Flash cards mysteriously disappearing

[Jason]

As I wrote in my previous email, I am using FlashCards to study German
and it has been quite useful. However I am experiencing a very strange
behavior which in fact is making me lose a lot of my flashcards, which
is definitely *not* very useful. At seemingly random times, the number
of cards in my German set drops dramatically. Yesterday, I had a
little over 300 cards in the set, and this morning I went to add
another set, and it dropped to around 90! However what is really
strange is that I also organized the cards into topics by chapter
(chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, etc.) so that I can study a
particular chapter if I want to, or my whole vocabulary if I want to.
So when I look at the cards for the whole set they dropped to around
90, and also the numbers dropped for the boxes for the whole set.
However when I examine the topics that have lost cards, those topics
still include the old cards which were lost -- and I can even use the
cards by hitting "run" for individual topics. However that still
doesn't solve the problem that the cards are missing from the overall
set.

Another interesting element of this behavior is that it doesn't
randomly delete the cards - it deletes them from the bottom of the set
up. So for example, if have 10 cards as following:

Card 1
Card 2
Card 3
Card 4
Card 5
Card 6
Card 7
Card 8
Card 9
Card 10

... when I experience this behavior, it doesn't delete cards 3, 6, and
7, but cards 8-10, leaving cards 1-7.

Do you have any idea what is going on here?

Jason

[Armando Margarido]

I had exactly the same issue when I use the topics. Now, I dont use
the topics anymore and I have csv files as backups on my computer ^^

Armando Margarido

Le 28 mai 09 à 14:41, Jason <jason...@gmail.com> a écrit :

[Jason Lustig]

I also have the CSV files backed up on my computer (which is the only
reason why I didn't completely freak out when this happened). Now that
you no longer use topics, would you say that you no longer experience
this problem?

Thanks
Jason

[Armando Margarido]

The last time I had this problem was at the 1.9 update. One of my
topics who had about 60 cards and after the update the 20 last cards I
added were deleted. But it seems that some cards can be deleted when
you are adding cards and if you exit the app during the editi g, like
if you press home button, or on a app crash or when somebody calls you.

Armando Margarido

Le 28 mai 09 à 15:29, Jason Lustig <jason...@gmail.com> a écrit :

[Jason Lustig]

Interesting. It makes sense that when the app crashes and it is
writing something to disk, it would lose data. However, you suggest
that "cards can be deleted when you are adding cards" and if you exit
the app during the editing" - do you specifically mean getting them
from the website? I sometimes find that the larger the batch of cards
I am adding, the greater the chance that I will lose data. This
probably is because when you add too many cards at once, the app
crashes, but even when it doesn't I sometimes lose data.

Thanks
Jason

[Armando Margarido]

No this problem just happened when the import website was not online.
I was talking about adding cards directly on the iphone.
Armando Margarido

Le 28 mai 09 à 16:41, Jason Lustig <jason...@gmail.com> a écrit :

[Jason Wentworth]

Are you guys still seeing this issue in 1.9.1? In 1.9.0 there was
some issues in topics that may have caused this issue but topics
shouldn't cause lost cards in 1.9.1.

I'll look into it and if I can find the issue I'll get a fix out
asap. If any of you can find a way to consistently repeat the issue
please let me know!

Thanks,

Jason

Sent from my iPhone

On May 28, 2009, at 9:54 AM, Armando Margarido

[Jason Lustig]

I am using the most recent version, whatever that is (1.9.1 I think).
I was unable to find any consistent action which caused the behavior,
but it always seemed to happen after adding a group of cards from the
website. Overall the website is fantastic - I would never have created
300+ cards directly on my ipod - but it seems to choke up on large
batches of cards. When importing cards, sometimes I have the following
types of problems - usually with large batches but sometimes with
small batches too:

1. Sometimes, the website stops responding, and when I try to load up
the cards I get a message that it can't find any data.
2. Sometimes, when adding large batches of cards, the app crashes
while in the process of loading it. This might be tied to losing data,
but I've lost data even when the app doesn't crash.

Thanks,
Jason

[Jason Wentworth]

The app right now doesn't handle large datasets very well. I dont
think it should cause other data loss. For now I'd advise importing
in smaller chunks. You can still import into the same cardset but I'd
try 50-100 at a time.

