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MemDeckPro training sessions are highly customizable. You may choose a stack among built-in ones, or one you have entered yourself. Along with the card face and stack number, you may display some other elements that could help your memory work, such as card index, card full name and hint. You may also audio-train if you prefer, by checking Text To Speech. If Text To Speech is checked then questions and answers will be voiced as well as displayed.
Stack Selection
To choose a different stack, tap on the spinner and all the available choices will show in the drop down box. You may have to scroll down to select it, if there are more stacks than can fit in the spinner window.
As it might be difficult to work some of the widgets, especially if you have a small display, you may freeze the Settings pane, i.e. allow vertical scrolling but prevent paging (horizontal scrolling), by tapping again on the Settings tab. The underlining tab color will change from orange to red as a reminder of this fact. Tapping any tab will re-enable paging.
Test Selection
You can choose to test yourself on Card, Position or Both. If you select Card, you are training your ability to recall a card associated with a number, i.e. a number is displayed on the back of a playing card, and you have to recall its associated card value.
If Position is selected, then a face-up card will be displayed and you have to recall its position in the stack. You may choose both, and if so, during a training session, a number or a face-up card will be randomly displayed.
If you select Position on its own, you may also choose to train for recalling a card before or after the one being displayed. This is useful in real world situations when the deck has been cut, or a card selected, and peeking the bottom card will tell you which one is on top or was selected.
Tapping on the -0 / +0 check boxes will toggle the values (0 or 1), but if you wish to increase the distance between cards, a long tap on either check box will bring up a wheel where you can choose between 1 to 26, independently for positive and negative values. In addition, you may choose to have this increment fixed or random. If you check random, then if your increment was, say, +6, you will not be queried on +6 every time, but on a scale of 1 to 6, the increment changing randomly on every card.
This feature is not available when querying both cards and positions.
Card Range Selection
You may select any range of cards, from 1 to 52, to practice on. It is useful when you are at the first stage of your stack learning and you want to learn it by batches of 10 for example.
Cards Selection
You may select any subset of your stack, from 1 to 52, to practice on. It is useful when you want to focus on some specific cards that you find particularly hard to remember.
By tapping on a row, you can select or unselect a card. Tap DONE when you want to save your choices.
It is best to remove all restrictions on card range and suits, such as Heart only, for example, in the Suits section, to ensure that all the cards you have selected will be displayed during a training session.
Suits Range and Order Selections
You can select any combination of suits to train on, but you must at least select one, of course.
There are three possible choices for Order.
Sequential : the cards (or positions) will be displayed in stack order.
This order is useful when you are first learning your stack, obviously, but has further uses once you know your stack "cold".
If you check Sequential and Card in the Test section and finally uncheck everything in the Memorized deck section, you can practice recalling your stack in sequence without recalling the positions, as you would when reciting the alphabet for example. It is a mandatory skill in effects such as Simon Aronson's brilliant Histed Heisted.
Reversed: the cards (or positions) will be displayed in reversed stack order.
Random: the cards (or positions) will be displayed in random order.
Timer Selection
If Manual is selected, you will have to tap on the cards during training to progress further.
Note that the sliders are disabled in this mode as the Test and Reveal times are irrelevant
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If Automated is selected, you may then set the time for your test, i.e. how long will the card or number be displayed before the answer is shown, and how long the answer will stay displayed before going onto the next test. The range varies from 1 to 10 seconds.
Language Setting
Currently, the language setting is limited to card names. First export your current settings by tapping the Export button.
An xml file, memdeckprolang.xml, will be generated in your device Download folder. Copy memdeckprolang.xml to your desktop and edit it using an XML tool. If you do not have any, I suggest you download Microsoft excellent XML Notepad which is free, light weight and very intuitive. You can use a Text editor, such as Notepad++ if you prefer, but make sure to save the file in "UTF-8" format so that all characters are accepted, otherwise a validation error will be generated while importing the file.
Once you have modified the card names, upload memdeckprolang.xml back to your device Download folder and tap on the Import button. The card names will be changed to your chosen language.