Separate thread since it's launching a couple of specific new things (and good to lump all of the flashcard-specific discussion together anyhow).
After much introspection we've decided to heavily overhaul the New Session and Manage Flashcards interfaces in Beta 3, as follows:
New Session by default will bring you to one screen, with no tabs and probably not even a profile list (that may end up in Flashcard Central or may just be hidden by default). There are three things you can configure on this screen; "Test Me On", which gives you checkboxes for "Reading," "Writing," "Listening," and "Stroke Order," "Question Type" which has checkboxes for Multiple-choice, Free-answer, and Self-scored, and # of cards, which most likely will *not* include an "Endless" option in this screen's version of it.
"Reading" shows you only a flashcard's characters; in multi-choice mode you're prompted to choose the Pinyin and definition, in free-answer just the Pinyin. "Writing" shows you pinyin and definition and asks you to choose or enter the characters, Listening plays audio and asks you to choose the definition or enter the Pinyin. The "Stroke Order" and "Self-scored" options are each exclusive, disabling all of the other checkboxes in that area, but the others can be combined, allowing you (at long last!) to test cards in multiple ways in the same session. You would not necessarily see each card in each mode, the system would simply pull up X number of cards in one mode, then X number in another, and so on, sort of like a test in Chinese class giving you 10 reading questions, 10 writing questions, etc; a high-frequency card might come up in more than one mode but the software wouldn't be doing anything so specifically ensure that that happened (or didn't happen).
There's also an Advanced button in New Session that takes you to pretty much the same interface as now, except that now in the first screen Test Mode only has Review Only, Self-Scored, Pleco-Scored and Stroke Order options, the Pleco-Scored one gives you checkboxes to enable each of the 6 possible combinations (read/write/listen combined with mc or free) and the Self-Scored mode gives you its ow read/write/listen checkboxes. Each of these boxes (in either mode) has a Setup button next to it which allows you to customize exactly which fields are displayed / tested on, limit that particular mode to a certain range of score values, and emphasize that mode in the session (so you'd see twice as many cards from it as from non-emphasized modes). We're not yet sure how to rectify Endless mode with switching between question types, most likely we'll pick a reasonably small number of cards (say 5) and cycle through that number of cards in each mode.
In Basic (non-advanced) mode, scoring is Automatic and cards are chosen using frequency-adjusted rather than repetition-spaced review; we feel this is much better for novice users, since with repetition spacing you can get into the confusing situation of having no cards left to review that day. We thought about making it look ahead to find the next day when you have cards to review and review those, but that kind of seems like it's defeating the whole purpose of graduated recall. There most likely will be a "Choose Categories" button at the bottom of the screen, since even novice users would likely find it important to choose one or two specific lists of cards to review from.
But basically, by replacing the confusing Show / Ask options with the nice friendly concepts of Reading / Writing / Listening, we both make the system easier to use and make it possible to implement multi-modal sessions, two things which it seems like a lot of people would really like to see.
As for Manage Cards, the big issues with that screen now (as we see them, anyway) are that the layout is way too cramped and the card list is too narrow to see anything more than the first few characters of a card. The new design has one line with a simplified search control at the top of the screen, with a smaller number of fields to search on and all of them pop-up lists instead of text fields / date selectors; there's still an option in the field pop-up list to do an advanced search, though. Below that, most of the screen is taken up by a full-width list of cards, with just a one-line toolbar at the bottom of the screen giving you new / info / category / delete icons along with "More" and (on Palm) "Done" buttons.
So that's it, basically. This should be pretty much fully implemented in Beta 3, the goal for which in general is to have the interface in a near-final state and pretty much every significant feature implemented (or dropped / delayed to 2.1). Which is why it may not be out until a week or two before Christmas, but it'll be well worth the wait.
After much introspection we've decided to heavily overhaul the New Session and Manage Flashcards interfaces in Beta 3, as follows:
New Session by default will bring you to one screen, with no tabs and probably not even a profile list (that may end up in Flashcard Central or may just be hidden by default). There are three things you can configure on this screen; "Test Me On", which gives you checkboxes for "Reading," "Writing," "Listening," and "Stroke Order," "Question Type" which has checkboxes for Multiple-choice, Free-answer, and Self-scored, and # of cards, which most likely will *not* include an "Endless" option in this screen's version of it.
"Reading" shows you only a flashcard's characters; in multi-choice mode you're prompted to choose the Pinyin and definition, in free-answer just the Pinyin. "Writing" shows you pinyin and definition and asks you to choose or enter the characters, Listening plays audio and asks you to choose the definition or enter the Pinyin. The "Stroke Order" and "Self-scored" options are each exclusive, disabling all of the other checkboxes in that area, but the others can be combined, allowing you (at long last!) to test cards in multiple ways in the same session. You would not necessarily see each card in each mode, the system would simply pull up X number of cards in one mode, then X number in another, and so on, sort of like a test in Chinese class giving you 10 reading questions, 10 writing questions, etc; a high-frequency card might come up in more than one mode but the software wouldn't be doing anything so specifically ensure that that happened (or didn't happen).
There's also an Advanced button in New Session that takes you to pretty much the same interface as now, except that now in the first screen Test Mode only has Review Only, Self-Scored, Pleco-Scored and Stroke Order options, the Pleco-Scored one gives you checkboxes to enable each of the 6 possible combinations (read/write/listen combined with mc or free) and the Self-Scored mode gives you its ow read/write/listen checkboxes. Each of these boxes (in either mode) has a Setup button next to it which allows you to customize exactly which fields are displayed / tested on, limit that particular mode to a certain range of score values, and emphasize that mode in the session (so you'd see twice as many cards from it as from non-emphasized modes). We're not yet sure how to rectify Endless mode with switching between question types, most likely we'll pick a reasonably small number of cards (say 5) and cycle through that number of cards in each mode.
In Basic (non-advanced) mode, scoring is Automatic and cards are chosen using frequency-adjusted rather than repetition-spaced review; we feel this is much better for novice users, since with repetition spacing you can get into the confusing situation of having no cards left to review that day. We thought about making it look ahead to find the next day when you have cards to review and review those, but that kind of seems like it's defeating the whole purpose of graduated recall. There most likely will be a "Choose Categories" button at the bottom of the screen, since even novice users would likely find it important to choose one or two specific lists of cards to review from.
But basically, by replacing the confusing Show / Ask options with the nice friendly concepts of Reading / Writing / Listening, we both make the system easier to use and make it possible to implement multi-modal sessions, two things which it seems like a lot of people would really like to see.
As for Manage Cards, the big issues with that screen now (as we see them, anyway) are that the layout is way too cramped and the card list is too narrow to see anything more than the first few characters of a card. The new design has one line with a simplified search control at the top of the screen, with a smaller number of fields to search on and all of them pop-up lists instead of text fields / date selectors; there's still an option in the field pop-up list to do an advanced search, though. Below that, most of the screen is taken up by a full-width list of cards, with just a one-line toolbar at the bottom of the screen giving you new / info / category / delete icons along with "More" and (on Palm) "Done" buttons.
So that's it, basically. This should be pretty much fully implemented in Beta 3, the goal for which in general is to have the interface in a near-final state and pretty much every significant feature implemented (or dropped / delayed to 2.1). Which is why it may not be out until a week or two before Christmas, but it'll be well worth the wait.
