Kitsun Website Update Notes

[Neicudi]

Not technically a patch note but:

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I just checked the commits I made to my source control andddddd:

Kitsun is 1 year old!

Apparantly my first commit was at 28 february 2018!

I’d like to sincerely thank everyone who provided feedback, their thoughts or just checked Kitsun out!

Without you all Kitsun wouldn’t be anywhere close to where it is at the moment. It has grown tremendously in the last year and I’m sure it will in the coming years as well! This is all due to you reporting bugs and suggesting new features or proposing better solutions.

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With that in mind, here’s a new broad roadmap of what’s going to be developed in the foreseeable future:

Currently working on:

• Native apps for both android and iOS
• Offline mode (I really want to make this happen, hopefully it will work out )

Next up:

• Better card management tools (searching tools etc)
• Simplified card creation process (no need to choose templates/layouts)
• More dictionary integrations (kanji, other languages etc)
• Visual Layout Creator
• Level/Card unlock system (level based unlocking ala WK)
• Statistics
• Gamification (user levels/exp etc)
• Layout Community Centre (sharing card styling with others!)

After that:

• Interactive tutorials
• A Default Deck showcasing all possibilities for cards and explaining the system
• Updating the Guide pages with all functionality, better formatting and a ton of images.

[Neicudi]

2019-03-31

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New features:

• Rank up/down notifications during reviews now show the new SRSLevel that the card changed to.

• Tags can now be added while generating cards from the dictionary page. At both custom and default card generation flows.

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Bugfixes:

• The dark class is now correctly added to the lessons/reviews card wrappers. Meaning that you can now properly style cards especially for dark theme users. (E.g. same card having both light and dark versions based on the theme the user is using).

• Dictionary: Buttons are now properly disabled while waiting for an answer from the server during card creation.

• Dictionary: Values should now be properly wiped after generating a card.

• Unlimited lessons: Enabling, doing a lesson and then disabling the setting will now return the lesson pool to the daily amount rather than keep it at the max amount.

• IF/OR layout logic will now also work for cards which lack the fields (but where the template DOES have the fields). The value now defaults to false if it doesn’t exist.

• Pressing Enter on a external keyboard on a iOS device should now work as intended.

• The icon files are now stored locally, no more dependencies on external servers causing Kitsun to malfunction when those servers go down

• Tapping on the input should now scroll the card to the top.

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Feels good to be back in the flow! Looking forward to working on Kitsun (the website) again

[Neicudi]

03-04-2019

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New Features:

• You can now reorder reviews! The clock icon in the top right corner has been replaced by another icon. Clicking it will show you the following popup:
  

  • You can then choose the sorting you’d like:
  • Random is the default and just shuffles the reviews completely.
  • SRS Level, go from lowest to highest or reversed.
  • Due Date, do reviews based on when they came up for review or reversed.
  • Layout, bundle all cards using layout A together, and Layout B together etc.
  • Checkbox to keep siblings together. Toggling this on means that you will be able to do all layouts (sibling cards) of an item before moving onto the next one.
  • This setting will be remembered in the cookies, meaning that all your review sessions on that device will be sorted that way from now on.

• Added a banner on the decks page which informs you about the new features in the latest update. Clicking the cross will make it disappear (stored in the cookies) until I update it again

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Bugfixes:

• Fixed a small visual bug with the rank down notification. It will now show level 1 instead of 0 when an item ranks down completely.

• Sped up reviews a bit by cleaning up the code

[Neicudi]

2019-04-07

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New Features:

• Instantly generate Kanji flashcards! You can now look up Kanji inside Kitsun, which will then search Jisho.org for a kanji and display the information. Just like the regular dictionary tool, you are able to generate a flashcard from it within two clicks!

Search

Clicking the “Generate Flashcard” button brings up the popup with most values filled in already:

The newly created card uses the new Kanji template, seen below

• Added a new default Kitsun template for Kanji. This template has 4 layouts in it. 1 for Kanji -> Reading and 1 for Kanji -> Meaning and 2 alternative colorschemes (light vs dark).

Front

Back (empty block is for your own mnemonics or other notes )

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Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug where ascending and descending sorting was reversed.

• Fixed a bug where the review session wouldn’t reshuffle after getting a card wrong.

[Neicudi]

2019-04-21

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New features:

• The cards page has been supercharged!

