Mental Case is a beautifully designed new commercial offering in the flashcard software world from Drew McCormack that will cost you about $40. It offers excellent support for interval study, graded slideshows for both study on demand and interval study as well as convenient set management. While some of its features need further development, this is an promising debut. Read below for a detailed review. (Continued)
One of the more unusual offerings out there in the memory management software genre is Mindburn, which advertises itself as a personal knowledge system. As such, it is not strictly a flashcard application, but serves many of the same functions and this review evaluates it, perhaps somewhat unfairly, in comparison to other flashcard applications. The application is a commercial product going for just under $25 and its flagship feature is the ability to manage one’s knowledge through interval study. Mindburn provides a highly customizable scheduling environment for reviewing information that can be organized into multiple levels of folders. Ultimately the software is not an appropriate study environment for students of languages, though some of its sample data suggests it might be used for that purpose, but the application has enough interesting features worth praising to deserve the attention of other flashcard developers looking to brush up on their own creations. Read up for some of the more interesting aspects of this application.
Genius is a free and open source flashcard application for OS X created by John Chang. It has a clean and simple design and is easy to work with. It uses the fill-in-the-blank method for study and distinguishes between a “learning” stage and a “review” stage for each card. It supports two regular fields, a “group” field, and a “type” field. Each card is assigned one or two scores, which are incremented and decremented when the card is practiced. Words can be assigned an “importance” which has some bearing on when it is chosen for review. 
I came across Ebbinghaus, an OS X flashcard application written by Christian Kienle, when I read comments here and there from fans of the software. Most of them seem to enjoy its simple support for images. It enjoys an interface that will be at home to any mac user, and indicates the “progress” of learning through a colored bar but I found the software to be buggy and its features fall far short of the Fool’s basic expectations. Ebbinghaus is currently free but according to its blog a new commercial 2.0 version is in the works with many more features that was due out early this year. I may have to update this review if there is marked improvement. Read on for more details.
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Upcoming Reviews
Some of the OS X applications I’m hoping to post reviews of in the coming weeks: Anki, Ebbinghaus, Mental Case, Genius, iFlash, ProVoc, Flash Cards, Mindburn, Mnemosyne, and Studycard Studio. I may eventually move to online flashcard services if I can cover these major offerings.