FCD beyond limits: text9, text10, ... and other feedback

[Yabena]

Hi Ernie

Recently I was tinkering with a deck which uses quite a lot of specific FCD features (I have an iPhone 7+ with ios 14.8.1 and FCD version 4.49), and I wanted to share some challenges with you. I don't know whether they're easy to solve or not, since I don't code, but to me it seems like these limits were set up the way they are because maybe you thought "ach, no one is going to use that anyways, so let's put a maximum value here", so I wanted to do my best to explain my cases where I was limited by the maxima.

I'm currently learning Toki Pona, it is an artificial constructed language invented by a linguist who wanted to find out with how few words it's possible to make a language. The core of the language are 129 words (using only 12 letters) and each word be displayed as a pictogram ("Sitelen Pona"), drawing ("Sitelen Sitelen") or emoji ("Sitelen Emoji") too. Luckily I found a comprehensive spreadsheet online (https://linku.la/about/nimi/) from where I got almost all data.

If you want to have a look to the deck, I uploaded it to public library with the name "Toki Pona (&Sitelen Pona..." via username yabena

#1 Text9, Text10...
Currently it is possible to add up to 8 texts (text1, text2, ... text8) to a deck and to display these with custom layouts on up to 5 sides. I have a use case where it would be helpful to have much more texts, such that the user of a deck can adjust which is the translation language easily.
The spreadsheet has which I used as a source has translation into a few dozen of languages, which sadly I cannot all add to the deck since there is the limitation of 8 texts. If I could add them all, it would be an easy thing for a user of one of the other languages to change the cards language by simply searching out which Text his language is and changing the Text linked to side2 (e.g. replacing Text2 by Text36). I'd want to include a list of which Text stands for which language in the description of the deck (which shows up in public library), however there is a limit of 1'000 characters, so I cannot list all languages there too. So I'd also appreciate removing the character limit for description (or adding a new input field "usage advice" with unlimited characters). I believe the guy who made http://www.spanisch-5000.de faced a similar issue.

#2 Custom Names for Texts and Categories?
In that case it would also be useful to give the Texts custom names, which would be displayed in the app too. Either by changing the names in-app and then displaying them in the Excel/txt header something like that
* text-1-title Toki Pona
* text-2-title English
* text-3-title Etymology
etc
or by adding an additional line in the Excel/txt above or below the actual text1, text2,... line which is used for the titles.
Similarly, category names would be a nice feature too:
* category-1-title Usage
* category-2-title Book
* category-3-title Word Type
etc
(and more than 4 categories would be nice too ;))

#3 Layout Options for all Text1 till Text8
Another challenge was that the layout options are not equally available for all Text1-8. While font and font size can be adjusted in-app for Text1-8, text colors can be adjusted only for Text1-5, which was annoying because I wanted Text3 to be black, Text4-7 to be grey, but if I put these into the first five slots, they will show up in the dictionary stack, so Text1 and Text2 must be for source and target language, so I wasn't able to set all colors I want.
(I know it's possible to do this with HTML via Excel but it's kinda annoying, and it makes it more complicated for new users to understand what's going on if I send them my Excel file)

#4 Custom Layout Options for Image1, Image2,... like for Text1, Text2
The reason I wanted to change the color of Text3 to white is that I have an image on that side which has a transparent background and is a black drawing (like this one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... 29.svg.png). It didn't appear on the card, because it had the same color as the background. So I changed Side3 and Side4 background, which implied I also need to change the Text color. However I cannot set the entire deck to background white, since I cannot change all Texts to be non-white. So now I have two sides with black backgrounds and two sides with white background which is kinda a breach in style.
Another nice feature would be here to have a few settings for image1, image2 (like they are for text1, text2 etc), which could include:
-- invert colors (which would solve the above issue immediately. And I guess I'm not the only one who uses images with black drawings for symbols)
-- remove transparent background and replace it through color x (usually black or white)
-- autoadjust size/height to xx:yy
The nice thing would be here to be able to adjust all image1 at once, like it's with text1, text2 etc.
Another thing I missed was putting multiple images on the same side (in my case I'd want to have a side3 with the images for "sitelen pona", "sitelen sitelen" and "sitelen emoji". However since I cannot put multiple images on one side, I had to add a forth side). Same goes for sounds, if I want to have different accents to pronounce the same word in the target language (e.g. American and British English, so that I can compare the pronounciation, or in case of Toki Pona there are also two kinds of sounds which I found in the spreadsheet).

