar under the count button filled up relatively quickly. The real problem is displaying the results, for some reason that takes a long time to process. It might be better to display some of the results and load more as the user scrolls down. What iThing are you using to only have 50 characters a minute? Quote
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