keeping flashcard lists synced between iphone and ipad

[kohoutek]

Hi there,

I'm sorry if this has been covered already... I did a quick search and didn't see this specifically. (I'm almost afraid I've already asked before, heh)

Is there any way to keepmy flashcard lists synced between my iPhone and my iPad? I've been using the flashcards a LOT lately and I'm on a job in Beijing where I carry my iPad to meetings, and my iPhone around at lunch or around the halls, and I'm constantly adding cards throughout the day.

By the end of the day I have a total mishmash of stuff on both devices and I can't figure out a simple and fast way to keep them both updated and in sync. I'm constantly checking/browsing the list of words I've added from the last day or 2, to remind myself of a word I've forgotten (not actually using the flashcard-testing per say)... but many times the word I'm looking for was added on the device I don't happen to be carrying.

It would be great if this stuff synced on iTunes... maybe it does already? I also lost a whole bunch when I had to reinstall the os on one device and I guess it hadn't backed the lists up on the computer I sync to.

Apologies for my ignorance if this is all handled and I'm just not doing something right.

Thanks
Andrew

 

[mikelove]

Not really a good way to do that now - you could do a search in Search Cards for cards that had been modified since (whatever date), export the results of that search, transfer them to the other device and import them, but there's no way to do it automatically via iTunes or some other method built into Pleco.

We'd certainly like to add support for it, but to be honest, the iPad's popularity caught us a bit by surprise, and as flashcard sync is an extremely complicated feature to get working well it's taking a while to find room to implement it in our schedule - it should appear at some point (hopefully before the Android release, so that we can use the same system to facilitate easy inter-platform sync / migration - even on desktops if our Android-version-on-desktops scheme works) but not in 2.2 - possibly 2.3 though.

 

[erzangel]

A good sync between iPad and iPhone would be awesome. I just use it in the very same way: Most of the time on the iPad, but when running around or waiting I could use the time to revise vocabs on the iPhone, where I of course do not have my iPad with me or it would just be inappropriate to use the big iPad.

Here's a "user story" on how I imagine this:
First I use Pleco on my iPad and add some new flashcards and test them. Before I go on a short trip to the city, where I have plenty of time on the subway and bus, I open the Pleco app on my phone and iPad. I go to the syncing menu on my iPad and hit just one button. It automatically detects the nearby iPhone and transfers the data via WiFi, Bluetooth or cloud sync (MobileMe or Dropbox). The syncing process only takes a few seconds and then both devices are in sync. The sync should also be two-way, not just in one direction.

I am really looking forward to the day your update with that feature is available. I would even pay a small add-on fee for that (around 2-3 €).

 

[mikelove]

First I use Pleco on my iPad and add some new flashcards and test them. Before I go on a short trip to the city, where I have plenty of time on the subway and bus, I open the Pleco app on my phone and iPad. I go to the syncing menu on my iPad and hit just one button. It automatically detects the nearby iPhone and transfers the data via WiFi, Bluetooth or cloud sync (MobileMe or Dropbox). The syncing process only takes a few seconds and then both devices are in sync. The sync should also be two-way, not just in one direction.

I am really looking forward to the day your update with that feature is available. I would even pay a small add-on fee for that (around 2-3 €).

I think we'd probably host this ourselves, actually - never know when a popular public site might be knocked out by the Great Firewall, and unfortunately there isn't really a good standard protocol for this that people could plug into any site (WebDAV support is primitive and inconsistent to say the least), plus it lets us easily build cool features like web-based flashcard review / editing onto what we've got later on.

Not sure whether there'd be a fee involved or not - if we built this on a cloud platform like S3 it'd cost practically nothing per user (on the order of $0.01 a month in storage/bandwidth costs for a reasonable-sized database), but if there's a lot of new programming / support involved that starts to make the cost more significant.

 

[justin.mann]

I have a similar but perhaps easier to solve problem. My flashcard list is the same on iphone and ipad, I just want to copy the scorefile. Is this possible?

 

[mikelove]

I have a similar but perhaps easier to solve problem. My flashcard list is the same on iphone and ipad, I just want to copy the scorefile. Is this possible?

The scores are the trickiest thing to move, actually - best bet would probably be to back up your database on one device, transfer over the backup and restore it on the other. Direct device-to-device sync is coming in a future update but for now that's about all you can do...