  • You can now sort based on “Index”, “Level” or “(Creation) Date”, you can sort in both ascending or descending directions.
  • You can now search for SRS Level 0 (or mixed with other levels)
  • The results of a search are now per 100 instead of per 20, meaning you’ll have to click “load more” less often

• The server now compresses information before sending it to your browser. Meaning that large calls should be way faster! For some large calls I saw the size decrease by 30x

• As part of the above changes, a TON of logic has been rewritten on both the client and server side. I tried testing as much as I could, but it’s possible some bugs have slipped through, let me know if you find any!

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Note:
This rewrite will also allow me to write queries for card management actions to be applied to your searches, e.g. setting a tag or layout for ALL cards matching your search at once, without having to manually select anything or load more cards. I hope to implement this relatively soon ^^

[Neicudi]

2019-05-01

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New Features:

• Kitsun’s gotten a bit of a facelift. Introducing new fonts, new icons and a new sidebar style:

• The Cards overview page should now be displaying results a bit faster than before as some queries have been further optimized.

• English Meanings have been added to the Kanji dictionary card results (these were generated on the card but weren’t being displayed on the actual search result).

• Reorder - Keep siblings together option has changed to a slider toggle instead of a checkbox

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Bugfixes:

• Ranking down an item during reviews should no longer show “Level 0” in some cases.

• Hibernated/Awaken status once again displays right away on the cards page after hibernating or awakening cards.

[Neicudi]

2019-05-05

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New Features:

• Kitsun now also splits possible answers on ;and 、(fullwidth - aka Japanese - commas), making it less tedious when importing certain lists/decks or creating Japanese cards

• The font for Japanese characters has been reverted back to the original font, with a few system fallbacks added.

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Bugfixes:

• Manually adding cards to the front of the lesson queue should now work for decks with the “Random” sorting order. However, the underlying cause of this problem had to do with the Random lesson sorting not working correctly from the start. For now, random sorting will not work and fall back to chronological sorting instead.

[Neicudi]

2019-06-10

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New Features:

• You can now change templates of existing cards. When selecting a different template from the dropdown, a popup will show up asking you to match the existing values to the new template fields.

• You can now enable spellcheck for input answers (aka disabling typo leniency) for any deck you want. You can do this from the deck settings page.

• Reviews can now be batched by 10. This functionality works the same as the wrap up functionality previously did. Enabling this function from the reorder popup (accessed by clicking on the reorder button in the top right, next to the counters) will search for the next 10 card IDs and make sure that all the sibling cards (e.g. Japanese -> English and English -> Japanese) are somewhere within the next cards. Once you finish the 10 cards (and it’s siblings) it will present you with a new batch.

• Decks page: You can now click on the lessons count of a deck to go straight to the lessons screen.

• Decks page: You can now click on the reviews count of a deck to go straight to the review screen

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Bugfixes:

• Fixed an issue where double audio would play at the backside of a card under specific circumstances.

• Fixed an issue where double audio would play when pressing the audio playback hotkey.

• New layouts will now automatically be added to the users active layouts for that deck when the author pushes an update with new layouts.

• Feedback System: Approving feedback wasn’t working well for very old decks (such as the N5-N4 Decks). This has been fixed.

• Feedback System: The approval popup will now show new template fields even when they are not actually present on the card itself.

• Fixed a few issues with the 10k deck not updating layouts as it should.

• Furigana should now always show, regardless of whether the syntax before it is correct.

[Neicudi]

2019-06-23

New Features:

• Template & Layout sharing is now available!

  • For creators: You can share layouts by creating a deck, adding some sample cards using those layouts and setting the category to “Templates & Layouts” before publishing it to the community centre.
  • For users: The Community Centre is now divided into two sections, one for layouts and one for Decks. Clicking on a shared item will let you preview some sample cards with the layouts and let you import the layouts into your account with the click of a button, just like getting a community deck!

• Subs2Kitsun BETA is now live: Generate sentence cards from your favorite series, films OR anime!

  1. Drop your video file into the page
  2. Drop your foreign language subtitle file into the page
     2b. (OPTIONAL) Drop native language subtitle file into the page
  3. Use the subtitle sidebar to skip the video to the corresponding point
  4. (OPTIONAL) adjust the timing of the subtitles with the buttons in case they are off.
  5. (OPTIONAL) record audio by hitting the “Start” and “Stop” Button
  6. Hit the button to generate a card. It will take the currently active subtitles as the sentence values, add the recorded audio, and take a screenshot of the video.
  7. Adjust the values if needed and go!

