OpenCards 1.5 released !

It is with great pleasure for me to release v1,5 of OpenCards, which is a free flashcard learning extension for OpenOffice Impress.

http://www.opencards.info

OpenCards 1.5 comes along with great bugfixes and a few new features:

• increased minimal system requirements to java6 and OpenOffice3.0
• tag arbitrary shapes as questions
  - support random question mode also with tag-question
  - allow multi-shape tagging
  
• automatic parsing of directory structures into a the category model sub-tree
• category deletions now require additional user confirmation
• streamlined problem reporting by auto-composing report email
• sortable columns in LTM-Manager
• dramatically improved stability on slow systems (and especially with OpenOffice 3.1, which is much less snappy compared to 3.0)
• persistent divider-locations for LTM-Manager

The new version will be automatically deployed via auto-update if OpenCards >= v0.6 is installed. To ease development OpenOffice 2.x is no longer supported (and OpenCards won't install for it). Furthermore Java6 is required to use OpenCards.

Even if OpenOffice 3.1 comes along with great new features, its Impress performance has dropped significantly. Especially annoying for OpenCards users is the notable increased loading time of Impress-odp files (which has doubled and worse for some files). I've filed a bug about the problem, but the OpenOffice developers rejected it, because they said it was not reproducible or didn't matter. But judge yourself and comment on the bug if you consider fast-file loading to be a mandatory feature for an office software suite.

You're welcome to share and discuss your experiences with OpenCards, suggestions, bug-reports, problems or ideas about flashcard learning in general with other OpenCards-users in the discussion forums.

OpenCards 1.0.1 released

After having recovered from the release of OpenCards v1.0, and encouraged by the first donation for OpenCards since the start of the project flooding my bank account today, I've started to work on the code again.

And so it is with great pleasure for me to release v1.0.1 of OpenCards. It comes along with a few bug fixes and some minor features that are all based on the user feedback I've collected during the last time.

• fixed integration of new flashcard-repository
• new: notification, when the maximal number of new items per day has been exceeded. This should make the internals of the scheduler more understandable to the user. Furthermore, it is possible to click on the notifcation (indicated by a changing cursor), which opens the LTM-settings of OpenCards and allows to adjust the limit if immediately.
• improved: replaced logging monitor with log-file
• various usability & stability improvements

The new version will be automatically deployed via auto-update if OpenCards >= v0.6 is installed.

Unfortunately the new meta-data API for OpenDocument 1.2 is planned not before OpenOffice 3.2. This requires some of the features planned for OpenCards2 (like tagging of arbitrary slide elements as questions) to be shifted into accordingly.

New Flashcards Repository

It has been a while since I've set up the OpenCards wiki, where users could share their flashcard sets.This was a nice and important step, and I was quite happy to see some users to share their flashcard sets. However, I've never felt too comfortable with it. Why? The underlying MediaWiki was hard to manage (at least for me). It was almost not possible to track changes, categorization was not intuitive, and finally the look&feel seemed to me a little sluggish compared with todays ultra-cute web2.0-apps.

After discovering WordPress for my private blog just a a few days ago, I was deeply impressed by its simplicity and functionality. So I've just gave a try to setup a new flashcards repository for OpenCards using WordPress:


It comes along with many wonderful new features like

• get notifications about new flashcard sets via RSS
• use arbitrary tags to (multi-)categorize shared card-sets
• rate card-sets
• more easy to use without knowing any special wiki-syntax
• much more beautiful compared to the old wiki (e.g. tag-clouds, ajax, etc.)

Let me know if something is missing or does not work as expected. Any ideas for improvements are as always cordially welcome. And most important: Share your flashcards! :-)

OpenCards 1.0

It is with extraordinary great pleasure for me to release OpenCards 1.0, which is a free flashcard learning extension for OpenOffice Impress.

