Feature Request - One-click Add to Last Collection

[zzcguns]

Feature Request: To have a keyboard shortcut to bypass the Add to Collection pop-up dialog box, and simply add the item unmodified into the last-used collection.

(Please note supplemental feature request included at bottom of message).

When playing through a collection such as Fluency Fast Track, I often want to add difficult items to a private collection in order to be able to practice them some more. N.B. For this workflow I can’t use Favourites, because I use Favourites separately within the workflow.

For this I use the Add to Collection facility, using the + button at the right hand side of the button list when playing -

Now, I should state that the Add to Collection facility is excellent, and is extremely powerful in its ability to allow modifications such as specifying the collection, adding hints and notes, changing the %completed, and even modifying the cloze. This flexibility is excellent in the general case of finding a sentence and wanting to add it to one or more collections that are being built up.

However, for the workflow that I use, where I am simply building up one collection, the current way of working is a slow process, given that I don’t want to carry out any modifications and simply want the sentence to be put unmodified into the last collection that I used. I should note that if I want to add hints or notes to a sentence, then first of all I add those changes to the copy of the sentence in the main collection (e.g. Fluency Fast Track), as I know that these will then be automatically copied over when I then use Add to Collection.

The only times that I make use of the dialog box are -

• When I need to create a new collection and set this as the new default
• When I see an unfamiliar word (or phrase) in a sentence that I’d like to set as the cloze, so I need to use the dialog box to make the change (and the ability to just click on the word in the sentence “title” to make this change of cloze is an excellent feature).

Currently to add an item to my last used collection I have to -

1. Hit alt-A as the keyboard shortcut for “Add to Collection” (or click the + symbol at the right of the button list).
2. Wait for the dialog box to pop up.
3. Use the mouse/trackpad to swipe up so that I can access the “Save” button (the dialog box often extends beyond the bottom of my screen)
4. Move the mouse cursor and click the “Save” button
5. Wait for the dialog box to disappear.

This is quite slow. Note that here I am referring to using a PC with the web interface, where jumping between keyboard and mouse/trackpad is more of an issue.

I would like a facility whereby I could just use a keyboard shortcut to add the unmodified sentence to the last collection that I used, for example “alt-L - add to Last Used Collection PRO!” or “alt-G - Grow Collection PRO!” or whatever makes sense. I’m not necessarily asking for another clickable button here, as I don’t want to crowd the button list too much, however that might be useful if other people were interested in this facility and wanted to use it on a mobile device

This facility would then be as simple as the current capability of adding an item to favourites using alt-F, and I wouldn’t have to wait for the update to be confirmed. As soon as I had used the keyboard shortcut I could then just move on to the next sentence while letting Clozemaster do its work in the background (as it does now when I use the keybaord shortcuts for setting favourites, resets, mastered).

A “plan B” option would be to set the dialog box focus on the “Save” button, so that a keyboard warrior such as myself wouldn’t need to use the mouse/trackpad and would eliminate steps 3 and 4 in the above list - however, I would much prefer the keyboard shortcut as described.

Supplemental Feature Request: To have an option in settings for Add to Collection items to be added without progress being copied over (i.e. they are copied over to the collection as if they had not been played in that collection).

This would allow a user such as myself to align the Add to Collection facility with the default behaviour of the Copy to Collection feature in the Manage Sentences dialogs associated with each collection, i.e. to align the Add to Collection behaviour with the behaviour of Copy to Collection with the “Include progress” box unchecked as in the image below.

[sindaco]

@zzcguns

A “plan B” option would be to set the dialog box focus on the “Save” button, so that a keyboard warrior such as myself wouldn’t need to use the mouse/trackpad and would eliminate steps 3 and 4 in the above list - however, I would much prefer the keyboard shortcut as described.

I would also really like this to be the default for any dialog boxes prompted by a keyboard shortcut combination.

Currently, because I hate using the mouse, and tends to interrupt my flow a lot indeed (especially because I like to leave the cursor hovering over a specific % Mastered, for faster manual adjustment - ideally this would be done through solely using a keyboard combination too, e.g. increase/decrese percent mastered by 1 step), I currently use:

• keyboard combo to bring up the dialogue box
• press “Tab” (which will highlight the “X” in the top right corner, if I recall correctly)
• press “Tab” again (which will take it to the first field, which finally results in “Save” getting highlighted)
• press “Enter”

As for the “Last Collection” assignment, since I tend to assign to two or more collections simultaneously (one for difficult words I want to practice more, one for expressions which can be very quirky, and then sometimes also ones to specific grammar constructions I want to practice more), I would really need to at least see somewhere what the current “Last Collection” is.

[zzcguns]

I love the idea of a keyboard combination (“Pro!”) to manually adjust % mastered up and down by 1 increment at a time. I would normally only use it to go down, but I do sometimes reset progress upwards to recover after an accidental mistake. I wonder if alt-"+" and alt-"-" would work for this?
I think you need to raise that as a feature request !!

That’s a good tip about the “Tab” technique.

I was using the “Tab” technique as well for a while, but in my case I found I needed to hit Tab several times on the Add to Collection dialog popup (I don’t recall, it might be 5 or 6 tabs minimum) until I was over a field which would highlight “Save”, and as I have a trackpad (I use a laptop) I found it seemed easier to use the “mouse” technique with my finger and thumb. Maybe I should go back and try the “Tab” technique again and time the two!

I used to use alt-D to bring up the Edit Sentence dialog box to manually adjust the % mastered. However, since I still needed to Tab multiple times to get to the “Hint” box or swipe down to “Save”, I stopped using that method and settled on the playing-speed advantage of adding to Favourites or -more drastically - a full 0% reset with alt-R, for any items that I wanted to keep playing.

