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Fixing bugs and improving features

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Matt Moniaga

01 Nov, 2013 06:25 AM

Hello,

First, I love the mental case app. It helps me study very well but I have a number of suggestions for both the Mac OSX client, and the iOS client.

First the Mac OSX client:
- I love that you can take screenshots and easily put it into your notecards, but I can see how this can get very space consuming and lag up the program as a result. Is there a way to auto compress screenshots?
- Also, It take a long while for me to open and exit the program. Is there a way to speed up the program and make it more fluid? It also takes up a lot of RAM at times when it lags. Maybe optimize it for Mavericks.
- It seems that the program loads up all the stacks at once. Is there a way to store these stacks as individual folders and have the app load each folder you want to edit so there's a more enjoyable fluid experience?
- You cannot hide the left sidebar if all I'm doing is creating flashcards, could you add that in for a less distracting experience?
- You also cannot make the program window smaller than a certain amount. I like to make the flashcard editor window just barely enough to show the flash cards
- Also, when you are typing, it is a little confusing and choppy going from one facet to the next, is there a way to make that more fluid? It's very jumpy and does not support two finger scrolling to go from one flashcard to the next etc.
- There's too much flashiness in animations, maybe it can be more simple to make it more fluid and less of a memory hog

For the iOS client
- The hidden correct / wrong buttons are not intuitive and its hard to enjoyably study on the Mental Case 2 app. Could you please make physical buttons of correct, incorrect, skip, next, and previous?
- Also, if I scroll to the next flashcard, it will auto-mark the previous card as correct and I would not be able to change that value. Please fix that.
- It's also a little choppy with too much animation and lag. It's a battery killer.

Thanks for listening to my suggestions

- SS

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by drewmccormack on 03 Nov, 2013 08:49 AM

   

   Hi Matt,

   Thanks for the feedback. Quite a few of the things on your list are on our radar.

   Screenshots should not take too much space. We use PNG compression, which is pretty reasonable, and works best with iOS.
   Opening time shouldn't be that long. If you are syncing with iCloud, it can take a bit longer, due to some networking.
   The program doesn't load all data at once. It loads a stack when you select that stack.
   You can hide the left sidebar, but it does require you to drag the split to the left. Not that convenient, admittedly. We will look into that.
   There are some restrictions on how small we can make the window. This has to do with some of the modes (eg slideshow and store) not working so well below a certain size. That said, the smallest window size is still pretty small. But I'll include the feedback. Maybe it can be improved in future.
   Two finger swiping between notes in edit mode should work. There were some issues with Mavericks, but they should be fixed in the latest release. Make sure you are up-to-date. We have a few more Mavericks fixes coming very soon.
   You can turn off animations in the slideshows. Make a custom slideshow, go to Advanced, and disable animations. This will remain in effect for future slideshows.
   Animations should not have any effect on the memory use.

   For the iOS app:
   We wanted to make the slideshow controls get out of the way as much as possible. The controls are not discoverable enough yet. We will try to fix that in our upcoming iOS 7 update. But I think the concept of gesture based control works better in that part of the app. We can think it over though.
   Autocorrection can be turned off by launching a custom slideshow, and going to Advanced (Default Grade setting). It remains in effect for other slideshows.
   Being able to 'undo' a grade is on our radar. It is not as trivial as it seems, because we have to be able to undo the rescheduling of the note. Possible, but will require changes to our data structures. Definitely a priority though.

   Thanks again for the feedback. Very useful.
   Kind regards,
   Drew

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