Hanping Chinese Blog

New features:

• New “Share” option menu in second screen. Allows you to send a dictionary entry (Chinese, Pinyin and English) as an email, Twitter, Google Buzz etc
• Traditional & Simplified chars can now be displayed together. On the main screen, hit Menu and then you will see the current setting (probably “Simplified”). Press the menu option to cycle through the four different display types: Simplified, Simp [Trad], Traditional, Trad [Simp]. The second screen still only shows either simplified or traditional (never both).
• New “What’s new?” dialog automatically shown every time you update to a new version. To view the change details, use the “More…” button which will take you to the appropriate blog entry.
• Improved “Help” dialog. Now includes a “More…” button which takes you to a forum post giving advice on how to best use Hanping.

Changes include:

• Create/rename/delete user list now performed in second screen (instead of first). Menu -> Active User List and then long press on the user list you want to rename/delete
• Added presets for different Hanzi Coloring schemes. In second screen, press Menu. From there you can cycle through the various presets
• Export user list functionality back again. In main screen, Menu -> Lists -> User tab -> long press on user list you want to export
• Hint text (in Search box) now shows 汉字 or 漢字 depending on whether in traditional or simplified mode
• When showing word list, now icon in top right brings up Word List Selector dialog
• Added filters to make sure unsupported characters (such as punctuation) are not entered into search box. Also restrict number of characters in search box
• Minor bug fixes

Major update:

• Complete overhaul of the UI/UX
• Lots more built-in word lists (e.g. HSK)
• Multiple user lists. So no longer have to put all favorites in one place
• In Single Entry screen, hanzi is now clickable. Click on a character and the longest word starting with that character, will be shown. For example, when the Single Entry screen is showing 女朋友, if you click the 朋, then the entry for 朋友 will be shown. If you then click 朋, then the entry for 朋 will be shown
• Better handling of situation where search term language is ambiguous – no longer shows the two English/Pinyin buttons on the line below. Read the rest of this entry »

New features:

• Quick Search Box (QSB) support. Looks up Chinese (Hanzi) or English (but not Pinyin)
• Hanzi in entry description now clickable so you can look up things like measure words. In the Word Details screen, Hanzi within the English description is now underlined so that you can click on/touch it and you will be taken to the search page
• Fixed ANR bug when accessing favorites shortly after dictionary update

Added word-of-the-day widget. This is updated every 24 hours and picks a random word from the 1000 most frequent two-character chinese words.

Place more than one widget on your homescreen for the best effect!

Changes since 1.4.0 are:

• User is notified (one-time dialog box) when a dictionary update becomes available
• When the search text matches both Pinyin and English, now the English results are shown (as well as the Pinyin/English buttons). The idea here is its better to show something rather than nothing
• Streamlined the search engine

Changes are:

• Voice recognition (Android 2.1+ only) – uses Google’s remote voice recognition engine which is supposed to support both English and Mandarin Chinese, but, in my tests, actually only supports English. Still its a nice feature to add!
• Custom Search – touch the magnifying glass (top right of search screen) and you are presented with alternative ways to match dictionary entries. In the as-you-type mode, prefix-matching is always performed (e.g. type “boo” and it will match words like “boo hoo”, “book” etc.). But Custom Search allows you to do things like match at the end to get entries like “peek-a-boo”. The fourth custom search type will match the most entries, so should probably only be used when searching pretty obscure terms.
• Another benefit of Custom Search is that now you can switch between English & Pinyin without having to clear/rewrite the search text.
• No longer show the one-line summary (“5 matches found for ‘blah [e]’ “). This was pretty useless because you can see roughly how many results there are by looking at the size of the scrollbar and you know what the search text was because it will be the same text that is still in the search text box (thanks to as-you-type searching). More importantly, now there is more space to show search results.
• Completely redesigned (thanks Shim!) the icon and also made it conform to Google’s new guidelines.
• Fixed bug where entering a very very long search text, caused problems.
• Fixed bug where entering search text starting with “common prefixes” like “to”, “on”, “the” etc., was resulting in slow searches
• Fixed Sample Sentences for Traditional mode.

Solves the issue where showing all the favourites, but none being stored, could cause a Force Close.