Hope everyone had a happy Holidays. I’ve actually made some small progress on various features for the upcoming version 0.4.3. One cool thing is that the Annotator view now accepts traditional and simplified characters without having to toggle to ‘traditional mode’ or visa versa. It makes it easier to read some of the posts from chinese-forums or chinesepod.com (which I’m starting to use and like a lot now). Also, as requested, I’ve fixed some of the external copy/paste issues. You can now paste pinyin with tone marks included. Plus you can now copy individual characters or pinyin using the ‘Copy characters’ and ‘Copy pinyin’ functions respectively.
December 28th, 2005
zdt 0.4.2 is almost upon us. I’m currently in the process of uploading the files to the sourceforge servers. They should be up by the end of the day.
As I mentioned in my previous post, there are a few new features in this release. However they are not quite polished/complete yet. So try them out and let me know if you find them useful.
Copying externally works. If you copy from the Dictionary View or a Category Editor and paste into wordpad (for example) you’ll get something along the lines of 我 wo3 I; me; myself instead of 20585::我.
Support multiple answers in Pinyin Recall mode. If you have entries in a category with the same character but different pinyin, the flashcards will accept either pinyin typed in as correct.
Navigation in flashcards. This is just in Pinyin Recall mode (currently). There is now a ‘Back’ link (Ctrl – left arrow) that lets you look at previously seen flashcards. Click ‘Next’ (Ctrl – right arrow) to navigate back to where you were. Sorry, no ‘skip’ function yet.
New Flashcard Summary dialog. This is just in Pinyin Recall mode (currently). At the end of a flashcard session, a ‘Summary’ link will appear (next to ‘Back’). Click on the link and a dialog will popup showing you what characters you missed in the current session.
Tables support sorting. No fancy sort icons, and the performance leaves something to be desired for large tables. However you can now sort the tables in the UI by clicking on the table headers.
Table Tooltip improvements. Still a work in progress, but I’ve been revamping the tooltips in the tables. They now support wrapping so entries with super long definitions don’t stretch so wide. Double-click on a table row activates them. Make them go away by clicking on them or pressing any key. They will automatically go away after 5 secs as well. Right-click on them to stop the 5 sec timer. This doesn’t apply to the annotation tooltips. They will get the same treatment next version.
December 14th, 2005
I’m aiming to have a 0.4.2 release by mid-December to beat the holiday rush. I’m working on a bunch of things that aren’t quite ‘complete’, but I think people will find them useful nonetheless. Plus I’d like to get some early feedback.
For example, I got a very simple sort functioning on the tables. I’ve decided not to do the Eclipse upgrade (see last post), so there won’t be any nice sort indicators, and the peformance leaves something to be desired…but it functions.
Check back later and I’ll highlight some of the new stuff.
December 6th, 2005