Software Instructions - MacFlash Editor

The MacFlash Editor can be started by either double clicking on the program's icon or by dragging a deck onto the program icon.  If you launched without a file, you will need to create a new deck (File/New).  Once you have a new or existing deck opened into MacFlash, you will see the window shown below, with a (possibly empty) list of cards, and a set of buttons on the bottom of the window

 





















The list displays the cards within the deck.  Each card is identified by a small icon and the question on the card (or "Question not specified" if no question is defined for the card).  Additional information on the card is shown to the right.  Double clicking on any entry will bring up the Card Edit Dialog, described below.  The list supports cut and paste of cards within the same deck, or between decks.  You can cut and paste multiple cards, using a shift-click to select multiple consecutive entries or command-click to select disjointed entries (as standard with most list views on the Mac).  You can also Drag and Drop from the list window, including support for TEXT clippings that are in a similar format to the Import Deck format, explained below.  The card count in the lower left corner of the list will help you keep track of how many cards you have made in the deck, and the status bar will inform you of
any messages from the program.

The commands on the bottom of the screen perform exactly as they read.  "Add" (or the Deck/Add Card menu option) will add a card to the bottom of the deck, and bring up the Card Edit Dialog.  "Remove" (Deck/Remove Card) will remove the currently selected card from the deck (same effect as the Edit/Clear command).  "Move Up" (Deck/Move Up) will move the selected card up the list, and "Move Down" (Deck/Move Down) will move the card down.

When you either create a new card, or edit an existing one, the Card Edit Dialog comes up, as shown below.

 































Along the top of this window is a popup menu with the various types of cards you may create.  Selecting a particular type will bring up editing fields for that card (which are explained in the 'Card Types' chapter).  Below the edit fields are two additional fields,  the "Maximum Tries Per Card" and the "Value" field.  These deal with how the card is presented in the Quizzer program.  Click the "OK" button to keep the changes for the card, or click "Cancel" to discard them.  Also, you can click "Ok And Add" to add the current card to the working deck, then continue to edit a new card.  When you add a card, the card is checked for missing fields and other problems which may confuse the end user of your deck.  Some of these are the lack of missing fields and must be filed in; others are more suggestions than errors.  If you wish to remove this suggestions, you can set the "Relaxed Card Checking" option under Edit/Preferences, explained below.  You will still be presented with a warning dialog when you omit a necessary field, though.

Selecting the Edit/Preferences option will bring up the dialog shown below.  You can set the default card to cause the Edit Card dialog to come up when adding a new card in that type.
Also, you can check the 'Use Last Card Type' to have the Edit dialog open with the same type of card that was last edited.  The default values for the Number of Tries and Point Value for new or imported cards can also be set.  The 'Relaxed Card Checking' option is explained above.  

 



















If you have a deck whose answers should be checked in a certain way, you can set these preferences under Deck/Checking Prefs, which brings up the dialog below  You may set any of the options to On or Off which will override any setting in the Quizzer, or you may leave the options as User Default.  Options left as such will be determined by the current quizzing preferences in the Quizzer.  The specific options are:

Strip Diacritics: If this option is On, the Quizzer will remove any special symbols, such as à, ê, and ö, from both the user's answer and the card's answer, before checking the answers for any card from this deck.  Note that these are replaced by their equivalent characters in the answer (e.g., diacritic 'à' will become 'a').

Case Insensitive: If this option is On, the Quizzer will convert both the user's answers and the card's answer to all lower case before checking the answer.

Strip Trailing Spaces: If this option is On, any trailing spaces that may be accidentally entered by the user or by the deck's creator will be removed before checking the answer.

 















If you would like to prevent others from looking at the deck from within the editor (but still full access to the deck in the Quizzer), you can password protect your deck using the Deck/Enable Password Protection... option.  When you select this option, a dialog will open.  Type and retype your password, and click OK.  From now on, when you open the deck, a password dialog will appear and ask for your password; if you fail to input the correct password, the deck will fail to load.  Once you have added password protection, you can change the password with Deck/Change Password, or you can remove the protection with Deck/Disable Password Protection.

If you have a tab-delimited file that alternates between questions and answers, you can use the File/Import... menu option to load the file into MacFlash.  Alternatively, you can use File/Export... to convert the MacFlash deck back into text file.  Note that only Plain Text cards are considered in these operations: all cards that are made from an imported file will be of the Plain Text type, and only Plain Text cards will be exported to the text file.  Also, the default values and maximum number of tries that are set in the preferences (above) will be used for the imported cards.

You can sort the deck via any of the 5 fields (type, question, answer, value, or tries) with the Deck/Sort By commands.  Currently, this will only sort the deck by ascending order, but this should be suitable for most purposes.

There are two other menu options available not discussed in the above.  Each deck can have a description which will be shown when it is loaded into the Quizzer.  This description can be edited with the Deck/Edit Description menu option.

When you are done editing the deck, you can save with the File/Save or the File/Save As menu options.  Decks will be saved with the Quizzer's creator type, so that if you double click these decks, they will open in the Quizzer, not the editor.