In general I agree with Colomar, but I wonder if not a simple scale going from a very light color (white) to a dark color via increasingly dark versions of the same color is the best. In fact, that's what we use right now. What does the extra colors buy us?

colomar wrote:I'm not sure if we should solve this issue separately for each application. There should be some global setting where people could specify that they have a certain color vision problem and then applications would use that information to adapt their color pallettes.

Is such a mechanism already in place somewhere?

ingwa wrote:In general I agree with Colomar, but I wonder if not a simple scale going from a very light color (white) to a dark color via increasingly dark versions of the same color is the best. In fact, that's what we use right now. What does the extra colors buy us?

Well, fistly I like colours and secondly using only one colour would affect 2 groups, people with achromatia and people who can't see a certain colour. Both of them would just see a grayscale/one colour progression. Which makes it difficult to figure out which colour is currently displayed - the user can't really see what level they're on. With a more colourfull scale we can avoid this issue in most cases. I'm honestly not sure what to do for people with achromatopsia.

Sogatori wrote:

colomar wrote:I'm not sure if we should solve this issue separately for each application. There should be some global setting where people could specify that they have a certain color vision problem and then applications would use that information to adapt their color pallettes.

Is such a mechanism already in place somewhere?

I don't think there is yet But it would be good to have!

Well, fistly I like colours and secondly using only one colour would affect 2 groups, people with achromatia and people who can't see a certain colour. Both of them would just see a grayscale/one colour progression. Which makes it difficult to figure out which colour is currently displayed - the user can't really see what level they're on. With a more colourfull scale we can avoid this issue in most cases. I'm honestly not sure what to do for people with achromatopsia.

[/quote][/quote]

A grayscale progression would still make it possible to distinguish the levels, wouldn't it? It would depend on how many levels we have. A few levels should be distinguishiable soleley by brightness

colomar wrote:A grayscale progression would still make it possible to distinguish the levels, wouldn't it? It would depend on how many levels we have. A few levels should be distinguishiable soleley by brightness

Yes of course, but it would be more along the lines of "about short term memory" instad of "Oh red, so upper short term memory" (Totally fictional example). I don't see why we should give up the more fine grained level distinguishment for everyone, because some will only see a greyscale version of it.
On the other hand, if you people find it way too colourful, then that's a valid reason for me to switch to something [more] monochromatic.

I think that color is one of the best things about this mockup, if you remove that, you remove much

Okay, so I have made the mockups of how I imagine the process of adding, waiting and sorting of the collections to look like:


First of all I removed the "Start" and "Learned" label on the rainbow bar on the top of the dashboard and replaced them with a head with a question mark and one with an exclamation mark respectively. I'm not sure if I like them. I think the shape of the heads look weird, but maybe that's just me. Now that look at I though I see that I could make the exclamation mark a bit bigger.
I'm still not sure why there's a line of orange pixels poking through the yellow part of the rainbow bar. The two are perfectly aligned in Inkscape, oh well. When the user hovers over one of the colours a tooltip with the written out confidence level e.g. "medium-term memory" should appear.

Looking at the individual cards I planned to use the "information" icon right to "Practise" to link to an Statistics page for said collection. There the user can see how far they've come, how many words they already know and a confidence breakdown for each word. To the left of "Practise" one can see the cog icon. It should be used to configure the individual collections e.g. to manually overwrite the length of the intervals between each session, to select what kind of method should be used to learn said collection or if Parley is allowed to automatically alternate the directions and methods of learning.
The "Practise" button would call up an dialogue where the user can check if all the settings are OK for them and then start learning. The idea is that the "Practise" button is there to quickly start the process of learning. If the user doesn't configure anything Parley should alternate automatically the "direction" the vocabulary is asked.
Because all these dialogues won't be in place for the first release I'd suggest to hide the cog icon and the information icon for now, so a click on "Practise" would take the user to the current overview page, where the user selects the method of learning and the direction.

Anyway, now let's go on: The user adds a collection by downloading/installing/creating it. Parley creates a word cloud of the collection and adds said collection as a card to the "Active Collections" section.

We can see that the image is blurred (never mind the not blurred part to the right of the image. Somehow Inkscape does not want to blur this part) and a label indicates that this collection is new. Additionally, the "Practise" label has a different colour to create some contrast to the other cards. Note also that the progress indicator is grey, which means that the user has not started yet.
The "X collection" to the top right of the application has also updated and now displays "10".

Now the user starts the first session of this new collection.

When the user has finished the session Parley will advise some amount of time the user should wait until they start the next session. If the user does not want to wait they can simply click "Practise anyway" to, well, practise it anyway .
I also had planned that the user has to reach a waiting time of 1 day in order to arrive at the "black" level.

If the user waits the suggested amount if time Parley will "unlock" (it was never really locked) the collection and then display the card normally.

So basically, every time the user finishes one session Parley will "lock" the collection until the suggested amount of time has gone by. So it's totally possible that some of these collections stay "locked" for weeks.

The user can also change how the cards are arranged by clicking on "Sort by".

