Weblog
I’ve moved the page to a Wordpress system. This allows me to have a real weblog section with feeds, comments, categories and all that good stuff. The main purpose of this weblog will be to announce new releases, post about upcoming plans and to point out to interesting articles in the blogosphere.
November 14th, 2005 at 1:53 am
Nice new system, Riad. I can’t wait for the next version of jMemorize!
November 14th, 2005 at 4:28 am
First off, Great Program!
and its good to have a blog system for users to comment.
It is very minimalistic program allowing one to just use it, know it quickly and come up with creative ways of making it work for them.
However, two things that I would like to see in future version(s).
1. The category problem.
Editing old cards is easy, if-and-only-if you want to change the frontside or backside.
My problem is I made a 702 question card file and I was a first time user of the program so I didn’t know the categories system well or how it was used in the program. So I made the first 500 questions in a single category. I then started to think about how the testing algorithms would work and also looking at a lovely list of 500+ questions it started looking very daunting to learn to say the least, so i started making more sub-categories for the next 202 questions.
I changed my mind again and redid the categories once more.
Now I have a big jml datafile and jmemorize won’t let me re-edit the category of the cards. I take it to mean you didn’t want the hassle of having to yet deal with the code to search-replace and move the line to another section of the datafile since it seems to be using a hierarchical format.
This forced me to become more familiar with the terminal (bash shell) of the Mac OS X operating system.
Luckily I found a unix command and have been awk -ing my way hacking up the jml file and extracting the individual card entries that match a search pattern and redirecting them from stdout into an appending of another text file. Use awk again with a logical not on the pattern match and overwrite the original jml to erase the entry. Then taking the seperate text files I extracted to (one for each category) and using the almight awk command (a real swiss army knife of text manipulation!) to insert the entire files contents two lines below the pattern match on a category name.
Thank you for using text files! I don’t save with the compression on so all this is possible.
however life would have been so much easier if I could just have a drop down menu on the edit screen of the flashcards to change the category of a card and let jmemorize do all the work =)
2. Picture dilema
All my current questions consist of about 25% using diagrams to study and come back and select and answer on the flashcard.
My future uses for jmemorize would be language learning and it would be good to use pictures as well.
Something very rudementary and simple would be fine by me in the beginning, such as just an external file link that launches the data file in the hosts operating system and depends on the operating system to provide its own internal links to know which application to launch to display the actual image datafile. This should make it platform independent and keep a lot of headaches out in the early versions of jmemorize.
I already have an eye of using the pdf format for my own use as it is the actual Graphics subsystem of the Mac OS X so I can natively create without any additional softare screenshots and flowcharts or any image for that matter into a pdf file and print to a pdf file natively without needing a printer opens up every application on this system for inclusion of its output into jmemorize flashcards. I can share with my Windows friends who with the help of adobe can view the picture portions of the cards as well.
Such a simple thing could give me huge usage benefits. =P
November 14th, 2005 at 4:07 pm
Hello. First of all thanks for the kind words.
@Peter
I’m sorry that you had so much work reorganizing your cards. Actually this can be already be done inside the software in two ways:
1) Open the category tree side bar. Click on a card and drag it over to the category entry that you want to move it to.
2) Select a card and cut it by select it from the Edit menu or by pressing CTRL+X on your keyboard. Go into the new category and paste it by using Paste from Edit menu or by pressing CTRL+V.
These operations can also be done with more cards at once.
I will add this explanation to the FAQ. There is also already a feature request to make moving cards simpler and more intuitive.
On the pictures: Along with better importing, thats probably the biggest feature that jMemorize is missing right now. I really want to add it at some point but I cant give you a time schedule on it right now.
By the way.. there is a new version out. Go and grab it :-)
November 14th, 2005 at 4:19 pm
Just wanted to note that I’ve added the category related explanations to the FAQ.