Here’s some screenshots to give you an idea of how it works:

The page after dropping the required files.

The confirmation popup where you can adjust the values if needed

Frontside of the resulting card

Backside of the resulting card

• div and span HTML tags have been whitelisted for field values.

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Bugfixes:

• Fixed an issue with the new lessons/reviews shortcuts (the deck counters)

• Fixed an issue where IF/OR logic would repeat the same content if the same logic with the same field was used more than once in a layout.

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I expect both the layout sharing and the Subs2Kitsun features to break. Seeing as this is a beta, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how it currently works and how you think it could be better. Some stuff such as fully automatic deck generation, vocabulary cards and custom template cards are already in consideration, but voicing your “need” for them is always nice to hear!

Another thing to take into consideration is that the Subs2Kitsun feature will not work with every video/subtitle format available. Please let me know if something doesn’t work.

[Neicudi]

2019-10-30

The long-awaited redesign is finally live! Bringing many new features, improvements and a complete new look! Here’s some of the largest ones:

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Major New Features:

• Home Page - A new home page has been added where you can see everything important at once. A timeline for all of your decks, your (new) user level, your average accuracy, your study streak and of course the amount of lessons/reviews currently available.

• Mass Card Management - The cards page has been replaced by a much more performant management page. This new page loads ALL of the cards in the deck at once and tries to cache it in your browser. From here you are able to quickly perform any kind of action you might need to do. E.g. filtering cards by tag and mass hibernating all of them at once. No more having to load cards batch by batch!

• Cards filtering - Due to the above mentioned table you can now also search for explicit or implicit values. E.g. you can search for the tag “Frequency 1” and it will only show you exact matches, rather than “Frequency 1” AND “Frequency 10”

• Adding/Editting cards - You can now easily add new cards or edit existing ones without having to leave the table. Simply click the pencil icon and a popup where you can create/edit your card will open.

• Statistics - Kitsun now tracks your lessons/reviews per day and also how many you answered correct or wrong. This is used for user levels, study streaks and accuracy percentages. In the future I hope to expand on this with a dedicated statistics page

• User Levels - You now have a fancy new level! This level is based on the amount of lessons and reviews you’ve done. Each correct review or completed level gives you 10 exp. The max level you can reach is level 50 and will take a tremendous amount of time and effort to reach. Currently only one person has reached max level yet.

• Community Centre - Now displays the 10 most popular decks per category on the front page. Also has a new category “Newest” where you can check the latest shared decks

• Mass Manual Lessons - You can now add multiple cards to the front of your lessons queue at once using the new management table actions.

• Additional Theme colors have been added!

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Bugfixes:

• Clicking on the lessons/reviews counters of a deck (on the home/deck pages) will now check whether you actually have lessons or reviews available before redirecting you.

• Pressing backspace during lessons & reviews (and while setting hotkeys) will not navigate you to the previous page anymore.

• Show/Flip/Correct/Wrong buttons should now display during Quick study

• Searching for decks in the community centre will now work better (less strict )

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As for general changes, I don’t even know where to start listing them. It’s a complete redesign built from scratch. I expect a huge amount of bugs to pop up. So please let me know if something goes wrong.

[Neicudi]

2019-10-31

First adjustments and bugfixes have been made. This bugfix update should drastically improve the experience for iOS users

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Bugfixes:

• iOS - Fixed some general scrolling issues

• iOS - The animated circles (accuracy & levels) should now look smooth

• iOS - Fixed an issue where the select box dropdown wouldn’t scroll

• iOS - Fixed an issue where the popups wouldn’t scroll when needed.

• iOS - Fixed an issue where the cards management table wouldn’t scroll horizontally.

• Re-added a link to the Den (forums) in the sidemenu

• Card Input text color should now correctly be white after validating your answers (mostly an issue on iOS)

• Adjusted the audio button styling

• Wiping the cards cache (with the button in the settings) will now display a notification once it has completed.

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I still have a few issues open from all the feedback. I hope to get around to working on those asap!
Feel free to check the trello board to see if the issue has been mentioned before

[Neicudi]

2019-11-01

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Bugfixes:

• Lesson and review counters now correctly display a ban icon when the deck is set to inactive. Clicking on them also won’t do anything anymore. This prevents a nasty loop where you’d get stuck on the reviews screen.

