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.