Team Shake Help (Android Version)

1. Press the + button, and a window will popup allowing you to add a user.  Repeat until all the users are added to the list.
2. Use the pull down menu to pick the number of teams that you want to create.
3. Now press the “Shake-em Up” button (Hat Icon with stars coming out) or shake your phone up and down.  To create simple teams, that’s it!  Your team will be created.   Note, that you can disable the shaking function of the Main Screen by disabling the “Initial Shake” option.  If you are just looking for the very basic using of Team Shake, you can move on to the Using Teams section of this help.  If you are interested in learning about more advanced functionality such as saving and loading lists of players, continue reading this section.
4. You can press the action button on the bottom right of the screen to do additional functions.  These functions are:
   1. “Settings” – This will display another screen with a number of configuration options that will allow you to fine to the operation of team shake.  See the General Options section of this document for more details on configuration options.
   2. “Share Team Shake” – This gives you an easy way to share a link to Team Shake with your friends via text message, email, twitter, or Facebook
   3. “Mark All Absent” – This will mark all the players on the list absent so that they won’t be chosen for teams.
   4. “Mark All Present” – This will mark all the players on the list present, so everyone will be chosen for a team.
   5. “Sort List by Name” – This will reorder the list alphabetically.  Note, there is a configuration option “Sort by Last Name” which controls whether this sort is done by first or last name.
   6. “Quit Team Shake” – This will completely close Team Shake.
5. Press the “Pick a Random Player” button (picture of a single user coming out of a hat) to choose one random player and display him on the screen.  This can be used if you don’t want to create any teams, but you just want to pick players randomly. to put the list into edit mode, where you can delete users or drag them into a different order.
6. Press the “Manage Lists” button to save / load / modify / exports lists.  The options available are:
   1. “Backup / Export” – This will allow you to email a backup file with all the lists and options in Team Shake.  This file can be opened later from a different device to restore the settings or lists (TODO: need a details section about this)
   2. “Import List” – This will open a new screen, where you can existing list of users that have been typed in somewhere else.  See this section for more details.
   3. “Create New List” – This will create a new blank list.  Be sure to save your existing list first (you will be warned if there are changes that need to be saved)
   4. “Load List” – This will allow you to load any lists that you have saved.  Be sure to save your existing list first.  Note that in the “Load List” screen, you can also delete any existing saved lists by ending “Edit” mode.
   5. “Save As New List” – This will allow you to create a new list out of the existing list you are currently modifying.  Any changes you have made to the list since you last saved will NOT be saved to the old list.  The current changes and all future changes will be saved to this new list.   If you try to specify the name of an existing list Team Shake will give you an error, and it will not overwrite the list.
   6. “Save List Changes” – This will save any changes to your current list so that if you load a new list, your changes will not be lost.  Note, that Team Shake always keeps track of your current changes in a temporary list that is automatically saved.  Therefore, stopping Team Shake, or even rebooting your phone, will not result in any changes being lost.