#5 bug with card preview when accessing through stack/dictionary for Custom Layout
Also I noticed that when viewing single cards through the stack/dictionary by clicking long onto a word is somehow bugged, because afterwards they are not displayed with the custom layout options (color, font, text-side-mapping etc) but just in a plain text1, text2, text3, text4, text5 view (no matter how many sides you have in your custom layout).

some other various minor bugs / feedback which I gathered in the last years:

#6 "Email is private" is not really private
if you export a deck to public library there is the option of enabling feedback email. If you click on the "?" it explains that your email adress can't be seen by other users (in the German Hilfe it's written like this "Feedback-Mail - wenn dies eingeschaltet ist, können Benutzer Feedback senden. Die Benutzer können dabei die Mailadresse nicht sehen"). This isn't exactly true. I downloaded a public deck (it was Spanish 5000) and then exported it as a .txt and in the introduction lines of the txt (the ones starting with * about the settings), I could read the email.

#7 empty lines are considered as Flashcards for line count
in 2010 you got that first Gold medal for the nice feature that when uploading to FCD app server the total number is displayed (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2954&p=8578&hilit=mabena#p8488). Once I uploaded a deck where I deleted a bunch of cards, but I improperly deleted them, I didn't remove the entire rows in Excel, I just deleted their content. I noticed that the number was unchanged, so your counter detects empty lines as flashcards (whilst your app recognizes empty lines and removes them, the website counter doesn't - which can confuse when you will see a smaller number of flashcards in the app than what you think you uploaded). I'd recommend to change it to something like: "152 lines detected, 102 Flashcards uploaded, 50 empty lines discarded" in case that there are empty lines inside.

#8 can you add the last asked side to statistics?
I don't know whether that issue is still recent, because it happened to me a few years ago (I guess that was before the introduction of Custom Layouts). I had a big deck of French 3'000 vocabulary and I learnt them with the "side shown first" set to "alternate" since I wanted to learn in both directions (and I still prefer that over Custom Layouts if I have an 'easier'/more straight-forward deck with not so many special effects). So these vocabularies all appeared as alternate, and since I used the deck a few years most of them were at an intervall >100. I did regular backups (export via email txt), and one day my old iphone3 gave up. I loaded my backup to the new iPhone6, everything worked out, including statistics, except the app seemed to forget which side I learnt last. So all cards startet again to show first at side1, which was somehow frustrating because at these high intervals it basically meant that for the next year I'd be mostly only learning in the direction French-->German and not vice versa. I had a look into the text file and I didn't find a parameter in the statistics of each card there indicating which side was shown first the last time for the case that "alternate" was enabled. So it seemed to me it is saved on the app locally and not being exported.
I don't know whether it's still the case today, but when since I write you now, I wanted to share it too. (that was kind of a reason too I did not write you till today, because I had a lot of things to say and I was just seeing it would get a looooong post and it took me some time to finally sit down and write it).

tl;dr I hope I didn't smother you with that wall of text. It's mostly very detailed feedback on specific issues. However I don't know how easy they'd be to change, and I don't know whether you have good reasons why you conciously didn't.
And after all that dulging into details and pedancy shouldn't give the impression I'm complaining, I'm wildly happy with the app, as you know.

I'd be excited too if you have a look to that Toki Pona deck too. I could imagine it would make itself good in the featured deck list too since it shows a lot of features of the app, from pictures to sounds to Custom Layouts. If you want to add it, feel free :). But don't feel pushed to do so, if you don't like it for whatever reason.

Best Regards
Yanis

[Ernie]

Hi Yanis,

Toki Pona is interesting. I didn't know about this language. I checked out your deck. Very attractive and well made.

#1
You should be able to use Text 9 also in your Excel file header. I don't plan on adding more to the app. My programming in this regard is a little rigid (prioritized for speed), so it's not real easy to add more. It might happen eventually, but not near-term.

As for the 1000 character limit for the description, I'll increase this to 2000 for the next update.

#2
Custom names is something I might eventually support. Not sure. But if it does happen, it won't be soon. But it's something I'm interested in.

