Usbong Project: Usbong Update: Introducing Phrase Hints (Oct. 6, 2014)

Hi everyone,

Here's the latest update regarding Usbong.

(Yes, we're still alive and kicking!)

New Features/Bug Fixes

A. Usbong:

+fixed: illegible "Don't have an account?" in sign-in screen

+added: phrase hints

--> description: when a user taps a phrase, a hint message appears

--> phrase hints have a lighter shade for its font color

--> challenge: Japanese, Chinese, etc. do not really use spaces, unlike English, Spanish, French, German...

According to Wikipedia, "Tokenization is particularly difficult for languages written in scriptio continua which exhibit no word boundaries such as Ancient Greek, Chinese,^[1] or Thai.

Some ways to address the more difficult problems include developing more complex heuristics, querying a table of common special-cases, or fitting the tokens to a language model that identifies collocations in a later processing step."

--> workaround: I was able to solve this for Japanese, by breaking down the Japanese sentence into its three alphabets (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana) + everything else not covered. The solution is not perfect, but it's workable for most cases. The next step so as to improve the algorithm is to include a Japanese dictionary to check for combinations between the alphabets.

--> further: It took me awhile to solve the issue of the feature breaking when combined with the HTML tags feature. In any case, I was able to fix this.

--> application: it is now possible to allow the user to receive hints about a particular phrase when reading text on the screen.

--> sample .utree: koko ni ite (stay here); usbong.ph/downloads

--> Attachments:

1) inNihongo.png (text in Nihongo)

2) hint.png (phrase hint)

3) inEnglish.png (text in English when fully translated; it is possible to switch between languages easily via the set language option (press menu button); more than two languages can be added)

--> Reference: image and scene were taken from the trailer of the movie, Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno (2014)

B. Usbong Builder (care of core developer, Rocky Camacho; issue ticketed by students)

+fixed: textImageDisplay caption bug

+partially fixed: unable to export .utree

--> we are unable to replicate this error, although we do know that it occurs. Nevertheless, Rocky has done the appropriate code revisions.

Well, this is all for now.

Usbong on Google Code has been updated.

https://code.google.com/p/usbong/

Usbong Builder has been updated.

1) https://github.com/rockycamacho/usbong-builder (Rocky)

2) https://github.com/masarapmabuhay/usbong-builder (forked from Rocky)

If anyone wants to collaborate,