Because of the all the big changes listed below, many of the files on Quizlet have changed (71 of them, in fact). If you have any issues with Quizlet’s looks or functionality, you probably don’t have the right files. To make sure you have the latest copy of all the files, you’ll need to empty your brower’s cache. See this page for instructions for various browsers.
You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to post this:
Scatter is here!
Scatter is a game. It’s ridiculously addictive. Try it here, embedded in this blog:
Scatter shows you eight random terms from your set, scattered all over the page. You drag corresponding items onto each other. It doesn’t matter if you drag the term onto the definition, or the definition onto the term. When you make a correct match, the two items will disappear. Keep going until all of the items are gone. It then gives you your score, and compares it to your record high score.
Warning: Scatter is highly addictive!
Instead of releasing this update, for the last two days I’ve been wasting my time playing Scatter all day. Or rather, I’ve been hoarding it all to myself. Hey, it’s called testing! 
It’s embeddable, as you see above. That means you can copy the HTML code and insert Scatter into your own page. The embedding code is at the top-right hand corner of the regular Scatter page. Should be cool to see what blogs it turns up in :cool:.
A few miscellaneous things about it:
- When you drop one item onto another, it won’t catch the drop unless your mouse is hovering over the target term. So if you have a giant definition and a wee bit of it is overlapping the target term when you drop, it might not work.
- Embedding will look best on pages with WHITE backgrounds. Sorry, people with other colors.
- Dragging performance might not be optimal. It runs fine for me and my testers, but your results my vary. Let me know if it’s hard to use.
- The “scattering” code randomly places the items all over the place. It finds random coordinates, checks to see if that space is free, and if it isn’t it will try 7 times more, then just give up and do the overlap. Think of it as overlap-resistant, as it won’t be perfect all the time.
- It’s sort of easy to cheat. I”ll leave it up to you to figure out how. Except, when I was testing I was able to get faster times by actually knowing the stuff than cheating.
- I may add High Scores so you can compare with other people. It’s hard to decide, because of how easy it is to cheat and manipulate any high scores board. And also, I’m unsure about encouraging competition on a self-improvement website. I’ll be listening for reactions on this subject.
- It will show 8 terms everytime (or if your set is less than that, it will show all of them). In all my testing, that seemed like the perfect balance of numbers. Every new round of the game will show a random selection of the terms in the set.
The second-best new feature is the networking page, which lets you connect with friends by sending them email invites to your groups or finding your friends by username/email address. Very nice.
Other things that are new:
- Overhauled the discussion box code so it’s less frenetic when it gets really long or when the page loads.
- Changed “Saved Sets” to “Favorited Sets” - everything is the same except for the name.
- Made the Getting Started page have bigger text, and more information.
- Changed the top-right help logo from (?) to (help). I think it’s more direct that way.
- The Print Flashcards page now tells you how many pages it will print for you. It’s still 5 terms per page.
- When you add a term on the Create Set/Edit Set pages, it automatically scrolls to the bottom for you. I love this one.
- If you aren’t a member of any groups, the My Groups page will show you the most recently created groups and links to see all groups.
- Upgraded to Mootools 1.0.
- Quizlet should now remember your Ignore and Prompt settings for the Learn and Test pages.
- Export page now lets you recreate sets inside of Quizlet.
- The home page is now more consistent on what sets it shows. All users will see the same list, when before they would see only sets they could access (private sets included). Now, a “Just Me” set will never be on the list. “Only Certain People” sets and “Everyone” sets will always show now (the former with a lock icon showing). Note: this does not change any privacy settings of your data, just what set titles will show in the “recent sets” list.
As always, let me know how she’s running.
