The colour scheme was changed a while ago to better fit with the Android look-and-feel. The vast majority of stock Android apps have a white background.
I wouldn't say the vast majority. There are lots of places with black background in the stock Android OS, especially when text is involved. For example, the default email application, all the configuration screens, the Youtube application... This is on a plain Froyo handset, no third party vendor modifications.
Of course it is not something that will stop me from using this excellent dictionary (which I did purchase), it's just the feeling of loss since it did previously use black background.
You're right - some of the stock apps use a black background - Contacts, Email, Music, You Tube, but AFAIK those are old apps which have not been updated for many months. Most of the other popular apps: Maps, Market, Messaging, Google Mail, Calendar all use a white background. And lots of the new popular 3rd party apps such as Facebook and Twitter are using a white background. I think Google wants to push 3rd party apps to look more consistent with web pages (which tend to have white backgrounds). Another problem with black backgrounds is that most people find them unattractive. For me, they remind me of the old MS DOS days!
1. Flashcard support: ideal solution for me is an interface with AnkiDroid, but I'm not sure what flash card program other users are using. I'd settle for being able to export my favorites list to a CSV file.
2. Sample sentences: the link to nciku is a great touch, but at the same time nciku is a very slow website and usually by the time it loads for me, the conversation / tv show that prompted me to check the dictionary in the first place has moved on. Any chance of adding sample sentences to the dictionary?
Lastly, thanks for this great app! Overall, this is a very solid dictionary, and I use it everyday. I was very frustrated to discover that Pleco does not support Android, but I found this app to be almost as useful and a much better value overall.
1. Yep, I'm looking into ways of interacting with flashcard apps. Watch this space! BTW, in the Pro version you can export your user lists to TSV (tab-separated values) files. From the main screen. Menu -> Lists -> User tab -> long press on the user list you want to export. There's not much you can do with these unless you are a programmer or spreadsheet wizard.
2. Offline sample sentences would be great but I'm not aware of a good free source for this. If anyone knows something that can be used, please get in touch.
First of all, thank you for this application.
I would like to request the option of saving in favorites the chosen words that I have searched.
I want to keep a record of the words I have searched and create a list for future reference and study.
Thanks,
KLeber
The ability to search for English parenthetical words such as (loanword), (anatomy), (idiom) etc.
When viewing individual characters in full screen it would be nice to see more information such as stroke count and radical. This could be a menu option instead of trying to fit it all on the one screen.
Search by radical or stroke count, for reference see the lianghaocidian 良好詞典 app which is available on the android market, traditional Chinese I'm interested in.
One of the great features of the pleco dicts which I used to use on the Palm and Clie
was that beside the input text box there was a little arrow which if you pressed
would give you a list of your most recent searches.
You could then select one of those and it would give it to you again
without having to retype it.
This would be great when you are trying to decode a complicated sentence
(or your wife is hurling a complicated curse at you)
and by the time you have go to the meaning of the last word
you cannot remember the first.
Or you need to look up a word that you just looked up yesterday.
Another of the features of the pleco dict that I used a lot was reverse look-up.
Let us say you type in an English word "idea" and it gives you several Chinese alternatives, such as "sixiang"
You could then long press any one of them, eg "sixiang"
and it would look this up, giving you all the possible English meanings for "sixiang".
One can partly replicate this functionality by using "copy to clipboard"
but this is more steps, and looks up the hanzi.
In fact this functionality is not quite as important with this dictionary
as when one looks up "idea", under each of the Chinese altenatives
there are a lot of English alternative meanings.
Even so, sometimes it would be nice, but lower priority.
@qkleber - are you using the free or pro version? In the pro version you can save words to custom word lists (a kind of favorites system).
@daymo - Information like radical and stroke count is not available in this dictionary. This would be best made available in a character dictionary which Hanping could then communicate with. Searching for loanword, idioms etc would definitely be useful. I'm trying to figure out a way to implement this without complicating things...
@faizoro - Copy/paste is available in the Pro version
@mfc - Search history - yes, this would be useful but I'm reluctant to add another icon to the search bar. Its already looking more crowded than I would like. Maybe a menu option or long press on the search box. Not sure...
For chinese words, the favorites system should be all you need. I suppose chinese phrases, pinyin and english searches are where this would come in handy.
Reverse lookup: In your example, would you not prefer to search the hanzi (思想) rather than the pinyin (sixiang)? And if you are searching the Hanzi then you already have that match???