• Lesson and review counters now also won’t navigate you to the lessons/reviews screen when your reviews or lessons are 0.

• Sidebar expansion on hover should now be disabled for touch devices (tapping on a menu item would previously open the sidebar). Please tap your user avatar if you want it to expand

• Home - Total Lesson calculation should be correct again. It might take a few more hours until the counts correctly update though (at 12 server time).

• Dropdowns will now position themselves to always be visible on screen. It already did this for the top and bottom, but now it also checks if there is enough space at the right side of the screen

• Searching cards by tags is now case insensitive.

• Management table - Fixed an issue with new decks where it would never finish loading cards (due to there not being any cards yet).

[Neicudi]

2019-11-03

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New Features:

• Greatly increased performance of the database used to cache the cards of your decks (for the management table). Also decreased the memory usage of the table in general. This should fix the crashes/freezes.

• Added a setting to disable the cards caching for the card management table. If you are still having problems with the cards loading or the browser tab crashing, you can enable this option. This will completely disable the caching, meaning the cards will always be fetched straight from the server (so it might take longer for large decks).This setting is cookie based, so it’s device specific!

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Bugfixes:

• Re-enabled some styling adjustments for lower resolution screens. This change should mostly affect tablets

• Re-enabled the feature to propose changes to a community deck card from the edit card popup.

• The timeline legend has been removed from all instances in order to create some more space.

• Fixed an issue where the sidemenu would sometimes fall behind other elements on the page.

• Fixed an issue where the experience after a level up was wrongly calculated. I will take Kitsun offline for about 2 minutes in order to run a script to recalculate the levels and experience for everyone.

• Fixed an issue where proposed changes couldn’t be accepted due to a failing API call.

[Neicudi]

2019-11-03 PART 2

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New features:

• You can now edit and/or delete folders again. When you click on a folder, the + button at the top becomes an edit button. Clicking on the edit button will bring you to the settings page where you can either edit or delete the folder. Sidenote: I still have to re-introduce the functionality to add folders. Coming soon!

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Bugfixes:

• Custom Dictionary Card Generation Popup - The layouts select should now work properly again!

• iOS - Dropdowns will now close upon tapping one of the items in them. Also fixed a small styling issue.

• Edit Card Popup will now close automatically upon deleting a card.

• I’ve disabled the search functionality when selecting layouts, levels or card statuses. As this would often be annoying on mobile devices (it would open the keyboard over the actual select dropdown).

• Management Table - It should no longer flash blue upon selecting a a row in the table.

[Neicudi]

2019-11-05

Anddd another round of bugfixes

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Bugfixes:

• Changed the the notifications you get when an action fails or succeeds, the previous version was causing some popups to never show up (such as the “Done all lessons” popup after hibernating the last item) while a notification is active.

• All management actions should now correctly update the data inside the table, regardless of the current filters/search.

• Recalculated the experience and levels of all users again due to a bug in the level up calculations.

• Fixed the experience and level percentages on the home page and the results page

• Fixed a bug where audio would sometimes play audio double during a Quick Study session (due to multiple audio sources available on the card)

• Added the correct placeholder text to the synonyms input field.

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Thanks everyone for reporting the bugs!

[Neicudi]

2019-11-10

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New features:

• Hovering (or tapping on mobile) the progress bar will now give some more information regarding the percentage of that rank and total amount of cards. See below
  

  

• User levels are syncing to the Kitsun forum accounts as we speak! Expect your level to be visible there between now and about an hour.

• Added a “Back to Deck” button on the lesson/review session results screen.

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Bugfixes:

• Fixed an issue where the management table would still display values of fields that were previously removed from the template (causing the table information to misalign for certain cards)

• The Quick Study option @ management table will not work unless you select atleast one card first.

• Timeline - Dark theme now has a white color for day markers.

• Fixed an iOS styling issue where the textcolor of disabled inputs/selects was wrong. (Should now be more legible in dark theme)

• Community Centre - Fixed an issue with IF/OR logic on new fields causing the sample cards to not render properly.

• Fixed an issue where the audio button wouldn’t change to a pause icon while audio autoplay fired during reviews/lessons/quick study.

