managing continuously added decks

[szf]

Ernie,
I am heavily using your app and wonder how to solve the following issue.
To learn Japanese i continuously add new decks to learn new vocabular.
These decks are managed by one combination deck and i always only with the combination deck, never with the single decks.
In the meantime the combination deck has about 50 individual decks.
As i have multiple such combination decks and never using the individual decks i wonder if i could somehow easily combine all decks included in the combination deck into a new single deck (either online on the iphone or offline in the pc).
Is there any method?
Or are you thinking of adding something that would help me here?
Or should i work in a different way as i currently work?
As i guess your app is often used to learn a foreign language i can imagine other users have similar requirements.
Thanks
Stefan

[Ernie]

You can combine cards.

In the app, open the deck you want to copy FROM, to go card listing, at Mode (at bottom), Multi-Select, Mode, Select All, Mode, Move/Copy cards... and you can move or copy them to another deck.

If you are comfortable using my website to transfer cards, you can also combine decks on your PC. To export to the PC, tap Edit (at main screen), a deck, then Export. You can export by mail or to my server. If you export to my server, you need to go the Export page on the website to copy back to your PC. If you export by Email, you can export all decks at once, but not really because it will max at 31 decks so it won't export them all for you. I assume you'll want to export with Statistic information so you can keep this. Once you have the text files, use Excel (or similar) to copy-paste them all together and retransfer. I'm now working on better ways to backup easily (since you can only export 31 decks right now by email).

[arthaey]

I also have continuously added decks, for picking up German or Spanish words from context in real life. Usually using the official Upload page and appending the cards is good enough. But if I notice a typo in an existing card,

1. edit the master spreadsheet, and also edit the matching card manually
2. edit the master spreadsheet, then replace all cards to get the one card updated

What I'd like as on option #3, where I could "append" only the edited cards, but have it do the normal replace-card-if-all-but-one-side-match rule.

... Or maybe it already does this? I've been afraid to ruin my decks.

[Ernie]

Interesting proposal. I'll make a note of it. I think it's a pretty good idea, but I'll revisit this in a couple months.

[arthaey]

Are any of your Google Doc import/export changes going to take into account these types of continuously updated decks?

[Ernie]

Probably not. As of now, when you update an existing deck from Google docs you have one option... refresh the entire deck.

What is the problem with replacing all cards? Is there fear that existing cards may be screwed up in some unknown situation?

[arthaey]

What is the problem with replacing all cards? Is there fear that existing cards may be screwed up in some unknown situation?

I somewhat frequently catch typos or decide that I should I have added more info to a card once I'm using it. So I update the card on the phone.

So if I replace all the cards with what's in Google Docs, I'll lose the on-phone corrections.

[Ernie]

The next update will make it very easy to export back to google docs. If you make a change on your iphone, then you can export to Google docs before you add any new cards from there. In this way, Google docs is basically kept as your "master" version. Thoughts?

[arthaey]

I can probably restain myself from making changes to the spreadsheet until I've hit the Export button. I do have some usability questions, though:

- Could you add some visual indicator that there are pending local (phone-only) edits that need uploading?
- Could you also add an idicator for when the spreadsheet's last-updated timestamp is newer than the last time I've imported?
- Will decks be able to remember their spreadsheet URL?
- Will the app remember my Google password (as discussed in the other thread)? If not, I won't be able to use any of these cool new import/export features yet.
- Does only 1 side of the cards have to match exactly, to be replaced?
- What will happen to cards where both sides had typos and were fixed locally? Seems like this case won't work (at least not without hidden unique IDs for each card).
- Is there a practical or hardcoded limit to the deck size for import/export?

[Ernie]

Adding a last edit date and some way to see what edits have been made recently is on my do-to list, but not planned for the near future. Ditto for other syncing time tools like date comparisons.

You are going to have to manage the two-sided updates yourself for now. What I do is when I make an update to a card on the device I will flag it and/or add a note. You can use this information to see what you've updated and what needs to be incorporated into your master version.

Yes, decks will remember their Google name/ID, so it can refresh easily.
I assume that the app will be able to remember the password for the next update.

As long as either side 1 OR side 2 match, the statistic info will get carried forward. If you changed side 2, and there are two cards with the same side 1 value, then stats won't get moved forward because it doesn't know how to match.

If you change both sides, then the only problem is that stats will be lost. Yes, you'd need an ID to deal with this, and so far I haven't wanted to add an ID to cards. (Keep things more simple for user.)

I don't know of practical limits for updates/imports/exports. I would assume that with an iPhone 4 that under 20,000 cards should do all of these quick enough. I don't know if exporting to google docs would be a little slow with a lot of cards.