Originally I had planned to display an icon for each mode, but I'm terrible at creating icons. I guess this has to wait till I come up with an idea to represent each mode.
Another problem currently is to change the sort mode i.e. in case of "alphabetical" sorting, how would the user change "A→Z" to "Z→A"? Maybe clicking the menu point again? I hope you people have ideas!
EDIT: I changed the last mockup. It still looks weird but, hey, that's what's imagination is for!
Thank you for your attention

In one word: Awesome!

Just a note about words due: If the user has (say) "5 words due", it means that Parley thinks that the user should practice them now and if the user presses "practice" he will get a session with those 5 words. If there are > X words due where X is the maximum size of the session then he will get a session with X words and afterward there will be the previous number of words - X words due (plus any words that became due during the session).

There can never be a situation where Parley thinks that the user should wait some time to practice a collection and at the same time there will be >0 words due.

Other than that, I think your suggestions are all very good and we should implement them.

Good stuff Sogatori!

If you want an example of how to solve the ascending vs descending sort mode in a single menu, open Dolphin and look at the View > [Sort by] submenu.

Oh and I think it's ok to keep the color and feel free to consider the color blindness issue here like you started to. (Even an application setting to switch to color-blind friendly modes would be fine I think.) Also, while laudable, I don't think we have to solve the color-blind issue for absolutely every population - target the largest affected groups. Until a global mechanism becomes available I think we can learn a lot by attempting to address it one application and use those lessons for when/if a global mechanism becomes available.

Hope this helps and very cool work!

ingwa wrote:In one word: Awesome!

Just a note about words due: If the user has (say) "5 words due", it means that Parley thinks that the user should practice them now and if the user presses "practice" he will get a session with those 5 words. If there are > X words due where X is the maximum size of the session then he will get a session with X words and afterward there will be the previous number of words - X words due (plus any words that became due during the session).

There can never be a situation where Parley thinks that the user should wait some time to practice a collection and at the same time there will be >0 words due.

Other than that, I think your suggestions are all very good and we should implement them.

Ah ok, thanks for clearing this up Inge!
I'm pleased that you like it.

alake wrote:Good stuff Sogatori!

If you want an example of how to solve the ascending vs descending sort mode in a single menu, open Dolphin and look at the View > [Sort by] submenu.

Oh this is quite excellent. I never had the menu in Dolphin enabled, so I never used this submenu . I'll update the mockup shortly. I also noticed that I should have used radio button.

alake wrote:Oh and I think it's ok to keep the color and feel free to consider the color blindness issue here like you started to. (Even an application setting to switch to color-blind friendly modes would be fine I think.) Also, while laudable, I don't think we have to solve the color-blind issue for absolutely every population - target the largest affected groups. Until a global mechanism becomes available I think we can learn a lot by attempting to address it one application and use those lessons for when/if a global mechanism becomes available.

I'm currently looking into it. In some cases another colour palette has helped, but in others it didn't really make a difference. I guess I have to explore the idea of using different textures.
I think it's great, especially now that we're slowly tackling system settings!

Also, thank you for your kind word .

Sogatori wrote:Originally I had planned to display an icon for each mode, but I'm terrible at creating icons.

First of all: I can only agree with the others: Great work!
About the "I'm terrible at creating icons": This is why community design is so great: Not everyone has to excel at everything. If icon design isn't your strong suit, we can ask the great icon designers present in this community to help out!

This thread has been quite for a while and I just wanted to tell everybody that Amarvir is working on a first implementation now. He says that he will show a first version "shortly".

I myself has been concentrating on the practice part of the application. So far I have implemented sessions and double-directed training and am now working on the initial phases of learning new vocabulary.

ingwa wrote:This thread has been quite for a while and I just wanted to tell everybody that Amarvir is working on a first implementation now. He says that he will show a first version "shortly".

I myself has been concentrating on the practice part of the application. So far I have implemented sessions and double-directed training and am now working on the initial phases of learning new vocabulary.

Excellent, I'm really excited. It will be interesting to see how everything works out in real life

Great job guys. I am really excited to see parley develop further. I just had a thought. This week I have started to learn vim, and I found that for me one of the best resources available is shortcutfoo.com. It does more or less what parley does, only if you want to learn all the commands you have to pay a fee. I haven't been able to find an application that focuses on teaching shortcuts and commandsso far. Did you ever think of using parley for something like that (Vim, command line...). It would be really valuable for people like me that are trying to learn these tools.

FYI: Yesterday we merged the first version of the dashboard into the git master version of Parley. We still need to fix some issues, especially with the underlying code but it's there and it looks good!

The workflow is not optimal and it will be changed for the next version but the dashboard does already give a very nice overview of your status and what you need to practice next.

The curious can build from the sources and check out what is there now. We can still change layout and/or workflow a little but since the string freeze for 4.14 went into effect yesterday those cannot be changed easily.

pedrorodriguez wrote:Great job guys. I am really excited to see parley develop further. I just had a thought. This week I have started to learn vim, and I found that for me one of the best resources available is shortcutfoo.com. It does more or less what parley does, only if you want to learn all the commands you have to pay a fee. I haven't been able to find an application that focuses on teaching shortcuts and commandsso far. Did you ever think of using parley for something like that (Vim, command line...). It would be really valuable for people like me that are trying to learn these tools.

There is absolutely no reason why not shortcuts could be put in a parley collection and trained as any vocabulary. You can even publish your nice shortcut collection to the Get Hot New Stuff server and let others download it too.