Slideshows

Mental Case is one of the few study apps to include a completely immersive study mode. Rather than just going through your notes in the standard editing mode, in Mental Case, you study by going through beautifully presented slideshows. Not only does this make studying less of a chore, it completely focusses your attention on learning your notes.

To start a slideshow, you can use the New Slideshow button under the note browser, or you can enter the study mode by going to the second tab in the toolbar at the top of the main window. There is only ever one slideshow at any one time. You can’t have more than one slideshow running, and you can’t pause one to study a different slideshow. If you start a new slideshow, it replaces the existing one completely.

Once a new slideshow has started, Mental Case ensures it remains in existence until you finish it or choose to start a new slideshow, even if you quit and relaunch the application. You are free to move in and out of the slideshow mode as often as you choose. Your progress will be stored so you can continue at any time.

When you begin a new Custom… slideshow, or make a new slideshow using the button on the left of the slideshow toolbar, you are presented with a settings panel. You can configure many aspects of your study session in this panel, including which notes will be included, how they are ordered, and what default grade (ie. right or wrong) should be assigned to the notes you view. Most of the settings will be reused for future slideshows, but the Basic options can be change depending on the type of slideshow you choose.

Each note appears in the slideshow as a set of slides. Usually, one slide corresponds to a single facet of the note, but this is not always the case. Sometimes a slide can contain more than one facet. An example of this is when you are studying a multiple choice quiz, where all facets appear on a single slide.

As you study each note, you can choose to grade it as right or wrong, depending on whether you felt you remembered the note well enough. If you grade a note as wrong, it may be repeated in the slideshow further on, depending on the settings you chose in the beginning. Grading also has repercussions for the study schedule of the notes. Marking a note wrong will usually cause it to be due for study more often, so that you have an opportunity to learn it better.

There are also other ways to grade a note. If you have very short pieces of text on your slides, you could choose to type the response. Mental Case will compare what you typed with what appears on the next slide, and grade the note accordingly. If you are studying a multiple choice quiz, you press a button to indicate your choice, and you are graded based on whether your choice was correct.

There are many ways to navigate a slideshow, including clicking the navigation buttons in the center of the toolbar, swiping left and right with two fingers — if you have a trackpad — and choosing a note from a pop down list in the top-right of the window. You can also navigate completely with the keyboard using the arrow keys.

The slideshow toolbar at the bottom gives you other options too. You can choose to jump out to editing mode to edit the current note; show statistics for the current slideshow; repeat audio playback; and flag notes so that you can find them again in the Flagged stack later on.

See also

Slideshow Topics
Starting a Slideshow
Configuring Slideshows
Navigating Slideshows
Grading Notes
Viewing Slideshow Statistics