Thanks for the new changes. Since I joined LingQ, about 2.5 years ago, the learn page has improved a lot. The best change has been the speed of creating LingQs and changing the statuses of LingQs which used to be super slow and is now lightening fast. I also like the recent feature of the ‘Manuel Mode’ for reading. Now I can read long documents on my laptop just using the arrow keys and I have recently been enjoying reading a long book in German on LingQ in this way.
In my opinion, not all changes to the lesson page have been positive. The main criticism that I have of the layout of the lesson page is how little area is decdicated to the box that holds the lesson text. This is by far the most important box on the entire LingQ website and should be treated as holy land. Instead, valuable space for this box is sacrificed for gigantic margins on the page and some useless power-up bar, which is even worse now since it is at the top of the page. I also find the new audio play button to be in a distracting position. Here are my suggestions for imrpoving the page
Remove the overly-bright and distracting background image. This might be great when logging in, but when reading texts, I prefer to concentrate on the text.
Make the margins on the left and right much smaller. Maybe five or ten times smaller.
Move the power-up bar to the bottom right of the screen. Why not let it cover a bit of the dashboard instead of the text? Most users probably don’t care about it anyway.
Luckily, the user spatterson previously worked out a way to edit the lesson page after loading it using the Greesemonkey extention to Firefox. It stopped working last night with the update, but I just made some changes and now it works again. Here is how the lesson page looks for me without the script running
and here is what it looks like with the script running
I will be using the edited version even though I am missing a couple of features (can’t play audio anymore for example). I will try to work out how to remove all the text in the lower right of the screen (i.e. ‘related phrases’, etc.) but that’s more tricky.
I am not suggesting that the page should be made to look just like what I see when I read with LingQ, but maybe something in that direction could be considered.
Did you use the old Greesemonkey script? I could have posted the one I edited today but unfortunately a few minutes after writing that post this morning, my computer had a heart attack and promptly dropped dead so I don’t have it any more. I can redo it though in a few minutes some point soon.
I often stop my audio, reread the last part, hit playback, then restart the audio. I can’t do that now because the playback button disappears when the audio is stopped. Also, the round indicator for where the audio is in the lesson is much harder to control than the previous scale across the top of the lesson. Clearly, I need to repeat a short portion of the audio much more often than you have anticipated.
What would be much more useful to me, if you had an indicator of some type in the text of the lesson that moved with the audio, so I can see where I left off if I am distracted from the lesson or go back to a section I need more work on.
I like the new changes, however what louse_steele said is also happening to me, and i also agree with Colin.
Besides that i think everything works good and functional, but it also was good before.
The only thing its not working is the video mode, the play button is still only under the title of the lesson and doesnt follow the screen when you scrolll down the text. And once u start lingquing the video gets covered by the dictionary and is hard to open the video again. (you need to loose the area where you are lingquing and go all the way up to the begining of the text in order to open the video again everytime).
I dont understand the reason to put the video/notes option at lingq if its not functional, eventually what i do is to open 2 window of navigator at same time, on window for lingq, and small window for the video on the right side.
Is not the ideal solution but at least i still keep watching movies using LIngq at same time with the subtitles.
@colin We know we can’t please everyone but I thought you would actually appreciate the fact that we did free up more room for the text in this update. There used to be a control panel top and bottom on the reading pane. We have now done away with the bottom panel thus freeing up more room for the text. As always, we appreciate the feedback and will keep it in mind as we move forward.
@louise_steele What do you mean when you say “hit playback”? I believe all the old controls still exist, just in a different look. The 5 second rewind button is still there if that is what you mean. In terms of the slider control it can be harder to find your spot in short lessons. We have plans to enable clicking anywhere on the progress bar to play from there. Hopefully this will make things better. As for indicators in the lesson, that is much more difficult to do as it would require manually syncing all audio files with locations in the text by the content providers.
@josu88 We haven’t forgotten about your request. We do plan on moving those resource buttons somewhere you will be able to access them even as the page scrolls.
@Mark: Okay, I see. The problem is that in one of my courses in the English library (Vera’s diary for beginners, English Version) that I used for the check, the German translations are missing now! I know for sure that I’ve added it long time ago, but I cannot say for sure if the lost has something to do with this update. How could this happen? Do I have to check all my coursed now if they have still translations and lesson notes?
@Vera Nothing was done to the lessons so it seems unlikely that your translations would have been removed. We have not heard this from anyone else. Is it possible that you are getting this course mixed up with another one you added translations for? Or, has this happened to multiple courses? Nothing we did should have affected the way resources display or the resources themselves.
The removal of the Info pane meant that I can no longer reliably calculate my unknown word ratio for each lesson.
There used to be a number that represented the number of known unique words in a lesson. This figure as very useful as a denominator when figuring out the percentage of unknown words over time throughout homogeneous sample texts. It has been my main performance indicator (apart from total number of known words) the last couple of months and I’m a bit bummed that it’s gone.
The word count figure next to “Times read:” is unreliable in the sense that it is cumulative, but I guess it’s better than nothing.
I’d suggest that you introduce this kind of performance indicator much like you have with blue words in new texts. If you want to take it to the next level it would be even more fantastic if the user could track this ratio over time for a few select lessons and/or courses, in a graph maybe.
