Study Folders as Combination Decks?

[peblin]

Hi all,

I have a fairly large selection of cards, neatly ordered in folders. They're mostly about wine - so one folder per producing country with decks for all regions. Think folder:France, decks:Bordeaux, Champagne, Rhone etc.

Now - I want to study French wines. Obviously, what I want to do is to run the French folder in Spaced Repetition mode.

Is there a way to do this?

For me, first organising everything neatly into folders and then having to create combination decks such as "French Wines" is both cumbersome and clutters the interface with what feels like duplicates.

(...and on a side note - I think I just passed a die-hard exam thanks to Flashcards Deluxe... thankyouthankyou Ernie for such a super-duper-terrific-awesome app.)

[Ernie]

What I would recommend is go into your French folder, add a combination deck, add all your french decks to it. (I just say go into folder first so new deck gets put in there by default.)
Move the combination deck to the top of the list? (Edit, then drag)
Enter combination and change to spaced repetition.

Cumbersome and clutters? I think it's very flexible, and I'm not sure how to double a folder as a combination deck, if that is what you are implying. As far as cumbersome, maybe having the ability to auto-select decks in the same folder might be useful, but I think all these would be next to each other in the list, so not to much of a hassle. If you have specific recommendations, let me know. I'm just not sure what your idea is.

Good to hear on your (hopeful) exam results!

Ernie

[peblin]

Thanks Ernie.

I definitely agree that it's flexible. I hadn't thought about putting the combination decks *inside* the folder. That helps reducing what I described as clutter, i.e. having both a Folder and a Combination deck next to each other with similar names on the "root" page.

I'll try to clarify what I mean from a user story perspective: "As a user, I want to be able to practice a whole folder so that I can use my folder structure much in the same way I would use a combination deck".

What I'd like to do could be solved by for example having an automatic combination deck of all folder contents added to all folder views. So, in my France folder, I'd have "Bordeaux", "Champagne", and "All decks in folder" decks to practice.
Or, perhaps a button saying "Practice folder" when I'm in a folder.

In a coding sense - if a Deck is an IDeck, and a Combination Deck is a deck-of-decks IDeck, well then - why cant a folder be a deck-of-decks IDeck as well?

Hope this clarifies my thinking a bit...

[Ernie]

This does clarify it, and it makes some sense. I still would have to show a command button (e.g. a row in a folder?) to start the study session, so it seems to be more of a convenience at this point than helping clutter or providing more "power". My folder is actually a deck object (just like a combination deck), so it couple probably work as you described pretty easily.

Bottom line is I'll make a note of it and consider this idea for a future update. For now, I think you can get the exact same functionality, just with a little more work (setting up the combo deck).

[doogooroo]

Hi Peblin and Ernie,

I understand the rationale behind Peblin's idea. I have some folders which I would also like to treat as a combination deck.

The way I'm getting around it is to put all the relevant decks inside the folder then create a combination deck at the top (still inside the folder) then run it that way. It means one more click but works fine.

I do, however, have folders which contain decks which I *don't* want to treat all the same. So if you did implement Peblin's suggestion, please don't make it default / include an opt-out function as I wouldn't want it to apply to all my folders.

My two cents.

Cheers,

Dougal

[doogooroo]

Addendum: I also have a folder ("Japanese") containing multiple combination decks (i.e. Japanese to English, English to Japanese, Character readings etc).

I like the neatness of having a Japanese folder and the utility of a small number of combination decks within it.

So, given this, I don't think having folders function as combination decks would work for me very well.

Cheers,

Dougal

[Ernie]

Thanks for your input Dougal. I think Peblin can get exactly what she wants by putting the Combo deck at the top inside the folder, but it takes a extra step to manually set up the combo deck. I'm concerned about doing too many things automatically as not everyone wants it all the time. I'm not doing anything on this right away, but it's good to have these ideas floating around as possiblities.