Flash Cards
Flash Cards was developed to help you test your knowledge of any subject. There are two modes: Text and Picture.
Flash Cards Version 3.0.1 improves compatibility with Leopard. Version 3.0.0 supports Latin, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Greek, Korean, Cirillic, Hebrew, Russian, Afrikaans, Polish, etc. characters. Fonts for these characters are included in the operating system unless you opted not to install them.
Click here to see Flash Cards II, a flash card utility which supports long narrative questions and answers.
When you launch Flash Cards you see the Control Panel. Press on the "Setup" button to bring up the Setup Window.
Select a mode (Text or Picture), on-screen time, period between displays, and selection mode (use random or step through). If you don't want the text to be black, click on the "Set Text Color" button and choose a color from the color wheel. Close the color wheel and the selected color will show in the small box. Select whether the text phrase should be bolded or not and select the font size (normal, up one or down one: up/down one changes the font size by about four, depending on screen size). When you are satisfied with the settings, click on the "Done" button to return to the Control Panel.
Above you see the Phrase Maintenance Window, which you access from the menu bar. The default text phrases are the names of baseball teams and the answers are their home towns. When you first launch Flash Cards, the default phrases and answers appear in the table. You can add, delete and modify phrases/answers (double-click a phrase or answer to edit it). Phrases and answers in the table are saved between sessions.
You can also clear the table and enter your own information. A button is provided to save a file with phrases and answers in the table and you can load a plain text file with this information. TextEdit works well for this purpose. Type one phrase (up to 50 characters), a tab, and its answer (up to 36 characters) per line and select Format>Make Plain Text before saving the file as a Unicode (UTF-8) ".txt" file.
When you first launch Flash Cards, a folder titled "FCPictures" is created in your Users/~/Documents folder. If you want to use the Picture mode, copy jpg pictures (file must have a ".jpg" suffix) into this folder. Pictures are chosen at random for display. The answer for a picture is the name (without the ".jpg" suffix. So, for example, if you want to flash pictures of outlaws, a name of a picture of Jesse James would be Jesse James.jpg. Click on the red (close) button to return to the Control Panel.
Above is a screenshot of the Control Panel after returning from the Setup window. Before you start the "test" you might want to scramble the order of the text phrases and pictures (or sort them to return to the alphabetical listing). Note: You will not see a change if you chose the "Use Random" selection mode in the Setup Window. The "Keep Score" checkbox is checked above so scoring will be provided. Click on the "Start" button to begin a test. You can click on the "Pause" button to pause the displays at any time and click the same button to continue the process. To see the answer of the displayed phrase or picture, click on the "Show Answer" button. If you miss an answer, click on the "Incorrect" button; otherwise, your answer is considered to be correct.
Above is a screenshot of the Control Panel with a test in progress. The "Automatic" mode has been chosen and, at this point the user has five correct answers and one incorrect answer for a score of 83%.
Above is a screenshot of the Control Panel in Manual mode with a test in process. At this point, the user has nine correct answers and one incorrect answer for a score of 90%.
Text phrases are displayed in the middle of the screen. The phrases may have as many as 50 characters. If the entire phrase will not fit on the window (depends on screen resolution, screen size, font size, etc.), the words that do fit on the screen will be displayed.
Keyboard shortcuts: Four keyboard shortcuts are provided. Cursor-Up is equivalent to clicking on the "Next" button; Cursor-Left is equivalent to clicking on the "Show Answer" button; Cursor-Right is equivalent to clicking on the "Incorrect" button, and Cursor-Down is equivalent to clicking on the "Pause/Continue" button.
How could Flash Cards be used? With young children, you could download pictures of animals from the internet, name the pictures the names of the animals and put the jpgs into the FCPictures folder. With young adults, you could set the text phrases to be countries of the world and answers to be their continents. In general, pick any topic and you can make flash cards to help you learn that topic while having fun. Use your imagination and have fun learning.
Download:
Click here to download Version 3.0.1 (3.4 MB) for Macintosh (OS 10.2 or later, Universal Binary).
Please send comments and suggestions to youngpr@myactv.net