If there were a place where the last collection information could be displayed, then that would be great, even for me when concentrating on building one collection at a time.

[zzcguns]

I’ve checked, and to use Add to Collection it is in fact only 4 Tabs between using alt-A and then “Save” becoming highlighted. That is better than I thought, even if it a still a bit of concentration-breaker to have to count the Tabs (in target language of course!).

I think I’ll go back and give this Tab method another try.

Thanks for getting me to go back and try that again @sindaco !

P.S. The other use I have for the Tab technique is to play the sound slowly (i.e. half-speed) after answering. There isn’t a keyboard shortcut for that, so (in typing mode only) hitting Tab-Tab-Space after entering is still not too inconvenient.

[mike]

Thanks for the feature request and all the input! The simplest short term option will likely be focusing on the Save button once the modal is open. Hot keys and not including progress should be doable. Will keep you posted!

[mike]

@zzcguns

should now be a quicker alt+a then enter to add a sentence to a collection without including progress. Still “work in progress” on the other feedback - thanks again for the input!

[zzcguns]

Thanks @mike, this is great.

It feels so much quicker to add items now compared to the previous method, but with no loss of functionality.

That is a fantastic result!

( The only thing that I will need to be aware of is that using the “Edit” facility means that the progress is included by default, but that is pretty obvious because one of the numbered percentage boxes is green. )

[LuciusVorenusX]

I’m afraid that I do not like this change at all.

Here’s the problem.

“The last used collection” seems to be “whatever you last played in a mode that was not speaking”. Listening. vocabulary, whatever. For some reason the collection doesn’t change if you last used speaking.

(Edit: Even that isn’t always true. I just tried playing one collection in listening mode for a few questions, and it STILL didn’t appear at the top of the list when I tried to add a sentence to it from a different collection.)

Under the old system it USED to be that the first collection in the drop down was “whatever you last added a sentence to”, which in my case could be a whole bunch of different ones since I keep collections by topic. As you add questions to new collections, the newest collection that you used would rise to the top. Now, I have to go hunting for collections which could appear waaaayyy down the list. And I have to do it Every. Single. Time, even if I am adding a bunch of sentences to one collection. Except in very rare cases the first collection on the list is now NOT going to be the one that I want to add the sentence to. And most of the time the collections that I WANT to add the sentence to will not appear anywhere near the top of the list.

I would like at least the OPTION of having the dialog work the way it did before, with the most recent collections that you have ADDED a sentence to (rather than played) appearing at the top.

[zzcguns]

So that was bad phrasing on my part when I put together the feature request, for which I apologise. I tend to concentrate on one collection at a time, so I wouldn’t have noticed this for quite some time unless you pointed it out.

By “last used collection” in this sense, I was thinking only of last used in the sense of “last added to”, but clearly these are not the same thing.

I would be fully supportive (and I would indeed prefer it) if @mike would be able to make the change for this feature so that it was “last added to”.

I also recall that having the “last added to” collection instead of the “last used” collection as the default when adding to collections, was a point requested by @morbrorper some time ago (and which therefore probably led to the behaviour that we had until today) -

Saving to "wrong" collection

In my Italian from English course, I am working with a number of collections, both private and shared, and every now and then I encounter errors on saving a new item. The error message is a generic one, so it is only by experience that I have realized, that most often the error is due to my inadvertently trying to save to a shared collection. At other times, I belatedly realize that I have been saving items to the wrong collection. It seems that the default for saving to a collection is the co…

Once again, I apologise for the poor wording in this part of my feature request.

[mike]

@LuciusVorenusX thanks for letting me know! That shouldn’t have changed will check what broke.

[LuciusVorenusX]

@zzcguns

So that was bad phrasing on my part when I put together the feature request, for which I apologise. I tend to concentrate on one collection at a time, so I wouldn’t have noticed this for quite some time unless you pointed it out.

That’s OK, your heart was in the right place. And I have to admit that when I said I didn’t like it at all, I do like the Edit part of the dialog being a drop-down now; playing on a notebook screen I always had to scroll down to hit the confirmation button. Having it all compressed so that the button is right there is great.

@LuciusVorenusX

“The last used collection” seems to be “whatever you last played in a mode that was not speaking”. Listening. vocabulary, whatever. For some reason the collection doesn’t change if you last used speaking.

(Edit: Even that isn’t always true. I just tried playing one collection in listening mode for a few questions, and it STILL didn’t appear at the top of the list when I tried to add a sentence to it from a different collection.)

@mike

@LuciusVorenusX thanks for letting me know! That shouldn’t have changed will check what broke

I can’t reproduce the “even that isn’t true” bug above this morning, but the list definitely does not update with the last collection that you added a sentence to. To demonstrate, here I was playing the system “500 Most Common” in Review mode:

The list above does correctly demonstrate the list of collections that I played before taking this screenshot. (Almost; in between I did include one system-defined collection, but as I would expect, that one does not appear in the list because you can’t add to those.)

In each case I completed a round.

I changed my selection to the “Daily until you get it right” collection and saved the current sentence to that:

I went on and played a couple more sentences, went to save another question, and sure enough, it wasn’t “Daily until you get it right” at the top of the list but rather the “For Better Or Worse” collection as it had been before I added the previous question:

As for what triggers the top entry in the list… it does just seem to be playing it, regardless of whether you complete a round. I tried “What’s On The Menu” in listening mode without completing the round, then I tried “The World Of Work” in speaking mode again without finishing the round, and both were added to the top:

Regardless, though… once at the top, the last collection stays at the top until you play a different collection. Adding sentences to a collection doesn’t change the top collection in the list.

[mike]

@LuciusVorenusX we pushed up a fix - please let us know of course if you’re still seeing the issue.