Pleco flashcards sync functionality

[dementior]

Hi everyone,

Very simple question: as of today it seems Pleco still does not offer any syncing functionality for its flashcards, so has anyone developed or come up with a solution to keep their pleco flashcards in sync in several devices?

 

I am using Android Pleco in two phones and I would like to keep both in sync plus a backup either in my PC or uploaded somewhere... I lost my phone a couple of months ago and 2000 cards were gone...

 

I have seen posts moving the cards to Anki in order to be able to keep them in sync... but I want to see first whether I can do it without importing the cards to Anki.

 

thanks a lot!

alex

[wibr]

Since Mike will probably appear here, I'd like to expand on the syncing...

 

What I would like to see is an easy way to edit flashcards on the computer while studying them on the phone and then sync the changed/new/deleted flashcards to the phone. Maybe using github or something similar? E.g. I create a set of flashcards with example sentences I want to learn, maybe put them on github and start learning them on my phone. Then while studying I notice some error in one card and useless sentence that I don't want in my deck in another card. So I fix/delete that, maybe push it to the repo and want to update the flashcards on the phone automatically. I think some way to collaborate on editing flashcards, subscribe to updates and stuff like that would increase the quality and quantity of flashcards, although git(hub) might be a bit of an overkill.

[mikelove]

We do offer sync for flashcards on iOS, just not on Android.

 

There's kind of a long saga for Android sync. Pleco's flashcard format isn't currently designed around efficient syncing - doesn't track changes in a robust enough way that one can extract a list of exactly what data has changed since the last sync and only sync that. (we designed it that way for space-saving reasons - all that tracking data takes up a lot of storage - but now that 16GB is a safe minimum and nobody is going to mind that much if their flashcard database is 30 or 40 MB, we can probably stop worrying about that)

 

We were able to get around that problem on iOS using iCloud - it may not be a very efficient sync, but the costs of that are borne on Apple's end and they don't seem to mind - but an attempt to develop our own custom sync system for Android users with the current format proved to be impossible to scale cheaply; required too much CPU power on the server side, so that once we had tens or hundreds of thousands of people using it it the hosting fees would eat us alive.

 

With a recent update to Google Drive API to support something approaching iCloud-type sync, we started working on a system using that, but then the GFW block of Google hit and it became clear that it was unrealistic to rely on any Google-provided services for sync. (again, not a concern with Apple who are now cheerfully hosting iCloud data for China users at China Telecom data centers)

 

So basically the only way forward now is to redesign our flashcard database format to make sync more efficient, and then roll out a new custom sync service using that; relying on a third-party service on Android simply isn't practical. This custom service would potentially allow something like what wibr is describing too (can't rely on github or Google Drive or any other collaborative editing service to keep working in China).

 

My concern with that, though, is that the market in general seems to be moving away from multiple devices now - the new trend, particularly on Android, is for people to carry around one phone with a large screen instead of a phone + tablet, and even for my own purposes I find myself using tablets now a lot less than I used to. So while optimizing our database format for sync is probably a good idea anyway, I'm not sure whether developing this sync service is a better use for our resources than other things we might do instead. Fundamentally we're talking about something that would primarily benefit a) Android users b) who make heavy use of flashcards and c) own multiple devices that they want to sync between - that's a minority of a minority of a minority among our customer base.

 

For right now, the best sync solution we have on Android is to get both of your devices upgraded to Android 4.4, then use the Backup Database and Restore Database commands with the file storage service of your choice. 4.4 added support for direct app access to file storage services, so if you just install a service's app then it should come up in the open/save dialog; using that, you can back up your flashcard database to the cloud in very few steps and restore / activate a backed up database from the cloud in fewer still.

 

If you don't have 4.4, you can still do that, it's just a few more steps since after doing a Backup Database you have to go into the file-sharing service's app and upload the resulting database, then download it on the other end. If one of your devices has 4.4 then you can do this the efficient way on that device and use the less efficient method on the other one.

[Shelley]

Would it not be possible to be able to send your flash card list to yourself in an email? i do this with lots of things on my android tablet to get it on to my PC.

 

My programming skills with android and modern PCs is nil so i might just be talking rubbish

[dementior]

Hi everyone,

 

thanks a lot for your responses

 

@Shelley you are right I can send the flashcards to an email account but the problem with this is that it requires action, this means that unless you do it regularly it does work on a daily basis because in order to get that list in Pleco, as far as I know, you have to go to the export function and create the file. So to keep lets say two phones in sync I would have to do this almost daily, since I am adding new cards everyday... its very easy to forget doing it thats why I am looking for a more automated solution

 

@Mike thanks for the helpful insight. I understand now that it seems more difficult than what I thought to provide a scalable solution in Android for syncing; I will try the back and restore functionality you mention but one of my devices is not 4.4 but 4.2.2 ;)

 

I will try to find a way to optimize this operation in order to keep the databases updated as frequently as possible.

 

thanks!

[ChTTay]

How do I sync using an iOS device? I can't find anywhere to tell me.

I am using an iPhone and an iPad.

[mikelove]

It's in Settings / Flashcards, bottom of the screen.

[dementior]

damn! i thought you were posting to say that you were going to implement the sync for android too hehehe

[mikelove]

We actually are moving in that direction again now, prompted by a combination of growing Android sales (iOS sales are growing too, so the ratio is about the same, but in pure dollar amounts we can now more easily justify spending money on Android-specific development) and the fact that Apple's new CloudKit doesn't have the capacity limits we need for flashcard sync, leaving us stuck on the increasingly-creaky old document sync system we've been using for the past year.

[dementior]

great news! keep us posted Mike

[hedwards]

@Mike that's good to hear. A bit of inefficiency isn't much of an issue for me, as long as the application continues to support having those files stored on an microSD Card. One of my personal irritations with Android lately is how hard it's getting to use the microSD card for anything useful.

[mikelove]

Yes, no plans to stop supporting microSD cards.

 

Storage access difficulties have been a major hassle on our end lately too - to be honest, most of Android's biggest technical flaws these days (storage, permissions, fragments versus activities and their complications for tablet apps) relate to their attempting to muddle along with old systems that ought to be torn out and replaced entirely.