Frequently Asked Questions
How Do I Choose a Stack to Work With?
On the Settings tab of the application, the first setting lets you choose a stack. The current selection is the stack the app will use. You can also then use the rest of the Settings tab to choose settings for being quizzed on that stack; your settings can differ per stack.
How Do I Indicate Which Cards I Know?
The Learn tab in the app pulls double duty. It shows you the correct card order for the currently selected stack, but it also allows you to specify which cards in the stack you believe you already know. If a card shows with a green border, we believe you know that card/location, and may quiz you about it. If a card has a green border and you don’t know it, click the card on the Learn tab to turn off the border until you’re ready. Finally learned a card? Click it to add the green border and tell us you’ve learned it. This feature should give you the flexibility to learn your stack in whatever way your brain works. Want to learn the cards all at once? I’m impressed! Make sure all the cards have green borders. Want to learn the cards a suit at a time? Click all those cards and turn them green, and make sure all the others are off. Want to learn the stack 13 cards at a time? Same deal. Want to learn every third card? Can do; just click those on. Want to start by learning the prime numbered locations? That’s really weird, but who am I to judge? Turn those locations on, the others off, and let us know how it goes.
I’m Trying to Learn a Stack You Don’t Support. Can You Add It?
Possibly! I attempted to support the most widely used stacks in the business today. But if I missed one, shoot me a message and let me know. Particularly if multiple people request the same stack, I’ll try to get it added in a future release.
Can I Add My Own Stack?
Not at this time. It would be a fair amount of work to add this ability, and I suspect it wouldn’t be used by many magicians. But maybe I’m wrong; if this is something you’d use, let me know. If enough people want to do this, perhaps it will get added in the future.
What Does the “Weight Mistakes” Setting Do?
This is an extremely useful option, but is a little hard to explain. If you take quizzes, and tend to make mistakes on the same cards/locations/questions, it stands to reason that this is highlighting a blind spot or weak point for you. If you turn on the Weight Mistakes setting, then future quizzes will ask you more often about any questions you’ve previous gotten incorrect, to help you work through your weak spots. If Weight Mistakes is on, then you can also choose the Mistake Time Limit setting. That one determines how far back we’ll look at your mistakes. For example, if you set Mistake Time Limit to “Last Week”, then we’ll look at any mistakes you made in the last week, and ask about those questions more often. There is no right/best answer to this setting; you can decide what time window best helps you learn your problem areas without bogging you down with past mistakes that you’ve worked through.
What Are the Correct/Incorrect Answer Delay Settings?
These determine how long a quiz waits in between questions, and allow you to choose different values depending on whether you got the question correct or incorrect. For my tastes, when I get a question correct I’d like to move on to the next question pretty quickly. But if I get a question incorrect, I’d like a few seconds to reflect upon the correct answer. But you do you!
Can You Support <Some New Type of Question>?
Maybe! Again, I tried to support the types of questions I thought would be most popular. But if I missed something, it never hurts to ask; if enough people express interest in an unsupported type of question, perhaps it will get added later.
How Long Are Results Saved on My Phone?
By default, results get deleted after 90 days. If results were stored forever, they’d slowly fill up the storage on your phone, and it seems unlikely many people would want to review their results from many months ago. It is possible that this 90 day limit is more than you’d like. If so, you can proactively go to the Settings page and delete all results older than a given number of days.
Why Am I Being Told “There Are No Questions I Can Ask for Question Type <some question type>”?
This will most commonly happen with the question types “Card Before” and “Card After”. If I’m supposed to ask you “What card comes after <some card>”, then the question isn’t reasonable unless you have indicated you know both that card and the card that comes after it. As an example, if you indicate that you know all the odd numbered cards, but none of the even numbered cards, I can never ask you a “Card After” question, because you’re guaranteed not to know either the card I ask about, or the correct answer. To remedy this, you need to either learn more contiguous cards, or turn off these question types until you do.
Why Am I Being Told “There are Only X Questions I Can Ask, But You Configured Y Multiple Choices”?
An example will probably make this clear. Suppose you indicate that you’ve learned 4 cards, but then indicate that you want your quiz to present 8 multiple choice options. I can’t fill in 8 distinct options with cards you know. If there are only 4 pairs of contiguous cards that you know, and you asked for 6 multiple choice options, I won’t be able to ask you Card Before/Card After questions, because again I can’t present 6 different choices. There are various ways you can fix these types of problems. You can learn more cards (yay!). You can ask for fewer multiple choices. You can turn off multiple choice answers entirely. Any of these might fix the error for the specified question type.
Why Am I Being Told “Your Current Settings Don’t Allow Me to Ask Any Questions.”?
The previous two questions explain why we might be unable to ask you questions of a specific type. If it turns out we can’t ask you questions for any of the types you’ve enabled, now we have a real problem. If we can’t ask you any questions, then we can’t quiz you. The good news is that there are various ways you can fix this. The previous questions explain ways you might be able to “fix” a given question type by learning more cards, changing your multiple choice settings, etc. Fix any one of them, and you’re back in business. In addition, you might be able to enable a new question type to get you rolling. For example, “Card Before/After” are particularly tricky. Based on the cards you know, it might not be possible to ask you any of those questions, and if they are the only question types you’ve enabled, you’re stuck. But if you enable the asking of “Card to Location” or “Location to Card” questions, those are less restrictive, and we might be able to ask you questions again.
You Didn’t Answer My Question!!
My bad. Let’s try to fix that. You can always send an email, and I’ll try to respond in a timely manner.