Feedback on first screen (lists of dictionaries etc)

[shreevatsa]

(I used this app again after a long time. Here's some user-experience feedback from the perspective of a naive user. Sorry I don't know anything about Android app development or what is possible/easy, so some of this feedback may not be useful to act upon.)

When I open the app at first, this is what I see (sorry if the image shows up very big here, not sure how to fix that):

Here a couple of minor issues are:

• visual appeal (I think there's some nonzero paragraph indent but it's too small… in any case with such short and ragged paragraphs I feel it would be better to have a zero indent and separate the paragraphs vertically),

• the “not connected to internet” or “connected but not on WiFi” message gets updated very rarely, maybe it's polling for the connection status — does Android have a way to get a callback or have it updated more automatically / on-the-fly?

The major issue IMO is that it's not clear what these lists are. Here's the result of scrolling down a bit:

IMO instead of the redundant “indic-dict/stardict-” prefix and the hard-to-understand “-head” and “-entries” convention with abbreviations like “bn” and “gu”, it would be better to set up a mapping somewhere, and have the screen use the standard(?) terminology commonly used for dictionaries (like calling something an “English to Hindi dictionary” or “English–Hindi dictionary” rather than “indic-dict/stardict-hindi/en-head”). So something like:

Which kinds of dictionaries would you like to install?

[ ] Sanskrit to Sanskrit

[ ] Sanskrit to English

[ ] Sanskrit to other Indic languages

[ ] Sanskrit to French

[ ] Sanskrit to German

[ ] Sanskrit to other(?)

[ ] Sanskrit kAvya dictionaries

[ ] Sanskrit vyAkaraNa dictionaries

[ ] English to Sanskrit

[ ] Ayurveda dictionaries

[ ] Hindi to English

[ ] Hindi to Hindi

[ ] English to Hindi

…

[ ] Gujarati (in Devanagari script) to English

or something like that.

This is not a hypothetical concern; maybe I'm stupider than the average user but in the past I've tried to use this app and become confused by the first screen itself (tend to just select everything that seems relevant, without full understanding which I only just got).

In case this does seem possible to do, but doesn't seem worth doing, could you point to the (roughly) relevant code, in case someone else might be able to take a look? :-)

[vvasuki]

Thanks for the valuable feedback!

In case this does seem possible to do, but doesn't seem worth doing, could you point to the (roughly) relevant code, in case someone else might be able to take a look? :-)

Definitely worth doing. Still, most excited by potential contribution! :-)

Just need to set the name variable appropriately.
https://github.com/sanskrit-coders/stardict-dictionary-updater/blob/3e8dfbe563023f13c0e7f59424b4c56f6ad470fc/downloaderFlow/src/main/java/sanskritCode/downloaderFlow/ArchiveIndexStore.kt#L128

(Easy to install Android Studio and develop.)