I’ll try to keep this as short as possible, because thankfully with the new system, backing up is pretty painless.

I should only need this single screenshot:

After connecting your iPad to your computer it should show up under devices in iTunes as shown above.  Select your device, and then click the Apps tab.  Scroll down to the bottom of that page and you’ll see the File Sharing section.  From here you should see FlashCards in the list of applications.  If you don’t see it make sure the application is up to date, and try turning the device off and back on again.

To back up, select all the files under FlashCards and click the “Save To” button.  This will open a file dialog and will let you save the files to your local hard drive.  To restore a back up, click the “Add” button, and then  select the files you want to restore.

And that’s back up and restore on the iPad (and future iPhone versions).

Stay tuned for more updates on FlashCards 2.0, and as always, let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to go through in these FlashCards How-To articles, or if there’s any new features you want me to implement.  I try to implement user suggestions as quickly as possible!

FlashCards provides several ways to import cards into the application, so in this post I’ll detail what it currently supports, and what’s coming in the future, as well as going through the process from start to finish on how to import flashcards.

First off, I’ll start with what the importer currently can’t do:

1. No sound or pictures.  The Importer currently supports only text.  I’m planning on adding the ability to import pictures/audio soon, but for now it’s only text
2. No formatting.  The importer only imports plain text, so alignment, background color, text color, things like that won’t be transferred into the application

Currently there are two ways to get flash cards into FlashCards, either create the cards on your iPhone/iPod/iPad or use the FlashCard Importer. The basic process to import files is:

1. Create either a csv file (comma separated value) or an excel file (xls or xlsx)
2. Upload the file to the FlashCard Importer
3. Import the cardset into the application

To create your spreadsheet you can use nearly any spreadsheet editor (Numbers, Excel, Google Docs, OpenOffice).  In the first column enter the text you want on the front of the card, in the second column enter the text you want on the back of the card.  Make sure no row is entirely blank.  As soon as the importer encounters an entirely blank row it will stop importing, so make sure each row has at least front text or back text, if not both.

Creating a csv file can be a little tricky, so in general I recommend using one of the excel formats (xls or xlsx) if you can.  Most spreadsheet editors support exporting to excel, so this is a pretty failsafe option, just create your spreadsheet and export or save-as in an excel format.  Most applications can also export csv, but due to inconsistencies in how each application implements the csv format it doesn’t always work correctly.  Still you can use csv, but if you are going to be using any foreign characters make sure the encoding on the csv file is UTF-8.  Again, I’m going to strongly suggest using one of the two excel formats, it’s just simply less prone to problems.

Nearly any spreadsheet program can be used to create these files.  In this post I’ll be importing flashcards for greek gods.

Here is the Numbers document I started with: [filebase:file:file=1]

If you can’t open that document, don’t worry.  Numbers is Apple’s spreadsheet application.  From that file I exported it to a standard Excel format:

[filebase:file:file=2]

And I also could have exported it to a CSV format.

[filebase:file:file=3]

Again, if you have special characters I’d recommend using an excel format for importing.

After creating your document and getting it into either an excel format, or csv, then go to the http://flashcards.red5dev.com which should look something like this:

Click the “Choose File” button and select your excel or csv file to upload.  Then click “Create” and if everything goes well you should see a screen like this:

With that we are done with the website, and can open up the FlashCard application on your iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad.

After launching the application you’ll see your familiar list of cardsets.  Here’s what it looks like on a fresh download of the application:

If you are importing into a cardset you’ve already created, you can skip this next step and open up the cardset you already have.  Otherwise go ahead and click the + to create a new cardset.

After creating your cardset, or selecting your existing one, you’ll see the cardset details screen, similar to this:

Select “Import” at the bottom of the list, and you’ll go to the import screen:

Enter in the numbers associated with your cardset.  In this case, mine were 1267, and then click import.  After a few seconds you should see a progress bar:

If for some reason you don’t see this progress bar, or the cards don’t get imported, try exiting the application and going back in.  After the import is done it should return you to card list, with your newly imported cards.

And with that you’ve gone from creating your cards in your favorite spreadsheet program, to having them in your FlashCards application!

Be sure to let me know if you have any questions or problems with importing, as well as any other How-Tos you’d like to see posted here!