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Meanwhile I’ve been wrestling with implementing Stripe for the payment processing (aka making it possible to subscribe/buy lifetime) and the account types and limitations. So far everything is going according to schedule

I’ll post some more information about the general roadmap for Kitsun soon

[Neicudi]

2019-11-17

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New features:

• Kitsun will now redirect you to your initial page after logging in. E.g. when you go to https://kitsun.io/overview while logged out. You get redirected to the login screen -> login again -> automatic redirect to /overview

• You can create folders again! The “Add Deck popup” now has a checkbox that you can toggle on to indicate it is a folder.

• The forums now also sync according to your subscription/account status (preparation for launch)

• Back to Deck button has now also been added to the lessons results screen.

• Overview - “Start Reviewing” is now hidden when you have no decks to review.

• N4 & N5 Decks - Added a placeholder text to the input to indicate the answer that is being expected (meaning or reading)

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Bugfixes:

• Fixed an issue where mass changing layouts of cards wouldn’t work correctly.

• Fixed an issue where levels wouldn’t sync to the Kitsun forums correctly. Your level should now sync well on the next level up (if not let me know!)

• Overview - Added some margin to the bottom of the page.

• Adjusted the “Add Deck” popup styling for mobile devices.

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Getting real close to the release now! Almost done with the payment system implementation

When the release goes live all accounts will be set to Trial. Existing beta accounts will be treated as new trials.

Trial accounts have the following limitations:

• After 14 days your account gets locked.
• After 150 lessons your account gets locked.
• Perhaps some restrictions to certain (non-essential) features (not completely sure yet)

[Neicudi]

2019-12-08

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New Features

• Default Dictionary Cards - Automatic audio generation has been added. More info below.

• Custom Dictionary Cards - Automatic audio generation has been added. More info below.

• Katakana 4.5k Deck - Worked together with @hinekidori to add audio to all cards!

• You can now click on the news in order to close it and keep it closed until new news arrives

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Bugfixes

• Cards Management Table - Fixed a bug where actions wouldn’t update the cards currently in cache. So changing to another template would show old data.

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Audio generation workflow:

Default card generation

Whenever you open the above popup, the audio will automatically be fetched and you’ll be able to preview it and choose whether you want to include it. Sometimes the audio returned is using a different reading that what you’d like. In that case you can click on “Specify Reading”, input your own reading and generate audio from that:

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Custom card generation

Clicking on the audio button will open a new popup:

Here you’ll be able to enter text and generate the audio. If your audio field already had text in it before clicking on the audio button, it will be automatically filled in at the popup, so you can just click on generate and click on save

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I am super curious to hear what you all think about this new audio generation feature! Please let me know if you have any remarks or feedback. Implementing it for the normal add/edit card workflow is next on my list, along with multiple language support

[Neicudi]

2019-12-22

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New Features

• The sidebar is expandable again! Hover has been disabled and instead you can now click on either the arrows icon at the bottom or on your user avatar to expand or shrink the sidebar Your preference will be remembered next time you open Kitsun through a cookie. Expanding the sidebar will shift the content of the page, rather than laying over it. It does still act as an overlay for mobile though, as there is less space there.

• Blurred text has been added to the default layouts. No longer will the backside of a Meaning card spoil the sibling Reading card! You can click on the blurred text to make it appear normally. This functionality can be used for your own layouts as well. Just add a blur class to the text and make it blurry using css.

• Scrolling on iOS has just improved tremendously! It will now smoothly scroll rather

• Added a Russian keyboard input. Typing in this input will use a Russian keyboard layout and type the corresponding Russian letters instead (think of it like wanakana, converting characters as you type). Use it in your layouts like this: {{type-ru:fieldname}}

• Kitsun will now show inputs with a yellow color if your answer was marked correct but had one of more typos in it.

• Added Sentence and Notes fields to the default dictionary card generation popup.

• Category order has been changed at the community centre.

• Advanced search area styling has been optimized for larger screens (two rows).

• Sidebar animation has been changed to be more smooth

• News animation has been changed to be more smooth

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Bugs

• Selecting More Time before starting a quiz will not screw up your quiz amount anymore.

• Audio will now properly play on any page when clicking on the audio button.

• Fixed a styling issue where iOS would cut off certain pages at the bottom.

• Fixed an issue where 2 columns styling would be enforced on mobile if there are only 2 dictionary results.

• Fixed an issue where the dropzone wouldn’t show up on mobile for decks in a folder.