Open Window Software News Spring 2010 A Free E-mail Newsletter from Open Window Software Featuring Tips on Using the WinFlash Suite, HandyCards and Flashcard Exchange Contents: 1) WinFlash v12 Suggestion Contest 2) WinFlash Feature Highlight - Advanced Statistics (Educator Only) 3) Free Upgrades for Referring Your Friends 4) Study Tip - Review Your Notes Too 5) How To - Backup Your Study Files 6) Latest In-line Program Updates --------------------------------------------------- 1) WinFlash v12 Suggestion Contest The results of the contest that we ran during the development of v11 were so useful that we've decided to do a repeat during v12's development cycle. We'll give a free upgrade to v12 for the 5 best suggestions that aren't already in our very large stack of requests. 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 simply 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 - Advanced Statistics (Educator Only) One of Educator's powerful tools, Advanced Statistics, can be used both to see how you're doing with your study file as well as to provide insight into where you might need to focus more study effort. The Advanced Statistics display can be accessed by right-clicking on either the Question or Answer dialog when the study file is open and selecting File Statistics... from the popup menu, or by selecting the study file in the Subject Outline display and clicking the Statistics for Selected File button. Either action brings up the Summary Statistics display. Click the Advanced... button at the bottom of this display and the Advanced Statistics display will open. The information can be displayed for each pair or summarized by category. It can also be sorted by pressing the Sort... button at the top and selecting the name of the column you wish to sort by from the list displayed. Using this feature you can, for instance, see what pairs are coming up in the near future if you're using the Leitner Study mode - just sort on Due Date, choosing Ascending as the sort direction. Give the Advanced Statistics tool a try and you'll find it both useful and informative! --------------------------------------------------- 3) Free Upgrades for Referring Your Friends Quite a few of you have earned free upgrades to v11 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 (v11 if you haven't upgraded yet or v12 when it's released if you're already at v11). 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 - Review Your Notes Too While we are very confident in WinFlash's ability to help you master memory-intensive material efficiently, you shouldn't use WinFlash to the exclusion of reviewing your class notes. Periodic review of your notes will help you tie together the various facts that you're studying with WinFlash and provide a logical framework that associates these facts to each other. --------------------------------------------------- 5) How To - Backup Your Study Files We hate getting notes from our users that they've had a computer crash and have lost their study files. These files represent a lot of time and effort and sometimes their loss can compromise studying for an upcoming exam. To avoid this issue you need to have copies of your study files stored on some form of removeable media that won't be lost or damaged if your computer has a sudden meltdown. While both Scholar and Educator contain a backup tool on their respective Scholar and Educator menus, this simply places a copy of the currently-open study file (and its associated support files) in the same directory as the open file. This gives you a copy you can 'revert' to if you encounter problems working with the original, but will NOT help you if you have a complete hard drive failure that makes your entire disk inaccessible. If you've arranged your study files so that they are all in individual subdirectories of a single top directory - e.g. My WinFlash Files - backing up to a CD-ROM is quite easy (See the Help File topic How Do I... Organize My Study Files for more detail on this). Assuming your computer has a writable CD-ROM drive, you can simply set this up to burn the contents of My WinFlash Files and all of its subdirectories to a CD. Once done, store the CD in a safe place and you can always reload your data current to the date of the CD. If you do a backup every week or two, you'll never lose very much work in the event of a computer crash. Even better, ALSO copy your e-mail files, word .docs and other valuable data when you backup your WinFlash study files. If you have a writable DVD drive you can probably fit ALL of your important data on a single disk. --------------------------------------------------- 6) In-line Program Updates Since the Last Newsletter There have been no updates since the last newsletter. v11.00.05 is still the current version. The 11.00.05 update to all WinFlash versions addresses the following issues: 1. Corrected Subject Outline for locales where '-' is used as the date separator 2. Positioned cursor at last used file when opening Subject Outline 3. Fixed problem with Unicode characters in checking FIB answers 4. Corrected problem in Create Composite File when checking for duplicates 5. Added section in Help file addressing Foreign Language study 6. Made help section on exporting text to speech to .mp3 files easier to locate --------------------------------------------------- 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 (c) 2010 Open Window Software. All worldwide rights reserved.