How Much Do You Want in 1.2.1, the First Update?

Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to download and experiment with DianHua Dictionary. There are some great recommendations coming from iTunes™, our support form here, and in the comments of some of the blog posts. The question now is how much do you want in the first update? Given the time it takes updates to appear on the App Store, it might be nice to fine-tune several items at once, but I could rush out a fix for the character clipping issue as fast as Apple could approve it. However, I'm leaning toward squeezing some more functionality into the first update. Right now, my plans are to:

Make fonts on the search results user-configurable as you see in the Settings page mock-up here.
Improve the search algorithms to yield more exact entries. That includes both expanding the English->Chinese results and scaling back on the Chinese->English results.
Add a definition page when you press on an entry in the Search results. This would allow you to see the full English definition and view the characters in a more readable font size.

So, what are your thoughts? I'm already working on all of the above, but if there's a high demand, I can quickly release a 1.2.1 with the character clipping issue fixed.

Comments

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Libin Pan

|2008-08-23 15:07:44

Thanks so much for the great work!

Here are some in my wish list:

1. Search
History
2. Search Suggest, after typing 3 letters, please give a list of
possible words
3. Can I have keyboard always on at the first screen when I open
the application

Thanks again!

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Chasen - Too simple?

|2008-08-23 16:10:37

First off, thanks for this wonderful app! I have been looking for something like
this for a long time. Very useful.

The only qualm I have is that the dictionary
may be a little too simple. By simple I mean that when it comes to bigger words,
the dictionary results are very limited. Also, the linkings don't work. For
example: Formalism is not found in English, but 形式主义 is found in
Chinese.

I realize using this open dictionary is what is keeping this
application free, but perhaps you could consider a second, paid version with a
more detailed dictionary?

I dont mean this as a criticism in anyway, and hope
it is not recieved as such... just a suggestion of what would really help those
seriously studying Chinese in university (Masters in Chinese literature).

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Jason - Thanks for the Feedback

|2008-08-26 05:56:02

Libin: Search History is already on the drawing board. Search Suggest
will require me to do some work on optimizing search performance. It's
too slow right now. I'll look into having the keyboard come up by
default.

Chasen: I'm wondering if the search algorithms I am using
are mainly responsible for a lot of what you're seeing. The English
search was a little bit too exact which was limiting some of the
results shown, especially when there was extra commentary in the
English definition. I've made a couple of tweaks, and it now finds
"formalism" from the English side.

The great thing
about CC-CEDICT is if you find words that need to be added to the
dictionary, it can be done fairly easily as long as they are provided from
a non-copyrighted source. You can find the page at http://cc-cedict.org/editor/editor.php?handler=....

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Robson - Word List

|2008-08-27 03:59:54

I would also first like to thank you for such a great app. This really is
exactly what I was looking for!

My suggestion would be a feature allowing you
store characters in a folder or on a list. This would be useful for keeping
track of characters you are trying to learn or use a lot.

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eighthsin - Updates

|2008-08-31 21:10:12

1. Ability to cancel a search and go back to title screen.

2. Search History
and Search Suggest

3. More accurate search results i.e. when searching for
the word 'beautiful', the top result is 'Jia Mei'- which I am not sure is even a
chinese word. 'Piao Liang' is way down in the list and this should be at the
top.

4. When searching in pinyin, the singular words in different tones
appear all over the place. These should be at the top.

5. Create and info
page button in the bottom right corner with 'Data from CC-Cedict' in it as it
doesnt look nice on the interface.

It is a great application and thanks for
making it, really useful for my travels. Im not too fussed about the search
results as I can speak Chinese well, however for anyone else I can see how they
could be telling their girlfriends they are 'Jia Mei' while she looks at him
blankly wondering what the hell he is talking about!

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Jason - Re: Updates

|2008-09-02 15:11:14

1. Coming in 1.2.1.

2. Already on the drawing board and in the works for
1.3.

3. This is a tough one since I haven't created the dictionary data
itself, and it's funny you should pick the word "beautiful" as an
example. I had to ask someone what word to use for beautiful a few months ago.
"Mei3" seems to be consistently defined as beautiful, and "Jia1"
shows up as "very/extremely" in some of my sources so it "might"
be right, but I've never heard anyone use it.

Having said that, if anyone runs
into words that they know are better than others that show in the search
results, please let me know. We'll definitely come up with a way to rank them
for better results. Also, if you notice mistakes, please send those to me or
file them directly with CC-CEDICT which you can find under Links on this
site.

4. It's a little better in 1.2.1, but I'm still working on ways to
improve it ...

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Ho - Feedback

|2008-09-11 16:31:18

Thanks for this great application. One would like to make comment. Some of the
results returned when I enter the English words do not include commonly used
Chinese words/phrases. For example, when I enter "Go Home" or
"Return Home", I don't even get the Chinese words
"回家".
Another example, "Eat" does not return the result "吃". There
are quite a lot of other similar examples. Perhaps you may want to take a look
into improving on this area. Thank you.

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Jason Koeninger - Search Results...

|2008-09-13 20:48:10

"Return Home": This is definitely a shortcoming of our search process.
We will take care of it in the next version.

"Eat": It's odd that eat
doesn't show up correctly. Our search should have been able to find it. Again,
we'll get it in the next version.

Thanks for the feedback. We will add these
words to our tests so we make sure future changes to the search algorithm do not
upset the results.

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