#3
You should be able to do this in your Excel file. Export your deck and you'll see header info with settings. For text color, the below will set Text 6 to red:
* | text-colors | ,,,,,1.000 0.000 0.000
I agree that the app should support this, but there's a workaround. People using Text 6+ will be importing from Excel, so easy enough to add this manually.

#4
I don't plan on adding any photo manipulation features. That's for another app. I can see two other options for your photo issue:
a) Use a card theme with a white background. In this case, no custom background colors or font colors needed (except for non-black/white font colors, like gray)
b) Put all your pictures through some photo program to convert them so they are not transparent. I think some Photoshop-like programs can batch process a bunch of photos at a time, and convert them to say jpg (which wouldn't have clear background). In this case, the user could choose a black or white theme, and the pictures would show up either way. Having a picture with a white background on a black card doesn't look that great, so not sure if any better than what you are doing look-wise.

#5
Are you using Advanced Layout? When you long-press, it will use the Card Layout defined when Advanced Layout is off. So turn off, set up your layout, turn back on, and it should work.

#6
Thank you for telling me about this. I will remove the email from exported flashcard files.

#7
Gold medal! haha. Wow, long time ago. I'm not going to change this. I don't think it's worth the effort, as I don't think it will affect too many people, or in much of a significant manor.

#8
Correct, the current alternate side info is not exported. I won't be updating this. Actually, I think people should be using advanced layout and studying each direction with independent stats. So my feeling is to have users move towards this direction instead.

[Yabena]

Hi Ernie
Thanks for your reply (as always faster than mine).

#1
I used Text9 as excel file header, but then when uploading to your app server I got the following error message: " Invalid column header: Text 9". Also same for more than four categories, it will bring the error: "Invalid column header: Category 5"
thanks for increasing to 2000

#2
okay, thanks for considering it

#3
alright, I'll try that with the Excel workaround.

#4
yeah, I kinda agree that photo manipulation is for another app.
b) I know there would be programs which can process a bunch of photos easily, but the main reason why I couldn't do this with my deck is that all the photos are acessed by public URLs (wikimedia commons direct links) and that if I'd download the photos and edit them, I'd have to upload them each time via OneDrive with the deck. It's much smoother to just put the URLs into Excel and finish. That's why I was scared of editing the photos.

#5
yes, I'm using advanced layout. Okay, so I'll set the normal layout to set up that one.

#6
cool

#7
okay, I agree it's only affecting a small number of users.

#8
yeah, I agree, advanced layouts should be the way to go. It's just not so easy to change an old deck with 3000+ vocabs from the time before advanced layouts. But yeah I agree that custom layouts should be the future, so I totally understand you don't want to adjust that.

Thanks again for your answer
Best
Yanis

[Ernie]

Invalid column header: Text 9

Oh, are you using the website / App Server? I just updated this so you should be able to use Text 9 now.

[Yabena]

yes, I'm always using the website / app server to upload my flashcards.
Now I could upload text 9 but I got the same error for text 10 and category 5:
Invalid column header: Text 10

you seemed surprised that I'm using the website to upload my flashcards. Is there a place where I can upload flashcards with limitless number of texts, e.g. Test 37 without getting the error?

[Ernie]

Text 10 is not supported, nor do I have plans to support in near future. Category 5 is also not supported.

I generally recommend Dropbox or OneDrive. I really like OneDrive, better because you can use on many devices (unlike Dropbox without paying) and there is a cool feature to easily remove file contents from computer (to save space) but still see the file in File Explorer and view/redownload as easy as a normal double-click. Install the client on your PC or Mac. Then you can you create and maintain your Excels spreadsheets on your computer right in the OneDrive folder, and the in the app, you can importe directly from the Excel file without the need to copy the file anywhere else or copy/paste text.

[Ernie]

Text 10 is not supported, nor do I have plans to support in near future. Category 5 is also not supported.

I generally recommend Dropbox or OneDrive. I really like OneDrive, better because you can use on many devices (unlike Dropbox without paying) and there is a cool feature to easily remove file contents from computer (to save space) but still see the file in File Explorer and view/redownload as easy as a normal double-click. Install the client on your PC or Mac. Then you can you create and maintain your Excels spreadsheets on your computer right in the OneDrive folder, and the in the app, you can importe directly from the Excel file without the need to copy the file anywhere else or copy/paste text.

But my website generally works fine also if you are not a Dropbox or OneDrive user.