Open Window Software News Fall 2008 A Free E-mail Newsletter from Open Window Software Featuring Tips on Using the WinFlash Suite, HandyCards and Flashcard Exchange Contents: 1) WinFlash v11 Suggestion Contest 2) WinFlash Feature Highlight - Open In Editor 3) Free Upgrades for Referring Your Friends 4) Study Tip - Study With Music 5) How To - Set Up a Home Network for Kids 6) Latest In-line Program Updates --------------------------------------------------- 1) WinFlash v11 Suggestion Contest We're still working away on WinFlash v11. Depending on how smoothly development and testing proceeds, v11 will be released sometime in Q1 or Q2 of 2009. Still plenty of time to get your suggestions in and get one of the free upgrades to v11 that will be given to the best 5 suggestions received. By "best" we mean improvements that will be valuable to a large percentage of users, and that are implementable with a reasonable investment in coding time for the value of the improvement. Please consider these two measures when contemplating a suggestion. We often receive suggestions that are SO specific to a particular, unusual, application of the program that they just don't justify the effort necessary to add them. An example of this type of suggestion is "I'd like to have the next question displayed determined by how I answer the current question" - i.e. programmable branching within the study file. While this might be useful to a few individuals, the vast majority of users would never spend the necessary time to set up the branching logic. --------------------------------------------------- 2) WinFlash Feature Highlight - Open In Editor For those of you using the Leitner system mode for your studies, this is an especially important feature. If you have added your study file(s) to the Subject Outline (see this topic in Help for more information) you know that the next due date for review of a Leitner study file is displayed at the end of the path name of the study file. But what if the file isn't due yet and you want to add some new pairs to the file? If you open the file by the regular method, you'll get that irritating "The file's current range has no pairs due for review..." message. Here's where the Open In Editor feature comes in. If you're in Subject Outline, simply right-click the file you wish to open and select Open Selected File In Editor from the pop-up menu that appears. Whether it's due or not, your Leitner deck will open up in the Editor, ready to be worked on. You can also access this feature by selecting File|Open In Editor from the main menu and picking the file with the regular Open dialog that appears. As an additional note, get used to right-clicking in WinFlash when you're working with the program - you'll find that the menu that pops up often has a single-click access to the task you want to perform. --------------------------------------------------- 3) Free Upgrades for Referring Your Friends Quite a few of you have earned free upgrades to v10 by referring your friends to us! Have a friend that could use WinFlash? You can earn a free upgrade to the next release of your version of the program (v10 if you haven't upgraded yet or v11 when it comes along if you're already at v10). Just have your friend mention your name in the Comments section when placing the order. A great way to help out a friend and get the next major release gratis! --------------------------------------------------- 4) Study Tip - Study With Music We're not talking head-banging heavy metal here. But research has suggested that any adjustment to the study environment that can make the student more relaxed and comfortable has a positive effect on the effectiveness of the session. This would include physical comfort such as one's chair or sofa and the temperature of the room. Light classical background music also enhances the session, especially with language learning. See this link for a further discussion of the theory, known as desuggestopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestopedia --------------------------------------------------- 5) How To - Set Up a Home Network for Kids For home users our license allows installing a single copy on each machine that you personally own, so you can put Educator on your kids' machine(s) and then, if you wish, lock down the Educator and/or Options settings with a password. If you're networked, the study files can be on your machine and accessed by the kids over the network. If not, you'll need to copy the files you create to their machines. If they won't be edited by the kids, use compiled .flz and .flt study files. If you do want the kids to be able to edit them use .flu's but create a separate directory for each .flu and put all support files in this directory. That way you can transfer the directory intact to the kids' machines and there'll be no issue with filepaths for support files. --------------------------------------------------- 6) In-line Program Updates Since the Last Newsletter If you're running something older than v10.10.05, you're missing out on some nice improvements in the 'look' of the program - "Complete icon facelift throughout the program" The 10.10.07 update to all WinFlash versions addresses the following issues: 1. Reset TextToSpeechOn to 0 if SpeechInstalled = False 2. Fixed Cheers & Jeers crash that appeared in 10.10.06 --------------------------------------------------- Need Help? Have A problem? Check out our online listings of the latest releases and the problems that they've solved: http://www.openwindow.com/pages/wfprobs.htm If your issue isn't covered there, please send e-mail to support@openwindow.com and we'll do our best to resolve your problem. --------------------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE: Send e-mail to service@openwindow.com with SUBSCRIBE as the Subject. UNSUBSCRIBE: Simply send an email to service@openwindow.com with REMOVE as the Subject. This newsletter is a free service of Open Window Software and is Copyright © 2008 Open Window Software. All worldwide rights reserved.