• (Subteam/Oppose team – #1) – The numbers in the green circles identify a users’s subteam.  The number in the red circles identify a user’s oppose team.  Subteam and oppose teams are used to force people to always be on the same team or to never be on the same team.  If two or more players have the subteam number, they will be forced to be on the same team, if that is possible.   Similarly, if two ore more players have the same oppose team number, they will not be allowed to be on the same team.  One possible use of subteams is to assign friends to the same team.  Oppose team can be very useful to separate two students that don’t get along.  Its also important to note that we said these numbers will be used “if possible”.  There are some circumstances in which subteam or oppose team number cannot be honored.  For example, if the team size is only 4 players, but you put 5 people in a subteam, it will not be possible to create a team with all 5 players.  In a similar fashion, if you put 5 players on the same oppose team, but only 4 teams were created, two people from the same oppose team would be forced to be on the same team.  Team Shake will display a warning if it is unable to honor the subteam or oppose team numbers.
• (User Strengths – #2) – The little arrows to the left of a player’s name indicate their strength.  Strength can be assigned on a per user basis as weakest (downward green arrow), weak (downward blue arrow), normal (no arrow), strong (upward black arrow), or strongest (upward red arrow).   The display of these arrows can be turned on or off by toggling the “Show player strength” option.  This option is available because we understand that you may not want players to see what “strength” value you have assigned to them if you are showing them Team Shake.   In order for strengths to be used during team selection, the “Balance Team Strengths” option must be enabled (this is the default).   When you assign strengths to players, this will change the way teams are selected.  Team Shake will still be as random as possible.  However, it will now try to create more balanced teams by distributing the stronger and weaker players more evenly across the teams.   One important thing to note, is that (by default) Team Shake assumes that having additional people on a team is an advantage, and that having less people is a disadvantage.  Therefore, if you have one small team, and only one “strongest” player, he would almost always end up on the small team.  Similarly, “weakest” or “weak” players are more likely to end up on a large team.  When picking teams for some games, this may not be the desired behavior.  For example, if you have a game where there are only 4 players and with a 5 person team, there would alway be one person sitting out and waiting his turn, you could enable the “Balance alternates” option.  This option balances the teams based on the average user strength of the team, rather than the combined strengths of the team.
• (Gender) – This option is not shown explicitly in the above diagram.  However, each user can be assigned a gender.  Players that do not have a gender assigned will be displayed in green text (not shown in the diagram).   Male players will be displayed in blue text, and female will be displayed in pink text.  Note that the display of the colors can be toggled by setting the “Show gender color” option.  By default in Team Shake, setting a player’s gender will have no impact on Team Selection.  However, there are two configuration options that will change the way gender is using in creating teams.  If the  “Balance Male / Female” option is enabled, Team Shake will attempt to create teams where each team has the same number of male players as every other team (and also the same number of female players as every other team).  For example, if you have 12 boys and 8 girls in a class, and you make 4 teams., each team will have 3 boys and 2 girls.  The other configuration option that can be enabled is “Separate Male / Female”.    This option will create separate teams of males and females.    For example, if you had 15 boys and 10 girls, and you make 5 teams, you will have 3 teams with 5 boys and 2 teams with 5 girls.  Note, that it does not make sense to enable both of these options at the same time.  If you do enable them both, then “Balance Male / Female” will be ignored, and the “Separate Male / Female” team selection method will be used.
• (Advanced Team Selection) – There are some additional configuration options that can be used to change the way that Team Shake picks teams.
  • The “Equal Ability Teams” options allows you to create teams where each team is made up of players with similar strength.  For example, suppose you had 30 players 10 of which were “strong”, 10 of which were “normal”, and 10 of which were “weak”.  If you chose to make 6 teams, you first 2 teams would be made up of just “strong” players, the second 2 teams would be made up of just “normal” players, and the last 2 teams would be made up of  “weak” players.  If the players did not dived evenly into the teams, some teams might have been “strong” and “normal” players, and other teams might have “normal” and “weak” players, but no teams would have both “strong” and “weak” players.   This method of team selection is useful when the players in the team will be playing against themselves rather than another team.
  • There are 3 remaining options that impact the way teams are selection “Larger uneven teams”, “Larger Groups First”, and “Subteam 1 in Team 1”.  These make minor changes to the way teams are picked:
    • Larger uneven team – If enabled in the case of an uneven number of players some teams will have more players than requested.  If disabled, some teams may have less players than requested.  This option has no impact if the players can be divided evenly into the requested team size.
    • Larger Groups First  – If enabled, in the case of uneven teams, the larger teams will be listed first.  If disabled, the smaller teams will be listed first.
    • Subteam 1 in Team 1 – If enabled, all the members of subteam 1 will always appear in team 1
• (Absent / Present #3) – The red “no” circle on the right of each user’s name can be used to toggle a player between “Absent” and “Present”.  Users that are “Absent” will not be placed into any teams.   Both the text of the player’s name and the “no” circle will change color to grey to indicate an “Absent” user.
• (User Details #4) – By pressing on the user’s name or any empty space in the row, a “User Details” screen will be displayed where the user’s name, absent / present state, gender, strength, subteam, and oppose team can be set.
• (Number of Players indicators #5) – These two numbers in the bottom bar on the screen, give you an easy indication of how many players total are in your list (the right number), and how many users are currently present (the left number)
• (Players per Teams / Number of Teams Toggle #6) – Press this button to toggle between choosing the number of players that will be in each team and the number of total teams that will be created.

