Messages

Hey Tom,

That's currently not a feature of the app, but I can see how that would help if you have some dictionaries that you want to use more often than others - or what's your specific use case behind this?

One way of implementing this feature is to modify the RecentList activity (which shows the recently loaded dictionaries) to allow for re-ordering of dictionaries, ie. via drag-and-drop.

Cheers,

Achim

Hey Tom,

That's a great idea - what's your use case behind this? Additionally, what's the downside of having all dictionaries active (which is already available in the app)?

I think the following needs to be done to get this into the app:
- Implement an intent, similar to the one to load a newly installed dictionary. I guess it would load that dictionary and unload all other active dictionaries - or what's your use case?
- Use the Android ShorcutManager to implement a dynamic shortcut to a dictionary (ie. the newly implemented intent). Those shortcuts can have different icons

Happy to help any volunteers to get started on this!

Cheers,

Achim

Hi wildgrace,

Great question! I just double-checked and you are completely right, there is currently no build-in way to completely remove a downloaded dictionary.

What you can do is the following:
1. Go to "Download" -> "Recent"
2. Note the path to the directory (or file) of the dictionary
3. Then long-press on the dictionary you don't need and tap on "Remove from list"

Now you can use any third-party file manager to navigate to the noted path and delete it completely, for example OI File Manager (free and no ads).

Hope that helps,

-axin

Hi Stefan,

thanks for testing as well as for your valuable feedback!

I fixed some bugs and changed the behavior of displaying search results: Now the first group of results (the one with the highest number of items) is initially expaned when the search finishes. The groups where no translations could be found will still be displayed at the end of the list to show the user which languages have been searched. I believe this is useful as the user can check if she really selected all the languages she wanted to search in case no (helpful) results were found. As it is at the end of the list it should also not be too distracting. What do you think? Any input is welcome

I pushed the update to the beta channel, it should already be available in the play store. Please keep the feedback coming!

Cheers,
Achim

Hi Starssoft,

thanks for helping testing and your positive feedback. I am still looking at some usability issues with the new version. When this is fixed we can push the release to the Play Store.

As said before, I added your feature request concerning notifications of new dictionaries to the list of open issues. I might be able to look into that after the release. If you have some time or know someone who can implement the feature feel free to direct them here. We are happy to help getting anyone started who wants to contribute to the project.

Cheers,
Achim

Dear Colleagues,

we are making progress with the development of the new Android version, featuring multiple active dictionaries (available in the core since last year...), user interface translated to 18 languages, optimized icons for high-density devices, and more. There are still some rough corners, if you still like to give it a try feel free to join:

1.Join the following Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dfm-android-betatester
2.Wait for your request being approved
3.Activate beta testing for DictionaryForMIDs: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/de.kugihan.dictionaryformids.hmi_android

The latest beta can then be installed from Play Store (may take a while). If you already have DfM installed it will automatically update to this development version.

Please pay special attention if the migration of the settings work smoothly, ie. the same dictionaries and languages are still there&loaded.

To leave beta testing please visit the Google Play Testing link again and click the corresponding button. You may need to to re-install the application which could reset the settings/data of the app.

Thanks,
axin

Hi,

a quick status update:

I quickly tried releasing an updated version that just includes the new Normation classes. I couldn't get this to compile in limited amount of time as there were missing classes that finally lead to the inclusion of all changes. The problem is that this does not currently work as the Android UI does not support the mulit-dictionary API yet. So I'll focus in incorporating the new API in the Android UI and make a new release when this is ready.
The basic lookup in multiple dictionaries is already working in the development version, but there are still quite a few edgy cases that I need to consider (and which currently cause the app to crash)...

Cheers,
Achim

Hi,

Thanks for updating me about this important change. I'm currently on the road without access to my computer, but I'll push an update as soon as I'm back (in about two weeks).

Cheers,
Achim

- Does executeTranslationBatch() honor parameters.isExecuteInBackground or is this flag ignored and translation always runs in background?

Yes, this parameter is evaluated (for Java; not for Javascript); if set to false, no new thread is spawned. Uhm, at least that's what it is supposed to be ... is there a problem with that ?

No, there is no problem, I just wondered what would happen if some TranslationParameters in the batch have it set to true and some to false. But as I'm either setting all to execute in background OR all to execute synchronously this was just a theoretical question about the design

Cheers,
Achim

Hi Gert,

sounds perfect, I just downloaded the updates from svn.

Thanks for that really fast enhancement
Achim

Hi,

fully agreed, this would be a very valuable feature for users of our software.

If someone takes interest in implementing this feature, feel free to discuss further details about it here in the thread!

Cheers,
axin

Hi Gert,

I started migrating to the new API and using executeTranslationBatch() and already get good results, it's working great!

Now some questions arose and before digging into code I guess it's easier to ask you directly

- Does executeTranslationBatch() honor parameters.isExecuteInBackground or is this flag ignored and translation always runs in background?
- Is there a way to find out according to which TranslationParameters of the given batch the callback newTranslationResult(resultOfTranslation) is returning? I'd need this information to have a grouped view of the results, ie. output "English -> German" and the results, then "German -> English" and the corresponding results.

Cheers,
Achim

Hi Daniel,

the problem was fixed and I just uploaded an update to Google Play Store. It should be available in a couple of hours... Please report back if you still experience some problems.

Cheers,
Achim

Hi Gert,

I had a look at the design you described. It sounds fine and should be relatively straight forward to adapt the Android HMI to use the changed API. But as always - the real problems will only emerge when really implementing it...

I'm currently not yet sure how the UI should change. Probably the user does not always want to search in all available dictionaries in all languages for translations. Maybe I'll add some language sets? So the user would not choose a dictionary+language but a set of dictionary+languages before starting translation.

Concerning executeTranslationBatch I guess we still have to work out some details. If the user has a lot of dictionaries with many languages or a device with limited resources spawning too many threads could cause problems. Furthermore, I quite like the idea of displaying all results belonging to one dictionary's language in a separate section in the result list. Therefore, I guess I'd prefer receiving one TranslationResult per dictionary per language...

For background information: Currently on Android I use a filterable ListAdapter which takes care of running the translation in a background thread. So I currently need to synchronously run translation in that thread. I remember having some problems with using executeInBackground=false, so in the end I used executeInBackground=true and some calls to Thread.wait() and Thread.notifyAll() to get synchronous behavior. Maybe I'll reconsider that when the new multi-threading translation API is available.

So this answer should be read as an "OK" from my side

Achim

Hi Gert,

Great to see you already found some time to look into this.

I'm currently on the road with limited internet access so I wasn't able to check the changes you proposed in detail. When I was first thinking about the topic the first idea was to remove the static methods so that hmi could create multiple instances of the translation layer. Quickly looking at your description I see you design for the translation layer to take care of multiple dictionaries itself, which should be fine, too. Where I'm not sure now is how multithreading is working now. Will there be multiple calls providing results? Or do they come in a batch once? Does it work in synchronous mode or only in asynchronous mode?
I'm back home on Monday, then I can check more in detail.

Cheers
Achim