The next update should handle importing larger sets a little better.

Thanks!

Jason

Sent from my iPhone

On May 28, 2009, at 12:29 PM, Jason Lustig <jason...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Jason Lustig]

That's good news! When you say that it "doesn't handle large datasets
very well," does that mean that it doesn't handle having large sets of
cards at all, or that it doesn't handle importing many cards at once?

Thanks
Jason

[Jason Wentworth]

I mean that the import functionality doesn't handle importing a large amount of cards at once.  Technically I'm sure there's some upper bound to what the application itself can handle but I haven't really seen any issues with that.

Thanks!

Jason

[Jason Lustig]

I've been trying to import more cards into my ipod, and have been having limited success. Here is what I'm experiencing:

1. The app is OK with bringing in groups of cards up until around 150.

2. The app seems to have problems with adding groups of cards to already large card sets.

3. When it is having problems, either it comes up and says it can't find data from the import (right when you enter the safari link and the app comes up), or when you import the data, nothing is added. Then the next time you look at the card list, it has dropped by half or something like that.

What I find most annoying about adding cards:

1. The URL to type into Safari is really long and cumbersome.  It would be much easier to import cards if the URL was shorter, such as r5fci rather than r5flashcardimport.

2. Once you accumulate large groups of cards, it takes a long time to load the "Cards" page. It also takes a long time to start running through the cards.

a) It would be useful for importing if it were possible to add groups of cards without having to go to the "Cards" page - i.e. to simply have a button on the main page for the card set. That would reduce a step and make the whole process faster

b) It also appears from this behavior that FlashCards actually reads the whole card set before displaying it on the "cards" page and/or running the set. If you can make it so that it displays cards in pages of, say, maximum 200 cards, it would make loading it faster. The same could be said for running the set, which when it takes 5 minutes to open the set and get started quizzing yourself, it makes the whole exercise pointless for those times when it is most useful - when you are stuck at the line in the supermarket, in the doctors' office's waiting room, etc. 

c) Another way in which this probably would be improved would be any way in which to reduce the memory footprint of each individual card, which would make it faster on the ipod/iphone generally and allow more cards in memory.

I would greatly appreciate it if any of these suggestions were to make it into future versions. Thank you.

Thanks for a great app,

Jason

[Jason Wentworth]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the suggestions!

The current version of the app does have problems importing large groups of cards.  This will be fixed in the next version of the application.  The URL issue will also be solved.  The current version of importing is very unpolished.  Basically after releasing 1.9.0 I started working on the import feature and got it functional.  I then found a bug in 1.9.0 and fixed it.  When I released the fix I decided to include the working, though unpolished, version of import, which is why the whole import process is still a little clucky at this point.  In 1.9.2 you'll be able to type in just the number portion of the URL directly into the application to open it, and in 1.9.3 you won't even need to know the number (more on that later).

How large of groups are you dealing with?  If it is literally taking 5 minutes to open up a cardset there is some serious issue that I'd like to figure out.  In general there are a few areas I'm working on to improve loading times.

As far as the memory size of each card, it's fairly small.  Unless you are editing or quizing a specific card all that is loaded into memory is the name, total times the questions was asked, and number of times it was answered correctly.

Thanks!

Jason

[Jason Lustig]

Jason,

"Five minutes" may have been a bit of an exaggeration but it sometimes feels like it. My set of german cards is around 400 right now and it takes about a minute to get it to start running when I load it up. I've been trying to build a large set of GRE words (around 1000) and it keeps losing cards whenever I hit 700 or so. Loading that set takes a significantly longer time.

I'm sure you know best how to make loading and importing cards faster. I am a computer programmer, but I've never coded for the iPhone/ipod and I'm sure there are a lot of hardware limitations which make handling a lot of information difficult. In any case, I'm look forward to new versions of the app, I think you really have something great going on here.

Thanks,

Jason

[George Benton]

PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE ME JASON!!

[Jason Wentworth]

George,

As the owner I can unsubscribe you, but you received these messages because at some point you subscribed to this google group.  In the future you should be able to unsubscribe yourself from any google group, or by sending an e-mail to the unsubscribe e-mail google provides at the bottom of every message.