After a lot of tiny Surusu updates comes a big ‘un. A long awaited feature is here at last: decks. The semantics are the same as for a physical deck of cards, in that a card belongs to one and only one deck, but can be moved freely between them. Now, you can:
- Combine/import your other accounts as decks, into a single account
- Create decks
- Move cards between decks
- View deck-specific stats
- Do deck-specific reps
- Cure cancer, AIDS and athlete’s foot
- Be happy
Note that in order to fully enable decks in your account, you may need to log out and then log in again. The ability to rename decks shall be added in a future update 😀 . For now, enjoy! All you beautiful Surusuers, keep your comments and suggestions coming using the Surusu hotline.
Other new, hip major features:
- PC/cellphone browser detection (cleaner redirects for PCs, linked redirects for cellphones)
- Background processing (asynchronous data-handling, allowing Surusu to give you a fast interface even as the amount of data being worked with increases).
- An improved repetition scheduling algorithm with more randomization and wider mix selection. Basically, your cards are shuffled more and they’re chosen in a way that further improves performance in terms of coverage breadth/depth.
- Decimation. “Trash bad cards” moves egregiously poor-performing cards to the trashcan, up to a maximum of 1% of a given deck’s cardcount.
Loving it so far.
Thanks a lot, Khatz!
Hey Khatz,
I really think it’s admirable you’re responding to user requests and continuously tinkering. It takes a really long time to get things right so thanks for spending the time.
I’ve had a play with the new decks function and wonder if it might be made even more usable by adding a little more flexibility so that:
(1) items could be attached to multiple decks
(2) multiple decks could be reviewed at once (including a “review all” option)
I suppose what I’m saying is opening up the decks functionality so that they were, in effect, tags.
At the moment, reviews are only deck specific. This could be useful psychologically if you had a goal – say mastering the kanji – and wanted to dedicate some time to that specifically. However, presumably you would still need to attend to each deck each day otherwise you would be getting behind in your reps somewhere. Personally I think I would prefer to avoid having to think about which decks I had revised and which I hadn’t, especially if the decks were to accumulate. So, if you’re going to run with the idea of decks, I think it would be helpful to include an option to review all decks at the one time.
Also, I think it would be helpful if the same flashcard could be tagged with multiple decks (i.e. tags). Something might have a Japanese tag but also be related to psychology. I might want to include this item both when I’m studying psychology or when I’m studying Japanese. It would be also cool to have the option to study items relating to both psychology AND Japanese.
One way of implenting this might be that, when clicking the review button, you had the option of putting a check-box against all the decks you wanted to review at that one particular time. As I mentioned above, it would also be handy to have a “review all” option too.
I don’t think you would need to change the name – you could still call these “decks” – but just open up the functionality so that items could be attached to multiple decks and multiple decks could be reviewed at once (including a “review all” option).
Hope this is food for thought.
Cheers,
Dougal
Hey Khatz,
I don’t know if this has been covered before, but I’ve looked at all the Surusu articles and couldn’t find an answer.
Basically, for the techno-fearing dinosaurs of myself, is there any way to manually backup my stuff on Surusu in another location? As in download all those cards and throw them on a flash drive? I figure that Surusu must be safe, considering you use it yourself, but I’m such a baby when it comes to stuff like this (OMG! It’s just FLOATING out there in the INTERNET)
If this isn’t possible, then a direct assurance from you regarding the complete safety and security features of Surusu would probably work just as well. Because you see I’m looking at making the switch to Surusu but I really just don’t want to lose my stuff, because then I’d lose all my credibility.
Thanks
Afaik there’s no backup, but if you’re entering data in bulk I would suggest doing it via the mnemosyne xml import and if you’re doing that then the easiest way to prep the data is in excel. In that case you have a local, secure backup…
Sorry, I’m an old man and not good with computers. Is there a way to make the font bigger on susuru? I just copy and paste the kanji characters from other places on the internet and no matter how big the kanji is that I copy it is always very small when pasted onto susuru. Too small for my old eyes to read. If the answer involves lots of computer stuff, please dumb it down for an old guy like myself. thanks.
Hey Khatzumoto –
I have a question about Surusu. First of all, thank you so much for making it! It’s one of the best weapons in my arsenal as I start learning Japanese (two months in!). Basically I’m confused why the program will switch to another deck before reviewing all the cards in the first one. To me it seems bad for my learning to not have the chance to review one deck/subject area in one sitting. Please let me know what the deal is here.
What is the RepCap?
And one other thing: what do the two buttons at the top left do?!? There’s the omega symbol and next to it a button just with a bunch of vertical lines.
Thank you so much!!!
Hey Daniel, maybe I can be of some help.
I believe the reason why the decks switch is so that you can do your reps in bite sized pieces through-out the day. This can be disabled by turning RepCap to OFF. (As you probably now assumed, repcap is that limit before switching decks.) Although since the recent update, the RepCap button doesn’t seem to work for me anymore…
If you hover over those items at the top, they’ll give you a description of what they are. Some seem straight forward, but I’m not entirely sure what they all do either ^^” Either way, they appear to be for navigating through your decks…for the most part at least.
I hope this helps 🙂