Well, something is bothering me : the window’s size of the LingQuing tool is too small, or should resize itself, depending on the screen display.
Mine : 1680x1050, which is prettty common now (we usually find 1920x1080 nowadays).
As you can see, the place is too small to display dictionaries correctly, and its very annoying to waste time scrolling in order to see a definition, each time I search one.
I hope, on next upgrade on LingQ, something about it will be done.
I have found this problem for some dictionaries, but I think it is a tough problem because making the dictionary window bigger means making the text that we are reading smaller. Since the text is the most important part of the page, I don’t think it should take up less than half of the window.
I actually solve this problem by using dict.cc which always pops out into a new window. The new window with the translation appears very quickly, I look at it, and then kill the window instantly so this doesn’t slow me down at all. Maybe one possible solution would be to have the ability to configure dictionaries to pop up in new windows, which can then be used by people when they come across this problem.
@ColinPhilipJohnstone: On my screen is only 2/3 of the screen width used. 1/3 is covered blue only. So there is much space to show more of the dictionary. As I said before it has to be flexible depending on the screen size, not a fixed width.
I like the width of the lesson text area. If it were expandable I don’t think I would like that since your eyes have a longer horizontal traveling path – I find this very tiring on the eyes. However, I do think the dictionary side should be expandable. This is low hanging fruit. A bit of CSS magic or some Javascript and it’s done. But I definitely like Vera’s point. This is the page you use on LingQ and it should be a bit more customizable.
Here are a few of my ideas
Font size would be a nice addition… Zooming doesn’t quite work with small screens.
Below the lesson we have a like “go to the next lesson”. That’s nice, but maybe something on the right side could have a “table of contents” like section where you could easily jump to another lesson in the course
Finally – and I realize this is just fluff – but I think it would be really cool to have some kind of counter for each word. This counter would start at 1 when you first LingQ the word. As you use the system, if you click on the LingQ again in the lesson text (ie, to review the definition), increment the counter. Then provide some way of sorting the LingQs by this number and allow you to review your “trouble” LingQs. If you click on a Known Word, perhaps it keeps that count too and after 3 or 4 times reviewing it maybe it pops up something saying “You’ve reviewed this word quite a few times… maybe it shouldn’t be in Known Word status”. I’m incredibly reluctant to move any words to Known out of some fear that I really don’t know them or may review them in the future. But that’s probably just me.
@ Vera - I just measured on my screen (which is a rather wide one), and the total width of the blue area is 3cm, and the total width of the screen is 50cm. That means that on this screen at least, approximately 6% of the width of the screen is blue. On my iPad mini, the total width of the blue region is 9mm, and the total width of the screen is 16cm, so once again, approximately 6% of the width of the screen is blue.
…or did you mean that a third of the screen is blue when the thing on the right is closed? I just did the measurements, and in that case, 1/3 of the screen is blue.
Wow, that is very different to what I see. Looking at the image given in mopoulpo’s original post, I see what you mean about the blue spaces being very large. Here is what I see
The blue area on my wide pc screen is about 3-4 cms wide on each side with the text zoomed to 125% of the original. If I zoom it to 150%, I have almost no blue areas, like in Colin’s screenshot. However, I’m uncomfortable with that text size.
Maybe you should activate the “Search Dictionary” feature, in order to see the behavior of the corresponding windows.
With some resources (Macmillan, Cambridge, Babylon, …) results are great (the inside content is not wider than the windows/frame itself), but with other resources (Longman, sensagent, wordreference, …) the windows/frame is not adapted : in Longman dictionary, the windows width is… 990 pixel ; and it’s the shame, because for useful content itself, the width is about 490 pixels only… everything else is Ads or something.
