User Manual for Mental Case Touch

Introduction

Mental Case is the premium flashcard application for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. You can sync flashcards with your Mac, or download flashcards from the web, and study them on the go.

There are two editions of Mental Case for touch devices: the ‘paid’ edition, and the free classroom edition. The classroom edition is intended only for use in the classroom by a teacher and students, and misses some of the functionality of the paid edition, such as Mac syncing and support for FlashcardExchange.com.

Notes, Cases, and Case Collections

The term ‘note’ is used to refer to a flashcard in Mental Case, and the term ‘case’ is used to refer to a folder or deck of flashcards. A ‘case collection’ is a group of cases, and you can nest case collections as deeply as you like.

The Library tab on the left is the place where you can browse all your notes. The first screen shows your list of cases.

You can add a new case by pressing the Edit button, followed by the + button. You can edit existing cases by pressing the Edit button. This allows you to delete cases, or press the blue disclosure button to change case settings, such as a case’s name or learning schedule. You can also move cases by pressing the blue button.

The cases at the top of the list are special. The 'All Notes' case contains references — not copies — to all of the notes on your touch device. 'Loose Notes' is for notes that don't belong to any case. The 'Lesson' is a special case which contains any notes that are scheduled to be studied according to your learning schedule.

Browsing Notes

You browse your notes on the iPhone simply by navigating into a case. On the iPad, when you select a case, the notes appear in the 3D note browser on the right. You can scroll this view up and down, but you can also skim through the notes by tapping and holding for a moment. Once you start skimming, you can drag your finger over the notes to make them flip, so you can look at them more closely.

The 3D note browser also supports some other gestures. If you skim to a two-sided note, you can see the second side (content) by tapping the exposed note once. The prompt should flap up, showing you the second side. To put the prompt card back, simply scroll, or tap elsewhere in the browser.

Editing Notes

On the iPhone, if you select a case in the cases list, you can view a list of the notes in that case. You can press the + to add a new note, or select a note to edit it. To delete a note, you can swipe your finger across it from right-to-left, and then press the delete button.

On the iPad, you can edit a note by double tapping it in the 3D note browser. An editing view will appear.

In the note editing pane, you can edit the text on the front (prompt) or back (content) of the note. The prompt is optional.

On the iPhone, you can take photos and include those in your notes, and on both iPhone and iPad, you can select photos from your photo library. You can also record audio for the prompt or content side of a note.

The Lesson

Mental Case can prepare lessons for you. The ‘spaced repetition’ algorithm used to schedule your notes is based on scientific research and provides optimal learning for the time you spend studying.

If you are syncing from a Mac, you can setup the lesson schedule settings in Mental Case on your Mac. You should sync regularly to refresh your lesson.

If you have no Mac, you can turn on the lesson for a particular case by editing the case, and switching the ‘Lesson Schedule’ on. Once you’ve done this, notes should start to appear in your Lesson case. (It can take a day or two for notes to appear in the Lesson.)

You can study the lesson notes by navigating into a Case in the Library, and pressing the Study button at the bottom. In the Slideshow chooser, tap on ‘All Lesson Notes’ or ‘Lesson Notes in Case’. If you choose the latter, you study only the notes from that case that are due for study.

Slideshows

You study your notes in beautifully-presented slideshows. If you tap in the center of the screen, tool bars appear which you can use to control the slideshow. You can move backwards and forwards; turn on/off automatic transitions (play/pause); or mark notes right or wrong. Notes that are marked as wrong will be repeated more often, both in the current slideshow, and possibly in future slideshows.

If you don’t want the tool bars to be visible, tap in the center of the screen to remove them. You can then navigate backwards and forwards by tapping the left and right of the screen, respectively. If you tap in the bottom corners of the screen, you can mark the notes as right or wrong. You can also navigate by flicking your finger right-to-left, or left-to-right.

Images sometimes appear too small on the screen to view comfortably. You can double tap images in slideshows to open the image in a new pane where you can scroll and zoom by pinching.

Sometimes round symbols can appear on slides in the bottom-left corner. One of the symbols is the yin-yang, and in Mental Case this represents a slide that is from a reversed note, with content before prompt. The other symbol is the recycle symbol, and it is shown on slides that are repeats, due to having being graded wrong earlier in the slideshow.

Mac Syncing

Mental Case for iPhone can sync with Mental Case on a Mac over a wifi network. First, make sure your iPhone is connected to the same wifi network as your Mac. You can create a computer-to-computer network for this if your standard wifi network doesn’t work. Once connected, select the Sync tab, and then choose ‘Sync with Touch Device…’ from the File menu on the Mac.

Each time you sync, all of the existing content on your iPhone/iPod touch is replaced. If you have created new notes on your touch device, make sure you choose to sync those back to your Mac.

Mental Case also transfers your whole lesson to your iPhone each time you sync, regardless of the cases you select in the syncing pane. This can cause more notes to be on your iPhone than you expect. If you want to reduce the number of notes synced across, you can turn off the lesson scheduling for some of your cases on the Mac. Simply double click a case on the Mac, and set the Lesson Schedule to ‘None’.

Downloading

There is no version of Mental Case for the PC, but there are a few options for downloading flashcards to Mental Case for PC users. First, you can get a free account at flashcardexchange.com, create some flashcards on the web site, and download them from the My Notes section in the Exchange tab of Mental Case. With a free account, you can only create textual flashcards; to add images, you will need a full subscription to Flashcard Exchange, which costs around $20 for a lifetime membership.

After you have entered your Flashcard Exchange email address in Account Settings, you can access your own notes in the My Notes section. The notes have to be public in order to download them, but you can make them private afterwards. If you would like to find specific collections of notes on Flashcard Exchange, the easiest way is to locate them on the web site, mark them as Favorites, and then download them from the Favorites section on your iPhone.

There is a second way of downloading notes to your iPhone/iPod touch. You can prepare your notes in Study Archive format with a standard text editor, and a zip compression utility. You can then upload the archive to a web server or file sharing service like Drop Box. If you then press the download button at the bottom of the Cases list in Mental Case, you can enter the address of the archive and import it. You can read more about how you prepare a Study Archive here.

Where are the Settings?

Settings are accessible from the Settings app, or from the Library tab in the app.

The settings almost all relate to the look and behavior of the study slideshows. You can set the size and font of the text, whether images have reflection, how slides transition, and the like. The Grading Advances setting determines whether a slideshow immediate transitions to the next slide when you press the right/wrong button. Plays Immediately can be set to have the slideshow automatically transition from slide-to-slide when the slideshow begins, or in the 'paused' state.