turning off sound-play icon

turning off sound-play icon

Postby sunhou » Tue Oct 05, 2010 7:47 pm

I got the applet to make some flashcards for my toddler (though I also study Chinese a bit, so I may use it for that as well). It's very nice so far. I have text, an image, and sound for each card. I'm making decks for e.g. people he interacts with, for foods he knows, the various kinds of trucks he knows, etc. I run it in "browse" mode, with autoplay turned on for the sound.

The one thing I haven't been able to do is turn off the small icon for controlling sound. Since I have autoplay on for sound, every card has a small square on the picture, which I could tap to stop the sound. Is there any way to hide that icon? E.g. for my "people" cards, it means everyone's picture has a square on their face, which is a bit distracting.
sunhou
 

Re: turning off sound-play icon

Postby Ernie » Tue Oct 05, 2010 7:56 pm

Sunhou, I like hearing about how different people use the app... for a toddler even!

You can't turn the icon off, but you can move it to the side, which hopefully will help a little. Go to Main Options (from main screen), then "Swipe / Tap & Icon Settings", then "Play Button Location". Here you can move it to either the left or right side a bit.
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Re: turning off sound-play icon

Postby sunhou » Thu Oct 07, 2010 9:51 am

I've been using an app for over a month called "Toddler Flashcards" which my 14-month-old really likes. But it only has certain cards built in. I found your app while searching for a very general flashcard app which would let me include text (for when he's older), images, and sounds, and let me build my own decks with the categories and cards I want.

Moving the sound icon to the right makes it a little better, though still not great. I'll understand if you don't provide a way to completely hide it, since it's likely not a feature many would want, but I hope you can toss it somewhere in your "to-do" pile.

My only other complaint is that your app moves between cards quite a bit slower than the Toddler Flashcards one. With TF, when you swipe your finger the image moves immediately, but with yours there is a bit of a lag. My son sometimes swipes pretty vigorously and quickly a couple of times, and at least once has gotten it to skip over a couple of cards and end up playing the sound for one card while another one is displayed. I wonder if yours is slower because of the internal records it keeps for scoring? Except we see this behavior even when in Browse mode, when it's presumably not keeping track of scoring data.

Anyway, yours was the only app I found with pretty much the flexibility/configurability I wanted, so thanks for providing it.
sunhou
 

Re: turning off sound-play icon

Postby Ernie » Thu Oct 07, 2010 10:21 am

As for moving between cards slowly, these are things I can think of...
1) The card moves after you lift your finger, not while you are dragging. This is by design.
2) Cards with large images will have more of a delay, because it takes time to load the pictures. Generally though, the app will shink images, uness you load through my website and choose the no-shrink option. TF probably loads images ahead of time.
3) You can increase the flip and slide speeds of the animations in the Main Options : View settings. This won't decrease any delay from when the animation starts though, so not sure this will help.

Basically, any delay is caused from loading pictures and drawing the new cards before it's presented. Older iPhones with large pictures will have more of a delay. The only thing I can probably do is try to load the next card in the background ahead of time, but this would cause complications that are really worth having to deal with.
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Re: turning off sound-play icon

Postby sunhou » Tue Oct 12, 2010 7:58 am

Yes, the Toddler Flashcards move while you are dragging your finger, rather than after, so that's a good point about the difference. Occasionally, on TF my son will slide halfway to the next card, then change his mind and go back, and play around with sliding back and forth a bit -- I think he likes seeing the cards slide in reponse to his finger movement.

Increasing the slide speed to "very fast" just does seem to make your app feel a bit more responsive, though I haven't let my son at it yet. (I also tried turning off the slide animation, but prefer seeing the cards slide. Even though I've set the options so you can go to the next card by tapping, my son likes sliding.)

I've tried to make sure my images are not too big, but may play around with reducing them a bit further. I think the docs said try to keep them under 600x600, right? I just got a new 4th-gen iPod touch though, so will need to see how things look on that before deciding on what image size works best for us. (Unfortunately, the new iPod isn't usable yet due to battery issues which Apple is apparently working on.) The new iPod is higher resolution -- does your app display images using higher res on iPods/iPhones with retina display? (Personally, I'm not sure I really need it; just curious.) What is the actual resolution used? I could try to make my images exactly the right size. I generally display the cards in portrait mode, in full-screen mode.

A couple days ago, my son was swiping like mad and actually got it so that the wrong text was displayed on the picture (I don't remember what the sound was doing). The main lesson from all of this is, if you really want to stress-test your app, let a 15-month-old try it out. :D
sunhou
 

Re: turning off sound-play icon

Postby Ernie » Tue Oct 12, 2010 8:13 am

Some people like the fast animations. For me, it just stresses me out. Ha.

The size of the iPhone/iPod screen is 320x480. If you make pictures larger, you can touch/hold to enter zoom mode. At exactly 320x480, it should fill up the screen exactly when in full-screen mode. The app will not show pictures in "retina" resolution, but in "standard" size by doubling the pixel size automatically for the retina screen. I'm not sure what it would take to support hi-res pictures; I haven't looked into that yet.

Wrong text with the picture? Ha, that's a new one. Noted.
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Re: turning off sound-play icon

Postby radiator » Tue Oct 12, 2010 7:49 pm

You may think I'm nuts, but infant beta testing is a winner... :D
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