How big can flashcards and multiple choice tests be?

[gwhiz.support]

Mobile devices present some processor/memory constraints that third party applications need to work within. In addition, Apple has allocated most of the memory in the iPhone and iPod touch for media files (music, video) and allocated a much smaller partition to third party applications. We plan to optimize our software within these constraints to allow for larger cardsets but in the meantime we recommend keeping your cardsets within the following limits.

The kbyte memory limit on the iPhone/iPod touch creates a combined row/column/content limit. We would recommend your input spreadsheets are no more than 200 or 300 cells where the cell total is the product of (rows x columns) in your Google Documents spreadsheet. Larger sets take more device memory, time to load, shuffle, and prepare for quiz mode.

Since most cardsets are two columns that equates to 100 - 150 rows.

gFlashPro and gFlash+ on the iPhone also supports alternative multiple choice answers for a specific question. For example, one question with four alternative answers would make a five column wide spreadsheet. That spreadsheet could be between 40 and 60 rows in length.

[gwhiz.support]

If you updated gFlashPro on the iPhone/iPod touch via iTunes since April 1, you can share your large cardset via Google Documents with the gWhiz Catalog and then download them to your device from there.

Through your own Google account you'll want to keep cardsets between 100-150 rows.

When you share them with the gWhiz Catalog, cardsets can safely have a few hundred rows and we've downloaded cardsets as large as 1000 rows. It will take approximately 15 minutes for them to be displayed in the gWhiz Catalog after you share them in Google Documents.

What's the difference? The Google Documents interface consumes more device memory than the direct database connection in the gWhiz Catalog, leaving more memory for cardset data. Our interface to the StudyStack is also a direct database connection from the device. StudyStack supports import methods similar to Google Spreadsheets (e.g., from Excel .xls, .csv) and we have downloaded cardsets with several hundred rows directly from StudyStack successfully.

The direct to database feature is only available in gFlashPro on the iPhone and iPod touch at the current time.