Using Teams

1. The names of all the members of a team appear in a colored bubble.   By default the names are sorted alphabetically by last name.  However, the sorting behavior can be changed by the “Sort by Last Name”, “Sort Generated Teams”, or “Never Sort Single Team” options.  The team names and the colors of the bubbles can be customized by setting the Team Color and Team Names Options.
2. Press here to generate a new random set of Teams.  You can also shake your phone to re-generate new teams.   Note, that you can disable the shaking function on the Teams Screen by disabling the “Follow-up Shake” option.  Disabling this can be useful if you accidentally shake your phone too much and lose the teams you generated.
3. Press the Action Button to share your Teams in the following ways:
   1. Share Teams as Text – This will allow you to share a text version of the teams via Text Message, Mail, Twitter, and Facebook
   2. Share Teams as Image – This will allow you to share a image of the teams via Text Message, Mail, Twitter, and Facebook.  You can also save teh image to your photos.  The image will look the same as the image on the screen.
   3. Copy Text to Clipboard – This will copy the text so you can paste it into any application that you have installed.
4. Press here to return to the Main Screen and create a different set of teams.

Loading and Deleting Previously Saved Lists

Loading and Exports Lists / Backups

Loading Lists from CSV or Text Files (e.g., Excel)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCn4tfgimAA?rel=0

It’s very easy to use Team Shake to add single players one at a time and to set the player’s strength, gender, etc.  However, sometimes you already have an existing lists, or you just find it easier to type up a full list on your computer, etc.  In that case, we offer support to import lists of names in a variety of ways.  You will need to take your typed up list of players and put it in the correct format, but first let’s just discuss how to get to the “Import List Screen”.  There are several ways to do that:

1. You can simply open the “Import List” screen by pressing the “Manage Lists” button on the Main Screen, and then press “Import List”.
2. Email yourself a “txt” or “csv” file in the correct format.  Then “Press and Hold” on the email attachment, and press “Open in Team Shake”
3. Put a “text” or “csv” file on you Dropbox or Google Drive account, and then choose “Open in Team Shake”.

Once you have done one of the above, an “Import List” screen like in the following diagram will appear.   Let’s describe how this screen works in detail.

1. List Name – Here you populate the name of list that you will be creating.  Note, that this list will NOT be loaded immediately, and this will not impact the list you are currently editing.  Instead, this new list will be added to the list of saved lists.
2. List of Players – Here the names (one per line) should be entered.  This can be manually typed, copied and pasted from any other app, or loaded from a file (via email, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.)
3. Save Button – Press here to save the list to your saved lists.  You will be returned to the Main Screen where you can continue to use the list you are currently editing, or you could load the list that was just imported.
4. Cancel Button – Press here to cancel importing the list.  Anything that has been typed or loaded will be lost, and you will have to start over with the import later.

Now, let’s get into some more detail on the format of lists of users.  There is really one format that is used for importing lists, but for the purpose of this explanation, we will treat it as 2 separate formats.  Let’s call these the “simple” format and the “complex” format.

The simple format consists of a text file with a single user’s name on each line.  The names must NOT have a comma in them.  If you use a comma in a name, only the part of the name before the comma will be added.  You can create such a file using an application like Microsoft Word, Notepad, Wordpad, Libreoffice / Openoffice Writer, or any number of programs .   However, you when you save the file you must save the file as “Plain Text”.   Here is an example of creating such a file in Microsoft Word and saving it as “Plain Text”.   Note, you should accept the default “File Conversion” options chosen by Word after you press save.  Click here to download the example text file.

The complex format consists of a comma separated list of 6 parameters for each player, one list per line.  The parameters are:

1. Name,
2. Strength (-2 to 2)
3. Subteam (0-64)
4. Oppose team (0-64)
5. Absent (0 – Present or 1 – Absent)
6. Gender (0 – not specified / 1 – Male / 2 – Female).

It is possible to create such a file in a program like Microsoft Word by just separating the parameters with commas.  However, it is much easier to use a program like Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice / OpenOffice Calc to create a spreadsheet with this information, and then save the spreadsheet as “CSV (MS-DOS)” in Excel or “Text CSV” in Calc.  Now, when you save as a CSV file you are saving your data as a plain text file with commas.  So if you have done an fancy colors, etc. with the SpreadSheet then you may want to save the file twice, once in Excel format and once as CSV.  When you try to save as CSV, make sure you use “CSV (MS-DOS)” in Excel or “Text CSV (.csv)” in Calc.  You may be warned that some formatting will be lost and that only the current sheet will be saved.  You must answer that you want to save as CSV anyway.  Also, if asked what “Field Delimiter” to use use, make sure you use a comma (,).  If asked for a text delimiter, choose double quotes (“).

When creating a SpreadSheet to use for importing, it is important that the first row in the Spread Sheet starts with the word “Name” in the first column, and that you have exactly 6 columns for each user.  This can easily be done by hand.  However, we have created an example Excel file that you can use as an example and template.  Click here to download the template / example file.  We have also have example CSV file that was created by saving this example Excel file as CSV file.  Click here for the the example CSV file.

As mentioned earlier, once you have created a TXT or CSV file in the correct format, you can use the “Open in Team Shake” option to import the teams into Team Shake from the Email app, DropBox or Google Drive.  Its also possible to simple copy and paste the contents of the file into the Team Shake “Import List” screen.

Exporting / Backing up Team Shake Lists and Configuration Options

Team Shake can backup your Teams and Options so that you can easily restore Team Shake later, or so that you can transfer your Teams to another device.   To backup your current Team Shake settings and lists, press “Manage Lists” on the Team Shake Main Screen, and then choose “Backup / Export”.  This will open an email window with the backup attached.  Email this to yourself for safe keeping or to use to transfer to another device.  Note, that Rhine-o Enterprises LLC will sometimes request a backup of Team Shake to help with support questions.  This backup contains all of your lists with their associated names.  If you feel comfortable sharing this information, a backup can be very helpful in identify problems as it allows us to see exactly what you have setup and reproduce the problem you are having exactly as you are having it.

Importing Team Shake Backups

With a previous Team Shake backup (identified by the file extension tsxml), you can completely restore all of your Team Shake lists and configuration, or just choose some of this to restore.  Above, we show the steps to restore a Team Shake backup:

1. Go to an email with the desired Team Shake backup.  Press and hold on the attachment until the “Open in” window comes up.   (Note that you can also load the file from Dropbox, Google drive, etc.  you just need to get to the “Open in” option on these apps).
2. Look for the “Open in Team Shake” option and press on this.
3. Team Shake will open and pop up a window with the following options:
   1. Full Restore – Press here to do a full restore of all your configuration options and lists.  This will overwrite all of your current settings and lists.  This is perfect, if you are trying to copy one iPhone to another.   Note that this is exactly identical to running both “Restore Lists Only” and “Restory Configuration Only”.
   2. Restore Lists Only – Press here to delete all of your current lists and replace them with the ones from this backup without touching your configuration options.
   3. Add to Current Lists – Press here to add the lists from this backup to you set of lists.   Note that if a list in the backup has the same name as one of your current lists, you will end up with two lists with the same name.  You can manually correct this by saving one of the lists with a new name and deleting the old one.
   4. Restore Configuration Only – Press here to restore your configuration options without making any changes to your lists.
   5. Cancel – Press here to go to Team Shake without restoring anything.

Configuration Options

General Options

• Initial Shake
  • Enables or disables creating teams by “shaking” your device on the main screen (may not be supported on all devices)
• Follow-up Shake

  • Enables or disables creating teams by “shaking” your device on the teams screen (may not be supported on all devices)

• Reset to Defaults
  • Press to reset all of the configuration options to their defaults.  This will only impact the configuration options.  It will NOT delete or change any saved lists.  Note this function is not yet implemented on Android.

Teams Selection Options

• Pick Number of Teams
  • If enabled, you are able to choose the number of teams.  If disabled, you are able to choose the number of players per team.  In new versions of Team Shake, this option has been removed.  Instead, you use the double arrow icon to change this behavior on the main screen.
• Larger uneven teams
  • If enabled in the case of an uneven number of players some teams will have more players than requested.  If disabled, some teams may have less players than requested.  This option has no impact if the players can be divided evenly into the requested team size.
• Larger Groups First
  • If enabled, in the case of uneven teams, the larger teams will be listed first.  If disabled, the smaller teams will be listed first.
• Subteam 1 in Team 1
  • If enabled, all the members of subteam 1 will always appear in team 1
• Balance Team Strengths
  • Creates teams with balanced strength based on the strength settings set per user.  Note, that this cannot be used with the “Equal Ability Teams” option since these two options create teams in different ways.
• Balance Male / Female
  • Creates teams such that each team has the same number of men and women as the other teams (as nearly as possible).
  • This option does NOT work with the “Equal Ability Teams” option.  If both options are enabled, Team Shake will NOT produce balanced Male and Female teams.
  • If both “Balance Male / Female” and “Separate Male / Female” configuration options are enabled, the “Separate Male / Female” selection method will be used.
• Separate Male / Female
  • Creates teams that just contain men and just contain women
  • If both “Balance Male / Female” and “Separate Male / Female” configuration options are enabled, the “Separate Male / Female” selection method will be used.
• Balance alternates
  • This option should be used when extra players on a team will be treated as “alternates” and not all players will play at once.
• Equal Ability Teams
  • This option creates teams that consists of equal strength players.  “Balance Team Strengths” must be disabled for this option to work.  This is useful when team members compete against each other rather than other teams.
  • This option does NOT work with the “Balance Male / Female” option.  If both options are enabled, Team Shake will NOT produce balanced Male and Female teams.

Display Options

• Team color in email
  • If this option is enabled, email text will contain the color assigned to the generated teams
• Team color on screen
  • If this option is enabled, the generated teams will show the name of the color in addition to set the background color for each team.
• Hide Background
  • If this option is enabled, the Team Shake Hat is NOT shown in the background of the main screen.
• Show player strength
  • If this option is enabled, small arrows are display to the left of the players’ names to indicate their strength level
• Show gender color
  • If this option is enabled, male players\’ names are shown in blue, and female players names are show in pink.  The colors are only shown on the main screen.
• Sort by Last Name
  • If this option is enabled, lists and teams will be sorted by Last name (if one is specified).  If this option is disabled, lists and teams will be sorted by first name.
• Sort Generated Teams
  • If this option is enabled, generated teams will automatically be sorted by name.  If disabled, the names will be displayed in random order.
• Never Sort Single Team
  • If this option is enabled, Team Shake will NOT sort the generated teams if there is only a single team generated.  This is useful when creating a list with the order for players to participate instead of creating teams.
• Use Rows for CSV/Excel
  • When this is enabled, teams that are exported to CSV or Excel will have one list on team per row.  If this is disabled, there will be one team per column instead.

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