OpenCards comes along with all you need to memorize all the things you ever wanted to know but never kept in mind. It follows an intuitive and natural approach: Just create flashcards as you're used to create Impress-slides. With OpenCards you can use any Impress/Powerpoint-file as flashcard-set without any conversion. OpenCards v1.0 runs on every major operating system, is free and open source, and is fully compatible to OpenOffice 2.x and the 3.0.

You can find more infos, tutorials, help, discussion forums, and flashcard collections shared by other users at http://www.opencards.info

OpenCards 0.16 released !

It is with great pleasure for me to release v0.16 of OpenCards, which is a free flashcard learning extension for OpenOffice Impress.

http://www.opencards.info

OpenCards 0.16 comes along with great bugfixes and a few new features:

• Automatic guessing of character encoding when importing flashcards from csv-files (feature request 2018184)
• Started OpenCards manual (not yet as 'feature complete' as necessary but a first step)
• New learning mode: When CTRL is hold while a new learning session is started OC will include all new items. This overrides the default behavior which just incrementally includes new items into the learning process. Refer to the (above mentioned ;-) ) manual for details.
• CTRL+C opens configuration dialog for the current slide when being in a learning session
• fixed: Refreshing mode included new (unseen) items
• fixed: New item counts in table do not match panel-counts
• fixed: Warning on Impress shutdown is shown more than once
  
• various usability & stability improvements
  

The new version will be automatically deployed via auto-update if OpenCards >= v0.6 is installed.

Because I'm not aware of any serious bugs, v0.16 is likely to become tagged as OpenCards 1.0 in a few weeks. However, the feature brain-storming for OpenCards 2 has already begun, and everyone is welcome to participate in this process. Additionally I would welcome any contributions (chapters, ideas, typos, grammar, etc.) to teh manual which is still work in progress.

You're welcome to share and discuss your experiences with OpenCards, suggestions, bug-reports, problems or ideas about flashcard learning in general with other OpenCards-users in the discussion forums.

Towards 1.0...

After two bug fix releases for v0.15, OpenCards becomes more and more ready to be tagged as v1.0. But beforehand I'll plan to publish at least one other bug-fix release that further optimizes the scheduler, fixes the last (known) crash bugs and *tata* adds a manual for OpenCards.

Although I considered the FAQ and the forums to be a sufficient documentation, many users expressed their need for a more elaborate one. So here it is: The OpenCards Manual (still early alpha but anyway...)

It's written in docbook format to allow an easy integration as JavaHelp, or -- preferably -- as native OpenOffice help. Unfortunately I just don't whether docbook can be compiled into OpenOffice compatible help files. Please drop me a note if you know how to do so.

Finally, I'm confident that OpenCards 1.0 (including a real manual) will be ready to be published before autunm. :-)

OpenCards 0.15 released !

It is with great pleasure for me to release v0.15 of OpenCards, which is a free flashcard learning extension for OpenOffice Impress.

http://www.opencards.info

OpenCards 0.15 comes along with great bugfixes and a few new features:

• Automatic hiding of the slide sorter pane during learning sessions (feature request 1890815)
• Added Italian translation (thx to Silvio Gavagnin)
• Added Greek translation (thx to Akis Vassiliadis)
  
• Added Portuguese translation (thx to Ricardo Umpierre)
  
• fixed: OC-toolbar-icons don't look too nice (bug 1915621)
  
• cosmetics: Toolbar is now named "OpenCards" now and not anymore "Add-on 1"
• various usability & stability improvements
  

The new version will be automatically deployed via auto-update if OpenCards >= v0.6 is installed.

Because slide-pane hiding requires an OpenOffice newer than 2.2 the minimal OpenOffice version required to use OpenCards was incremented to OpenOffice 2.3.

The remaining weeks towards OpenCards 1.0 will be used to fix a few remaining stability problems. However, the feature brain-storming for OpenCards 2 has already begun, and everyone is welcome to participate in this process.

You're welcome to share and discuss your experiences with OpenCards, suggestions, bug-reports, problems or ideas about flashcard learning in general with other OpenCards-users in the discussion forums.