Monday, February 2, 2015

Run Easy Notecards as a Web App

We're excited to announce that you can now run Easy Notecards as a web app on both iOS and Android devices. To do this simply add Easy Notecards to your home screen from your browser.

Here are the benefits of running Easy Notecards as a web app:
  • Launch Easy Notecards with an icon on your homescreen. No need to open your browser.
  • None of the browser's UI (address bar, back button, etc.) will be visible.
  • Easy Notecards will be its own entity in Recent Apps.
  • Unlike traditional apps you will ALWAYS be using the latest version of Easy Notecards. No need to update ever.


Website vs Web App

How to Add Easy Notecards to Your Home Screen

Follow theses simple steps to add Easy Notecards to your home screen. Your screen may differ slightly based on the device and OS version you are using.

iOS (iPhones and iPads) 

Step 1: Open Safari and navigate to EasyNotecards.com
Step 2: Tap the Share Button
Step 3: Tap Add to Home Screen
Step 4: Tap Add


Steps to add to iOS Home Screen

Note: On iOS, whatever page you are on when you add Easy Notecards to your home screen will be the first page shown every time you launch Easy Notecards.

Android (phones and tablets)

Step 1: Open Chrome and navigate to EasyNotecards.com
Step 2: Tap the Menu Button
Step 3: Tap Add to homescreen
Step 4: Tap Add



Steps to add to Android Home Screen

That's it! Now you can launch Easy Notecards directly from your home screen.


Easy Notecards on Home Screen for iOS and Android 

Navigating Back a Page

Android users can simply use the dedicated back button to go back a page within Easy Notecards. For iOS users there is no dedicated back button so we added a back button within the web app. Look at the image below to see the location of the back button.



Back Button on iOS 

Note: While taking a quiz or playing a matching game the back button is temporarily removed so that it doesn't interfere with the activity.


If you use Easy Notecards on your mobile device you should definitely run it as a web app. It's super easy to do and makes the experience that much better.

Good Luck this semester!

http://www.easynotecards.com

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Our Quizzes Just Got A Whole Lot Smarter

A dynamically created quiz can be taken for any notecard set that has at least 2 full cards. Since the quiz is created on the fly it will be different every time you take it.

The Old, Not So Smart Quizzes

The main problem with the old quizzes was that the wrong answers for each question were chosen at random. This often resulted in quiz answers that were very different from each other making it easier to select the correct answer.

For example, let's say you created a card set that contained both multiple choice and true false questions. You go to take the quiz and the first question is a true/false question. You look at the possible answers and this is what you see: True, B, A, C. The only possible answer to the question is True since False is nowhere to be found.

In addition, there were times when a quiz question would contain duplicate answers. Not only did this reduce the number of possible answers by 1, an observant user would soon learn that a duplicate answer was never the correct answer.

All of this has been eliminated with our new, smarter quizzes.

The New, Smarter Quizzes

First, answers are never duplicated.

Second, the wrong answers are no longer randomly selected. They are selected based on how similar they are to the correct answer.  If the correct answer to a quiz question has an image with no text then the wrong answers will have an image with no text (if they exist within the card set).

Similarity between the correct answer and wrong answers is based on:
  • total number of words
  • total number of characters
  • contains a list
    • if a list exists then list type is considered
  • has an image

Lastly, True/False and Yes/No are special cases that are handled differently. Only 2 answers are presented to the user for these type of questions.

We hope you enjoy the improvements to our quizzes. Try it out on your own sets or try one of these: