In a previous review of Anki, I had a number of critical things to say about the cross-platform application. However, I eventually came to realize that the only true advantage I seem to gain from using iFlash (a review of which I never completed for this site, out of a desire to wait for certain updates) were certain conveniences of the interface and its elegant Mac like feel.

Interfaces are important because they define the relationship between a user and his or her interaction with data. When done well, they also provide a sense of consistency which allow users to quickly and easily access the features that are useful to them but also create an enjoyment in the use of an application that bring users back again and again. Given the fact that, as a fully cross-platform application Anki must always make certain sacrifices in this regard and that it continues to have areas that might be seriously improved, I believe there will always be, at least in the OS X environment, a range of other flashcard applications which will appeal far more to a user at first use than what they are faced with when they first open the Anki application.

However, my reason for posting this entry today is to make and support the claim that Anki is currently and without question far ahead of all of its competition, at least in the OS X environment that I’m familiar with, as a powerful spaced repetition flashcard application.

I feel the need to post this entry because I’ve been sent a lot of e-mails by various students wanting me to stake a clear position on what I believe to be the current leading application. While the reviews on this website seem to be useful to many, the various advantages and disadvantages I have listed for each application in my various reviews seem to have left many newcomers to the world of spaced repetition and interval study in a flash card environment wondering what ultimately they ought to use.

So, for the record, after having looked at dozens of flash card applications on multiple platforms, many of which I have not had the time to review fully on this website, I am happy to recommend, without reservations, that’s serious students, especially of language study, take a good hard look at the open source and freely downloadable application Anki which is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux operating systems. I believe that given a little bit of initial effort in becoming familiar with the application and getting your data into the program either by direct input or through various import methods Anki provides the best solution for long-term memory management of large quantities of small atomic units of information. I am happy to endorse another application at some later date, and will continue to keep my eyes open for what is out there, but at this time, no other application, at least on the OS X platform, comes remotely close to Anki in terms of the number and power of features, flexibility in study, or implementation of spaced repetition.

Instead of writing a completely new updated review of Anki, below are listed just a few of the areas where I’ve been particularly impressed relative to the alternatives. Because I believe in the potential for further innovation through a healthy competition between flashcard applications I hope that other developers may consider some of the points below as they develop their own solutions.

1. Spaced Repetition – The most important area in which Anki shines is also the area in which it has the greatest lead ahead of its competition. No other application that I have worked with, with perhaps the exception of Super Memo for Windows (which, though powerful, and a very important innovation leader, is such mess of an application that I would not recommend to anyone and will exclude from comparative consideration below) offers users the same degree of power and flexibility in carrying out spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is becoming more and more popular and I’m very happy to see it being implemented in various forms by developers on all platforms. However, generally speaking, these features often seem to be added as a nod or a gesture to users who demand them and rarely, with a few exceptions, as a central component of the application itself. Many developers also seem to lack an understanding of what the concept really means, and how to make it work effectively.

I won’t go into a blow-by-blow comparison here between Anki and its main competitors for lack of time but I believe that serious students who want to not only memorize materials but to maintain a long-term mastery of things such as language vocabulary will find, as I have, that in the long term Anki just works. It has a powerful but flexible algorithm which can be customized by users and which adapts to the memory of the user with each iteration of review. While I hope that documentation of this algorithm, its use, and the ways in which users can take control of the process itself will improve in future releases and the interface for customizing some of these features also likewise continues to develop, I’m convinced now that the Anki approach is far superior to the interval study schedule in applications like iFlash (which was in turn based on a method I used in my own Flashcard Wizard many years ago and later by StudyCard Studio) or on the somewhat more advanced and customizable approach taken in such applications as Mental Case. It is also superior to any of the spaced repetition implementations I’ve so far seen in a wide array of iPhone an iPod applications that continue to emerge every week.

Note: While there is a browser-based client of Anki available for the iPhone or other mobile devices it is difficult to install and unreliable in use. It cannot match having an easily installable native application and I hope that either the developer of Anki or some other enterprising soul will produce a full on key client for popular mobile platforms such as the iPhone in the near future. Users who really want to have a mobile client for their flashcard study are strongly encouraged to contact the developer of Anki to make their wishes known, but currently may be forced to consider alternatives like Mental Case which support spaced repetition on their iPhone/iPod clients. iFlash may also support it in a future update to the iPhone/iPod client.

2. Models – One feature that I have not personally made full use of but which I now believe is a major advantage of Anki is the powerful ability to create multiple models for each deck. Anki allows users to create different kinds of questions and thus cards with a different kind of appearance within the same study deck. Thus a single deck of cards for one’s Spanish class, for example, can offer differing kinds and numbers of fields according to the type of material being tested.

3. Facts vs Cards – Another feature that I once underestimated but which I now believe offers a powerful advantage for users of Anki is a distinction that it makes between facts and cards. See my entry on this for more detail. One fact is a relationship between several fields of information while one card is simply a way of displaying that information or rather withholding some of that information from the user who wishes to review and memorize its contents. This provides an easy way for Anki to allow users to review language cards in multiple directions, and keep spaced repetition statistics and performance data separate in those multiple directions of study, without the user ever having to change the mode of study or make other adjustments. Users can suspend, temporarily bury, or delete individual cards without harming or touching the original fact.

4. Deck Overview – A new feature of Anki which I’ve now come to like very much is also very useful for students who wish to engage in long-term review and study. If Anki is successful in helping one review information then it is likely that over time a user will acquire new decks that for various reasons they have decided to keep in separate files rather than incorporate in one large deck with multiple models. Anki now provides a kind of dashboard or overview of one’s decks upon launch of the application which immediately shows users how many cards are due how many new cards need to be studied and how many cards and how much time has been spent on the application on this current day. No other application that I know of provides this kind of convenient overview of multiple decks of cards and thus Anki provides a wonderful single starting place from which once daily study may begin.

5. Statistics – No other application that I have used provides anything near the amount of easily viewable data and statistics about one’s study. Anki provides users an easy way to browse statistics about performance on a single card both during Flashcard study, while the management of entries or accessible through the graphs created by its statistics feature. Students who engage in long-term study understandably wish to have a better understanding of how they are performing on individual cards or on the deck as a whole as well as get a rough idea about the number of upcoming cards and the opportunity costs of not studying for several days. Again Anki is way ahead of its competitors.

6. Customization – Anki is also way ahead of the competition in providing easy and convenient way for users to customize various aspects of one’s daily flash card study and provide reasonable limits on that daily study. For example Anki provides an easy way to limit study to a certain number of cards, a certain number of minutes, and fix a limited number of new cards for each day of study. It allows users to customize the way that the three different categories of cards are handled, that is to say, failed cards which have been marked incorrect recently, cards which are due for review, and cards which have not yet been studied but which are currently scheduled for review. Unlike many other applications Anki assumes that you are dealing with a large amount of as yet unstudied material that you wish, through regular but managed study, learn and remember through use of the application. It takes as its unit of time not merely a single study session, but a single day of study within a larger study schedule that continues indefinitely into the future. It never assumes that any fact or card is completely memorized (the serious Cookie Monster flaw that most flashcard applications make) and it never seems that any of its users have the same powers of memory. Nor does it force you, like a number of applications out there claiming to provide spaced repetition, to continue reviewing cards beyond what is currently due or on the verge of being forgotten (this I have called the Insatiability Flaw).

7. Formatting – While it can be somewhat confusing to use, Anki also provides the most flexible approach I’ve seen to displaying information in various fields on cards with full control over the fonts and sizes of information. I have been told that one friend even successfully used some more advanced cascading style sheet features in the formatting of individual fields to allow the display of certain fields only when certain text is moused over.

8. Online Backup & Synchronization – Anki allows synchronization of one’s decks between one’s desktop and an Anki server and also allows you to review your decks online when you are away from your desktop. As I’ve noted before, with the exception of a somewhat unreliable browser-based JavaScript client there is still no mate if iPhone or iPod mobile Anki but I have some hope that this will be added in the future.

9. Excellent Use of Tags – I once criticized Anki for not using a set-based organizational method. However, I believe this was short sighted of me and showed that I was too tied to one standard approach to organizing data. I have come to appreciate the power of Anki’s full support for tagging which allows me to easily deactivate certain tags that may correspond to a particular direction of study or a particular category of words. It also allows me to indicate a priority for words that will have an impact on when those words are introduced.

10. Open Source & Open Architecture – Anki is an open source Python-based application. It has a fully supported plug-in architecture which allows any developer to add functionality and add features to the application. I believe that this kind of approach, both the fact that it is open source and its open architecture, gives me the best hopes for its future in that any interested and passionate developer can make improvements on the software and expand its functionality in the future.

11. Very Active Development – Finally, I’m incredibly impressed with the responsiveness and the enthusiasm of the primary developer of Anki. The application is continuously being improved and I found the developer to be extremely responsive to suggestions from his user base. A look at the issues database will suffice to show this. I hope that in the future the network of developers working on Anki will expand but for now I’m very happy to see a flashcard application that is continuing me being improved by a an active developer who seems to be devoting a considerable amount of personal time to the project. I only hope this continues to be the case! There are costs to this of course in that features can sometimes change quite rapidly and some consistency in approach might be lost but so far overall it gives me the impression of using a living application that is constantly evolving in response to the needs and requests of its user base. If you use Anki and want to support Damien’s work, I strongly encourage you to show your support for his labors with a donation. I also encourage other programmers with some understanding of Python, who use and enjoy Anki, to study the code and offer their services.

A flashcard application is said to be guilty of the Flip Fixation Flaw when the developer’s attempt to emulate the experience of studying and flipping a physical flashcard comes at the cost to the student of time or software functionality.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with creating a digital flashcard experience within educational software which is modeled upon the original physical paper based flashcard. This only becomes a problem when the marginal benefit of this approach is outweighed by the cost in terms of speed, space, and visual experience.

It’s Not Just about the Flipping

The three most common ways developers commit the flip fixation flaw are:

Lost Speed – When there is a non-trivial amount of time wasted upon creating the visual experience of “flipping” a digital flashcard to show another side of the card or sweep the card off the screen to show the next card. Because reviewing a well-studied flashcard can take less than a second, anything but the fastest flip animations can easily double the time it takes for a student to study a medium to high volume of flashcards.

If developers really want to flip the cards, then please: flip’em really fast!

Lost Space – In order to further give the user the impression they are looking at a physical card, developers often draw an image of a rounded or regular rectangle on the screen in which the content of the card is displayed and upon which the flip action is performed. This is a terrible waste of screen real estate because both the card and sometimes dozens of precious pixels are being wasted that might have been better put to slave labor portraying bigger fonts or more text.

Even if you want to “flip” the digital flashcard, we don’t need to waste screen space on a cute little flashcard, just flip the whole screen or canvas on the window.

Lost Memories – Some developers, who apparently really miss the real thing, like to create flashcards which reproduce the red vertical line and blue horizontal lines on ancient paper flaschards and elementary school notebooks.

Get over it, move on! Are you worried the users are going to type out of line or off the left margin? It may spark moments of nostalgia for people like myself who have actually used the brand of physical flashcards that looked like this, but no, we really don’t want to stare at the blue and red lines when we practice our flashcards.

Search – Searching for flashcards on the website is easy and conveniently provides separate lists of sets containing the search term in the name of the set or tagged as such. However, this list also includes lists private sets that one cannot access (sympathetically the developer writes, “I wonder what’s on those cards? I bet it’s something cool :(” However, other than to show off a high number of sets returned, it seems pointless to list such private card sets, especially when no user name of the creator is hidden so one cannot plead with them to open up their card set. The developer might consider adding an “advanced search” option which allows one to, for example search for “verbs” in the title, but tagged “german.” Also, the search seems to handle tag searches in a strange way. For example, searching for “germ” gives you all sets with “German” in the title, but none tagged “german.” Instead it return only two sets tagged “germ” However, if one searches for “germ cells” one gets all sets with “germ” or “cells.” There doesn’t seem to be a way to search for sets with both the tag “german” and the tag “verbs” (that search will return all sets tagged verbs).

Set Ratings? There doesn’t seem to be any kind of rating system or other way to make use of the growing community of users at Flashcard to help differentiate the level of quality between the various sets one can view on the site. This is a feature present on most other online flashcard review sites and I hope the developer will consider adding it.

Creating Sets and Adding Cards

Creating sets is pleasant but limited. Only two fields are permitted so students of Japanese and Chinese, for example, should look elsewhere. I hope support for three sided cards will be added in the future. Like most sites with the notable exception of Anki’s online study website, this is a card and not a fact based approach (see my posting on facts vs. cards). It looks like the cards can support multiple lines but does not have any controls (or even support for a meta-language like Textile used by Cramberry) for rich editing of the cards with bold and italics, for example. The cards and the import features support unicode without any problems.

One can easily import cards with various delimiters (commas, tabs, etc.) and also export both your own and other user sets with an even larger selection of delimiters. However, the developer does not handle CVS comma delimited files correctly. Normally comma delimited files will enclose fields with quotation marks if there commas within the field, to prevent those commas from being interpreted as delimiters.³

There doesn’t appear to be any easy keyboard short cut for easily adding new cards and one must click on the button each time to proceed to the next blank card. I recommend recognizing a key like an “enter” (as opposed to “return”) or “tab” or some other special key from the final field as indicating the user wishes to save and create a new card. There is also a bug in the interface for creating new cards. If you press “Add this Card” and get impatient while you wait and click the button again, the site will create two identical cards. Also, I would recommend adding a warning to users who have added text to a new blank card but who click on “I am done adding cards” to warn them they have not saved the currently edited card. Currently the field gets hidden without any warning and the silly user will have lost the card they entered without saving. Since this field appears to be simply hidden with Javascript, however, “Add a new card” will actually show the field again with the unsaved text still in there. I would still add a warning though.

It is nice that you can conveniently view previously added cards above when you add them, and easily delete or edit them with a click on a series of buttons visible only when you mouse over the earlier cards. I could recommend that it also allowed the user to double click directly on fields of cards to edit the field in question without having to mouse over to the left and press the “edit.” There is a cost to this pleasant display though. If one has imported 3,000 Korean words, as I did during my test of the site, you will have to patiently wait while a huge list of 3,000 Korean words is generated for you each time you open the set. I would recommend having a separate browse overview of a set’s contents or at least limit the displayed cards to a few hundred.

Interval Study and Flashcard Study

FlashcardDb supports two separate forms of interval study and you can switch between methods globally in the “Settings” of the user. One is the Leitner system, or what I have been usually referring to as a static time-to-forget (TTF) schedule.⁴ A description of the system used can be found here. The TTF schedule used essentially only has four stages with the intervals being one day, three days, one week, and one month. Although I haven’t used the service enough to know, I’m guessing (correct me if I’m wrong in the comments) the cards continue to repeat at intervals of one month when they reach the final TTF stage (otherwise, of course, it would be guilty of the cookie monster flaw). A static TTF schedule is fine and easy for users to understand and use. I used it in my own Flashcard Wizard a decade ago, and versions of it can be found used on the previously reviewed Flashcard Exchange website and such OS X applications such as iFlash and Mental Case. However, I feel that the number of stages are far too few and should, like iFlash, Mental Case, and my old Flaschard Wizard allow the user to tweak the intervals between stages according to their needs.

The “Graded Spaced Repetition” method uses an approach familiar to users of Anki, Mnemosyne, or the powerful SuperMemo application which developed the method. Users can grade their response which propels the card into the future accordingly. The cards are still, however, displayed with the same break down, making it somewhat difficult to distinguish off hand which system one is using when looking at an overview of one’s cards. In fact, regardless of which system one is using, clicking on one’s flashcards will send you to the page with a description of the Leitner method.

It would be nice if, on the “My flashcards” page, there was a more obvious way to study all cards that are due (across sets). The only way to begin interval study, that I can tell, is to click on an individual set and click “Study” but this studies only the cards for that given set. This would not be unusual if it weren’t for the fact that the “My Flashcard” statistics lump all statistics together for all sets, yet only allows you, as far as I can tell, to study the sets individually.

There is the capability of tagging one’s sets and then conducting interval study across sets on that tag or viewing the interval study statistics for that tag alone. However, I was not able to determine how to tag flashcard sets that I had found on the site. Again, my study statistics for those saved flashcard sets created by other users are included in the aggregate total of cards due, but I cannot seem to tag those sets or study them without explicitly going to the set itself. To allow this to happen though, the developer will have to devise some way to allow people to tag other people’s sets, while it may be wise to keep these tags visible only to the user who tagged them unless that user is the creator of the set. Either way, the tagging system has some more work. Future improvements might include the ability to tag at the sub-set level, marking collections of words by their part of speech for example if one wants to review simply the verbs across multiple sets. Adding this feature will need some work though, as it is only useful if tagging is extremely fast and simple.

FlashcardDB has a somewhat confusing system of dividing cards up which, if I understand it correctly, works like this when displayed in graphical presentation: yellow expired cards are cards that are due at a particular session or which have not yet been studied, there are green correct cards which are not currently due but the display of which gives you an indication of how many words are at a given interval, and red incorrect cards which have had their time-to-forget stage reset to zero. At the top of the table one is given totals of how many words are expired, incorrect, or green but this is not the most obviously useful indicator that could have been displayed since these aggregate numbers don’t by themselves tell you very much. Instead, statistics indicating certain trends or indicators of future study might be alternatives to consider. To be honest, while the colors dazzle, I don’t think they serve any truly useful purpose when presented the way they are. When looking at graphs of this kind, the primary things a student wants to know are: how many cards do I have at various intervals? How many cards are scheduled or are likely to be scheduled (at the current pace of daily added new cards and average performance up to now) for the coming days and weeks? It is easy to look at the chart provided and think one is looking at latter instead of the former.

It would be nice if, like Anki, the application provided a way to limit the number of cards offered for study on a particular day, regardless of how many cards are due. Anki, for examples, allows you to indicate a fixed number of “new” cards each day, maximum number of repetitions overall, and a maximum time per session (each of which can be overriden when the limit is reached during any given session). A blog entry written by the developer suggests that he is already thinking along these lines when he mentions, “a sort of Recovery Mode…through which a daily maximum of cards to study could be set. That way just logging on and seeing the number of scheduled repetitions doesn’t lead to a sinking feeling and maybe even further procrastination.” I hope that such a feature is added and that other developers of similar websites recognize some of the fantastic advantages of such a system. My ancient Mac OS classic application Flashcard Wizard provided a similar feature, as does iFlash but in both of our cases, it was merely a cap on total cards, rather than the optional caps on new cards, total repetitions, and study time provided by Anki.

During flashcard study itself, FlashcardDb has a number of good standard features, such as the ability to edit a card, and easily move back to earlier cards with the left arrow even after they have been graded. The right arrow key or the “f” key will flip the card. In graded space repetition, the number keys will grade the card. Ending the session will show you a nice pie chart of one’s performance, but rather than merely showing you performance on cards you actually studied, it includes words due or “expired” which were not studied (while understandable, it might be better to merely show cards actually studied in the pie chart)

From an interface standpoint however, frequent readers of this weblog know I generally dislike applications that try too hard to emulate the physical experience of turning over a paper flashcard, especially if this comes at the sacrifice of performance or efficient use of space. In fact, while in this case this is a relatively minor point, I am hereby going to call this general problem the “Flip Fixation Flaw” and will elaborate on this point in a separate posting. In this specific case FlashcardDb sacrifices precious browser space to create two separate spaces for displaying card information: one for each side of the card next to each other horizontally on the page. More text can fit easily on the card (which it probably shouldn’t since cards should generally be kept simple) or more importantly a larger font can be displayed by maximizing this browser real estate and putting all card information in a single large canvas. I recommend that FlashcardDb and other flashcard sites forego the physical representation of a physical flashcard and focus on the maximum efficiency, speed, and clarity (for example, by distinguishing the front and back by means of colors, shading, or some other means). In the case of FlashcardDB, I think the horizontal approach is not the best for flashcards. Generally the content of flashcards will be wider than they are tall. A vertical format is therefore, I believe, better than a horizontal approach and putting the text of each side in the same general space rather than creating a visual image of a separate card is not necessary.

Wrapping Up

FlashcardDb offers interval study and data portability for free so it deserves serious consideration for those who need only two sided cards. While the design needs better discipline, the overall experience is pleasant. However, my feeling is that it has a lot of rough edges and areas needing improvement both in terms of interface, interval study implementation and a few minor surface design issues. Although it may be my current location (South Korea) I also felt the site was sometime on the slow side to load but again, this may not be a problem in North America. At any rate, FlashcardDb needs some lovin’ attention by its users and developer to address some of the quirks throughout the website. It has good potential but I’m concerned that, given the powerful competitors out there, it will be hard for FlashcardDb to stand out clearly on either the design or features front. On the one hand, there are very professional looking sites like Quizlet and Wordchamp that, whatever problems one might feel they have, at least feel like they have a disciplined team of web monkeys at work on the interface while there is also the sexy minimalistic and colorful approach taken by Cramberry all of which offer FlashcardDb a serious challenge on the design front. Sites like Flashcard Exchange, with its pedigree, user base, one of the highest card counts and iPhone/iPod deployment via Mental Case will attract many who can overlook the clunky feel of the site. Finally, the ability for Anki application users on OS X, Windows, and Linux to easily synch and review their cards online as well as via a browser based tool on the iPhone/iPod gives adopters of that solution and its web equivalent access to the full power of interval study. FlashcardDb does, in fact, do a fair job on all fronts, but doesn’t really feel like it has its own niche where it truly shines. The best thing I can recommend to the FlashcardDb developer is to find that niche and really go all the way with it.

1. In Firefox the home page did display the “Featured Card Set” and “Failed” in a strange position, not sure what is going on there.
2. Actually, the developer might consider adding such a donation button, surely every dollar counts to help with hosting costs and there is no shame in providing an easy way for loyal users to contribute.
3. This is, incidentally, the biggest reason why I think CVS is a really stupid format for flashcard sets that will very often contain commas and I wish all flashcard developers would support it only for import, exporting by default with other delimiters such as the simple tab.
4. There is some confusion in the field of interval study and spaced repetition applications. Sometimes the Leitner method is a general term for any kind of spaced repetition algorithm, but other times it specifically refers to a system which is roughly based on the idea of decks of cards spaced at increasing but static intervals.

Cramberry

Cramberry is like a beautiful little statue of a young cupid with cute little wings and a bow. It is pleasant to look at but it can’t do anything. The website has a beautiful clean design but almost no functionality so far.

However, Cramberry developers would be quick to point out they are still in the early stages of getting the project off the ground. Cramberry has its own twitter feed, its own blog, and a still very basic but promising $4 iPhone application, Flash-Me that connects directly with Cramberry.

Cramberry has a rating system built in for publicly available sets, which is probably better than the favorites count of Flashcard Exchange, and it offers a simple way to share sets between friends or make them publicly available.

Cards can be added quickly and easily with the use of the keyboard alone (pressing return after filling the back of the card saves the card and presents a new blank card). More advanced users can make use of its supported metalanguage textile to add formatting and images to the cards. This is a nice feature, but really not necessary now that there are great libraries for creating rich text input within webpages. Why force the user to memorize a metalanguage when you can provide buttons directly on the page for things like “bold” and “italic” etc.? Adding such buttons does clutter the interface but this is a case where functionality boost outweighs the decrease of a clean look (one could also simply add a link to “show/hide advanced editing tools”).

The website is clearly in its infancy and still has very far to go though before it can really be worthy of a full review but I hope to see it address some of these issues in future:

-Cramberry supports only two fields, which is very disappointing for students of Asian languages.

-Cramberry has No Support for Interval Study of any kind. The home page claims that “Cramberry records your progress on each card, and shows you cards you’re having trouble with more often, letting you study more effectively, faster.” which suggests that there is some kind of spaced repetition at work but users are left at the mercy of a “black box” approach without any inkling of how this process works. I hope the developers will describe there system in greater detail and offer ways of viewing the progress of individual words. It might be worth looking into some of the most powerful interval study implementations out there, such as those used in Anki, SuperMemo, or VTrain or simpler but clearly described ones such as those found in Flaschard Exchange with a simple static TTF schedule (See terms page).

-Cramberry has No Data Portability, cards cannot be downloaded in any format.

-Cramberry has almost no options for flashcard study and I can’t find any information on keyboard shortcuts.

-Cramberry seems to be connecting to Google Analytics between every card. Whatever else it might be doing, moving between cards is way too slow. There is a nice color coding of the sides of the card.

-There is no cycle elimination. The cards just continue to flip indefinitely. Basically this means it is guilty of the insatiability flaw.

-There are no statistics whatsoever.

-The website is beautiful but overly minimalist. Eliminating distractions when doing flashcard study is important, as I suggested when criticizing Flashcard Exchange, but surely someone on the design team could spare 15 minutes to put something on their help page other than “Contact us with your questions by twitter or email.” You can search for sets and show “more sets” but you have no way of going back through earlier pages in the search results, know how many total sets were found, etc.

-Many links are not universally available. The help link is not visible on the home page, the home page (which is the only page with any explanation of the site) is completely inaccessible to users who are logged in, etc.

I look forward to seeing Cramberry grow, but for now, I would recommend users consider other online and offline alternatives until it develops a basic feature set.

See also:

-My flashcard application Basics and explanation of Terms
-My introduction to online flashcard websites.

UPDATE: Cramberry posted an entry on their blog about the review. It is promising to see them acknowledging some of the issues and announcing some upcoming features on the site. Among them are a commitment to incorporating full interval study features, data portability, and statistics. I hope they will also strongly consider adding support for three fields, which is useful for students of many languages, especially Chinese and Japanese. Again, as I mentioned in the review, it is still an early stage for them so I look forward to revisiting the site and reviewing them when they follow through on some of their development goals.

Flashcard Exchange

Data Portability: None for free users. Export of flashcards allowed with one-time fee of $20 or for owners of the Mental Case iPhone application.
Interval Study: None for free users. Spaced repetition for premium users.
Fields: Normally 2. Three possible by using the hint field and a special option.

Flashcard Exchange is perhaps the most well known online library of flashcards and web site allowing the online review of such websites. I have watched this website grow through the years. It now dwarfs most of its competitors with the huge quantity of cards it offers in all languages.¹

This website started ugly and despite years of growth and change, it is still ain’t pretty. Interface elements like tabs float strangely out of place in my Firefox browser when clicked and the whole design of the site is full of color inconsistencies and poorly thought out placements. Searching for flashcards is handled via google and the interface feels a little like the web from the late 1990s. The huge size of its database, however, does keep people from dismissing it entirely, however. It also prevents a mass exodus of its users by offering No Data Portability for its free users. It also provides No Interval Study for its free users.

For premium users cards found on the site can be exported in a wide variety of formats and can be studied using interval study. Interval study provided by flashcard exchange is a basic static TTF (Time to Forget schedule, see my Terms page) which advances from a spacing of 4 days for words at stage 1 to 11 years for level 14. Incorrect words have their TTF reset. My feeling is that the intervals increase too quickly for only 14 stages and the site should at least offer users the option of tailoring the interval schedule to their own memories (iFlash for OS X offers this ability, and Mental Case and Anki offer similar). However the site is to be commended for being one of the earliest online sites to appreciate the power of spaced repetition.

Flashcard Exchange does support three sided cards via a special option, but in a bizarre way: the third side must be included in the “hint” field which is then included in the rotation of each card.

The flashcard study itself is fairly smooth and allows you to continue studying incorrect cards (cycle elimination) but the flash screen is distracting with all the content included the window. There are keyboard shortcuts for studying but they are chosen without any thought to convenience of location (i for correct, x for incorrect – these two keys should be next to eachother. Same for p for previous card and n for next card). I also found that clicking is only accepted on the words of the card itself, not everywhere on the card which led to a lot of missed clicks. Flashing was also somewhat slow and there is no differentiation between the sides so it can sometimes be unclear what side is being viewed without looking at the top right (color coded or shaded sides is a better method). Overall the flashcard interface is way too cluttered with options. Most of the page should be stripped away, or a full screen option be permitted.

Finally, although the use of the site is tempting given the millions of cards it is host to, I have found that the quality of these flashcard collection is often incredibly poor. This is inevitable, given the huge number of users contributing, but one should choose a web site based primarily on functionality, and only judge the number of flashcards the site hosts if one finds quality flashcards for the textbook or language one is studying, not based on the total aggregate number of cards a site hosts. The only way to get some indication of the quality of the cards without looking closely is to to compare the “favorite count” which is the number of people who added the set to their favorites. It might be more useful to offer a more traditional rating system instead.

Mental Case users on the iPhone get free download access to the flashcards without a premium account and can study their cards on their iPhone or iPod touch so one is no longer tied to the online web version. This was a fantastic move for Mental Case and a boon to its users since it gave it immediate access to a large database of cards.

Overall, however, the design of the website leaves much to be desired, it has a very basic and inflexible interval study feature provided only to premium users, and also provides export only to premium users so many students will want to look elsewhere for their online study home.

1. Flashcard Exchange is nearing 20 million cards, Quizlet.com claims over 24 million terms and close to half a million users

Data Portability

Many of these websites are either advertising or subscription driven, or are at least contemplating these sources of income in the future. The more content they come to host, and the more traffic they attract, the more costly it becomes to manage such sites in terms of bandwidth, hosting costs, and labor. If monetization becomes a potential goal then these websites usually come to realize that the flashcards that their users upload the website, or which they provide for their users themselves, are their biggest asset. There is often, thus, a clash between the needs and desires of those running the site on the one hand, and those who use it on the other.

Sites will be very tempted to prevent users from downloading flashcards in a format that can be easily migrated to an offline solution or another website. If users can download flaschards, especially without paying for these flashcards that, in many cases, were typed up and uploaded by other users of the site, then they are essentially giving away “their” assets for free. Sometimes they will use excuses like copyright, which is a ridiculous argument since most such websites allow you to share your uploaded sets (often typed up from copyrighted language textbooks) with other users and some allow it only if you have paid for special “premium” features.

As users it is in our interests to avoid such “closed” web sites in favor of “open” websites which allow you to easily download any flashcards you have access to through the site in a format convenient to you. In reviewing the websites, therefore, I will lay heavy emphasis on data portability.

Other Features

The other major things I look for in an online flashcard solutions beyond the above key issue of data portability are:

1. Interval Study – Does the site provide a solid spaced repetition study system?

2. Fields and Unicode – Does the site provide the ability to review cards with 3 sides useful for studying Asian languages? Does it use Unicode and support non-roman characters?

3. Does it provide a good range of statistics on your study.

4. Does the site make good use of Javascript and or Ajax technologies so that flashcards are loaded quickly and cleanly without the page repeatedly reloading.

5. Does the site provide an easy way to share your flashcards with everyone who visits the site and a way to share with only a few people or optionally, with no one?

I also am looking for other things that I have listed on my Basics page.

See also my Terms page and Issues page.

Most flashcard developers realize however, that this approach has a certain disadvantage to it based upon a necessary assumption the developer makes about the user. Either the developer assumes the user is only interested in studying a card in one given direction (e.g. Russian to English) or they assume that one’s performance in either direction is roughly equivalent (if I know it in one direction Russian to English, then I probably know it in the other direction, English to Russian, roughly as well). This is, of course, rarely the case.¹ While some language learners are primarily interested in studying in one direction, most will want to have both passive recognition and active recall of a vocabulary word, being both able to immediately recognize its meaning when read, but also recall the word when thinking of the word in one’s own native language.

Most flashcard applications allow you to control the direction of study or reverse it. iFlash (review upcoming) allows you to reorder the two or three or more sides of a card shown or even randomize the direction of cards but in interval study it records performance for all directions together. Mental Case (see my review) allows you to designate the “note reversibility” for a card, and can thus prompt you in multiple directions for a card, but again this information is not recorded independently.

There are a number of methods for confronting this problem but the most elegant approach I have seen so far is taken by the most advanced software applications such as Anki (see my earlier review) and I believe that other flashcard developers would do well to consider emulating the approach.

Anki has chosen for its the fundamental unit of knowledge a ‘fact’ which consists of, for example, a word and its definition, and in the case of three sided Asian language cards, its pronunciation. The difference between this and the card approach is that a fact that a fact can be a mother to two or three cards each with their own intervals and directions. Anki stores the fundamental ‘fact’ information independently of the users performance in the application and when you enter information for the ‘fact’ the application can be configured to automatically add two or three cards associated with that card in the various directions that the user wants to study.

For example, if I’m studying Japanese or Chinese, I may want to be able to record, independently, my performance across time in interval study in all three of the following directions: 1) be shown the English and then guess the Kanji/Hanzi characters as well as their pronunciation (and tones in the case of Chinese) 2) be shown the pronunciation (and tones) and be able to guess the characters and meaning in English and 3) be shown the Kanji/Hanzi character and be able to guess the pronunciation and English meaning. In most cases I think learners of Chinese and Japanese will at least want to review in directions (1) and (3) so advanced flashcard applications like Anki allow you to automatically create cards to that effect when the facts have been inputted. These cards then progress along their own interval study schedule as you review them.

Because, however, Anki maintains a relationship between cards and facts, when the content of the original fact is changed, so too is the content of any cards associated with the fact. This is a big advantage over other applications which might be tempted to simply let the user create duplicate cards in other directions. In another advanced interval study focused application Memosyne (see my review), for example, you can create “Vice versa” cards which then tracks the performance on the reversed card separately. However, if you then go and correct or edit a card, it will not correct the corresponding reversed card. Anki does not suffer from this problem.

Given this fact to card relationship, however, it means there is a significant separation between applications which acknowledge the relationship and those which don’t which impacts the full exchangeability of data between them. If you export data from Anki you get cards, without the preserved link between cards that are born of the same fact.

I hope that flashcard application developers reflect on the benefits of this approach and the power it gives to users in maintaining large collections of flashcards that need to be memorized in multiple directions. Implementation of this kind of feature likely requires adding a layer of complexity to the way that the data is maintained, but I have become convinced that the advantages are truly significant, especially for those who want to engage in long-term study.

1. Though I do find that active mastery of a word, going from, say English to Russian, makes it far more likely that you know the reverse.

Chinese Flashcards is an iPhone/iPod application created by the developers at ChineseLearnOnline.com. The interface is extremely straightforward and simple, allowing students of Chinese to review some 2700 most frequently used Chinese characters in either their simplified or traditional form going from the character to its English approximate meaning and pinyin with tone marks. The application provides a graded slideshow broken into fairly compact rounds of study called “sessions” which are components of the whole study environment called a “test.”

Performance in each session is fed into a form of interval study that prompts the user at a later point to review words mistaken. Users can begin any given session again or erase all interval study data and start the “test” again from scratch.

Application Name: Chinese Flashcards
iTunes Application Link: Chinese Flashcards
Version Reviewed: 1.00
Software License: Commercial (about $5)
Review Date: 2009.02.15
OS Tested: iPod Touch 2.2

Note: This review is from the perspective of language learners, and especially those who will be engaged in high-volume and long-term study of vocabulary. See the Terms page for an explanation of the technical terms used in these reviews. See the Basics page for a list of basic features found in flashcard applications useful to language learners.

The website for the application has a very nicely written, complete with images, description of the features of the application which I recommend looking at. Beginning students of Chinese may also want to see the newest application they are offering which focuses on vocabulary rather than individual characters.

The application has one extremely frustrating aspect that I hope will be rectified in future releases: it has extremely slow transitions between cards and card sides. The time taken to produce animation for removing the visual tab covering up the answer and flipping the card is much longer than it takes for users to recognize and offer feedback on already known characters. Some visitors to this site have said they disagree with my complaints about this frequent problem in Mac and iPhone/iPod applications but I think it is a very serious problem for high-volume students and the feature should at least be optional. In my estimates with this application, the time taken to animate the removal of the tab and flip the Chinese character card triples the total study time for 25 already confidently known cards. Given 10-20 minutes of study per day, over a month or several months, this translates into very severe waste of study time lost to viewing animations. This is worse than the lost time I have seen in any other flashcard application on the iPhone/iPod so far. Given most students of language engaging in flashcard study will want to maximize the efficiency of their daily review, this UI problem is crippling and needs to be addressed before it can be recommended for serious students of Chinese.

On the good side, this is one of few applications which recognizes the needs of many students who wish to learn the traditional forms of characters who are studying in Taiwan, or who, for other reasons, wish to master the traditional forms. It also allows students to skip characters and leave them out completely from the loop (but it would be nice to offer the ability to selectively reintroduce them if necessary without restarting the “test” completely).

Although this language targeted flashcard application is priced reasonably for one that includes both content and a form of interval study, it can benefit from some improvements in future versions, in addition to resolving the above critical UI problem:

-Users are left completely in the dark about their interval study performance or about how interval study is carried out on the application, let alone giving them some control over the process. They have no way to tell how far any given card has progressed in the interval study process, or an overview of their study except for a basic summary of a session. This application really could benefit from adopting at least some of my recommendations related to statistics in interval study applications. If you are a user of this application, consider requesting some of these features from the developers.

-While this application has interval study to a certain degree, it suffers from a classic case of The Cookie Monster Flaw. It considers all characters that have been correctly reviewed 4 times as “memorized.” Hopefully this will be addressed in future updates and a more thorough interval study spaced interval system will be implemented that keeps in mind that nothing lives in memory forever.

-The 2700 most frequent characters said to make up about 95% of the characters used in newspapers. But 95% is not as good as it sounds. We think of this as an “A” or even an “A+” but it translates into, by my estimate (confirmed by my own experience over the years), around 10-20 Chinese characters per average page of a Chinese book that are not recognized. Perhaps half of these can probably be inferred from context, that still often results in more than half a dozen characters that need to be looked up, or simply ignored. I would recommend serious students of Chinese to use applications that provide a set of 3500 (or more) Chinese characters.

-Since the application already nicely provides smaller sessions of cards, it would be best if a form of cycle elimination was provided before sending these cards into the distant interval study future. This can dramatically help student performance in the future and prevents them from having to manually start a session over.

If the slow visuals are made optional, the cookie monster flaw is resolved, cycle elimination introduced, and some useful statistics for users are included, this could be a major contender in the flashcard market for students of Chinese wanting to master 2700 characters.

My review below points out many strengths of this application but also points out some issues with the flashcard interface which will frustrate high-volume students, as well as some of the limits of interval study which will concern long-term students.

Application Name: iFlipr
iTunes Application Link: iCards
Version Reviewed: 1.14
Software License: Commercial (about $5)
Review Date: 2009.01.29
OS Tested: iPod Touch 2.2

Note: This review is from the perspective of language learners, and especially those who will be engaged in high-volume and long-term study of vocabulary. See the Terms page for an explanation of the technical terms used in these reviews. See the Basics page for a list of basic features found in flashcard applications useful to language learners.

The iFlipr iPhone/iPod application is complemented with an online flashcard database at iFlipr.com where, with a free account, users can download shared sets (much like StudyStack, iFlash Deck Library, Flashcard Exchange, and other similar services), create and share their own sets, and freely export sets in the CSV format. However, it might be more accurate to say that the website is complemented with an iPhone/iPod application…

A Flashcard Library Browser?

iFlipr is best described as a “client” of the web page, focused on providing an environment in which a user can download cards and practice them on their iPhone/iPod. This approach has some strengths but also may produce frustrations for and ultimately be too limited for the high-volume long-term student of language. With one exception (ironically the “Downloads” pane) all the panes within the application involve interaction with the website and require an internet connection. That means the very UI of the application is deigned with the online interactivity chosen as the primary focus of the user experience within the application. Instead, I believe it would serve the users better, and serve iFlipr’s chances in future competition with other similar applications, if it focused on the study experience itself, which does not require online connectivity.

The “Featured” pane shows you a selection of high quality sets found on the iFlipr online service. The “Recents” pane shows you recently shared sets, the majority of which I found to be of very mixed quality. The lack of a rating system, at least for the time being means that one faces something of a jungle in wading through the online offerings. The third “Search” pane allows you to search for sets to download, while the “More” pane uses a built in browser to load the iFlipr website and provide access to most of its features. These include the ability to create decks, using a somewhat more basic (compared to the excellent desktop browser experience provided by the website), but still solid input interface.

Only the “Downloads” tab is an offline component of the application, listing downloaded sets and allowing you to move into study mode.

The advantage to this approach is easily apparent for any new user to the application. They can easily find and download sets in their field of interest through the excellent interface. They can also, if they have an internet connection, quickly create new sets, or download sets they have created online via the desktop.

However, once you have your flashcard files in the application, however, all of these features become superfluous. Once you have purchased your furniture, you don’t need a whole furniture store camped out in one’s living room, as it were.

I would recommend a complete redesign of the user interface to focus on the study experience. Combine all the online interactivity into one pane of the application. Let users enter that “Online” pane and access all the above mentioned areas such as featured, recent, etc. sets and the ability to interface with the website through the mobile client. That will free up all of these other buttons for greater offline functionality to address some of the problems and missing features mentioned below.

In my interaction with the developer, we seem to have similar views on these issues, and the origins of design of the application are clearer to me after learning that this dates back to the application’s pre-SDK development as a web-based application for the iPhone. I understand that the application is still in a transitional stage and I look forward to seeing how it will change.

Creating and Editing Sets

While it can be done either on the desktop or through the built in browser on the mobile iFlipr client, sets can only be created with an internet connection and, it should be remembered, a functioning iFlipr server. On at least one past occasion, the iFlipr has had connectivity issues, which reminds us that when we become dependent on web services, our data is in the hands of a service provider. In this case it is not a major corporation with dedicated server monitors but a free and well-designed service in the hands of a, for the time being at least, an engaged developer.

One major problem for students of Asian languages or who wish to keep verb conjugation information, etc. in a separate field is that, like Mental Case, iFlipr only supports two fields. Those students will probably want to consider other options like the upcoming iFlash Touch, iAnki, iCards, or other offerings that support three fields or more.

For those who can do with only two fields, however, the browser based set creation is, however, beautifully done. A full WYSIWYG editor is provided in the web based editor which allows you to do a great deal of customization of colors, fonts, sizes, and other formatting.

These translate beautifully once downloaded to iFlipr, putting most competitors to complete shame in this area. You may also add sound and images to your cards. What’s more, through the “Settings” tab, one can customize the font and size displayed on the iPhone and the font sizes are done relative to the size indicated through the set creation editor online.

The built in browser in iFlipr also allows you to create sets, but without the rich editor, which is a wise decision. In both cases, however, it is extremely easy to move to the next card. Like the desktop iFlash application, you can simply tab between fields and it will automatically create new cards when necessary. This is in contrast with the awkward Command-N or Command-Return shortcuts required in Mental Case or Anki desktop clients. Creating, editing, and deleting cards is simply a delight in iFlipr. Its dependence on being online for the creation process, however, will be a problem for students who, and I speak from long years of field experience here, find themselves in a grimy dormitory room or hole-in-the-wall cafe in some foreign country without a (or with a very slow) internet connection and want to type up their vocabulary.

There is no way to organize or move cards between or into multiple sets (decks) though the developer has indicated on the Facebook group for the application that groups and folders are in development. There isn’t even, in fact, any easy way to get an overview of what cards are in a set unless one is editing the set through the web page interface. There should, at least, be a way to get a quick list overview of what cards are inside.

Flashcard Study

The heart of any flashcard application is its flashcard study. For the high-volume long-term student even the smallest issues here can be enough to give an elaborately designed application the toss.

There are some aspects about flashcard study that I hope the developer will give serious consideration too. Flashcard study should be fast, clean, and go easy on the hands. Many of us will be studying a hundred or more cards a day so every little moment and movement counts.

The first problem is the positioning of the buttons. Like many developers to the iPhone/iPod who treat the environment much as it was a desktop environment, they forget that thumb location is key to placement of UI objects. In this case, the very bottom of the screen is the worst location. One must stretch one’s thumb when holding the device with one hand and this repeated motion (over a hundred times, for example) will eventually lead to serious strain. The thumb can reach the upper half of the screen with much greater ease. As I have said in other reviews, the Lima Sky Kanji application approach is good: make the whole card touchable, immediately flipping upon a single tap almost anywhere on the screen. Also, I recommend making a second tap mark the card correct (instead of having to aim one’s thumb at a small check mark) while keeping the “wrong” button as a separate button. As long-term students know, a higher and higher percentage of one’s cards will be marked correct if daily study continues so it should be the default (or easier) choice.

Fortunately, iFlipr does not make the mistake Mental Case does: when marking a card correct or incorrect, it immediately moves to the next card. Well, not actually immediately. There is a slow visual flip animation which ensues. Like I have said in reviewing other applications with this problem, “It was cute the first few times…” but after a few hundred flips it becomes akin to having your computer issue a, once hilarious, barf noise when ejecting a floppy disk (if anyone remembers that craze). This same problem is found in iCards, Mental Case, and some other iPhone/iPod based programs. This seriously slows down flashcard study for high-volume students. At least offer the option of turning these transitions off.

It is also not immediately obvious (until the content is read) what side of a card one is looking at. Mental Case offers a very nice feature of showing a slightly different background shade for each different side. iFlash Touch (at least the current beta version) shows the field name in barely visible text in one corner. Either of these methods, but preferably the first, gives the user immediate visual feedback on what side they are on. This may not seem like a big deal, since one should be able to tell from the text quite quickly what side one is looking at but it can definitely make the study experience more pleasant.

A number of settings are available during flashcard study. Here one can “Reset Mastery Levels,” choose between the graded slideshow and multiple choice approaches to flashcards, of which the former is much better for serious students. They can also choose the order for displaying fields, and whether to use the interval study (Leitner) method or a simple first to last order. It would be best to offer a setting here, perhaps on this very same option, to show the cards simply shuffled. The font and font size percentage (relative to the size set when the card was created) can also be set here in the settings.

This settings window, including the “Keep Practicing” and “Done Practicing” buttons has a very web pagey feel to it, instead of that of an iPhone application but regular buttons. The UI might be improved in future by using more native iPhone controls and following the consistent look of other iPhone applications here.

Also, these settings, might better be placed in the settings for a given set, rather than all crammed in settings available only during actual study. These and many other features, such as more statistics, set management, and various other features that might be added later are good candidates for replacing the currently heavy web-interactivity nature of the panes in the home screen of the application.

Cycle elimination exists only to the extent it is part of the interval study process. Like Kanji Flip, the interval study approach is continuous. One never “completes a round.” In order to give users a degree of in-progress feedback on newly studied material, generally I feel it is best to provide a “debriefing” screen after all newly introduced cards have been introduced showing the user, at the completion of a round, how well they performed in the round, before continuing to remove correct cards from the stack. Anki provides this when scheduled cards are completed. There are ways of doing this right without a traditional cycle elimination, but it depends on the effectiveness of the interval study features. Let us take a look at this in our consideration of interval study in the application.

Interval Study

iFlipr immediately puts itself in the running with the more powerful applications when it chose to incorporate interval study, the availability of which is apparent when one opens the “Settings” and sees the “Leitner” method of flashing there by default.

You can see that interval statistics of a sort are being compiled through the “Card Mastery” number. This increases each time you get a word correct and resets to zero when you get it incorrect. I think reseting the word mastery is a suitable brutal punishment for the forgetful and can probably serve well in most circumstances. However, my personal experience over the years of my own interval study suggests that words that have reached any level higher than 4 or 5 that one gets wrong after many weeks or months without being prompted to review it, recover very quickly and once they have recovered don’t need to be reviewed as frequently as a fresh card at a mastery of 0-3. I thus think an optimal system is one which drops the mastery level by some number (or provides such an option) perhaps arbitrarily set by the user according to their own needs (with a default of a drop of 2 or 1 point of mastery).

The “Deck Mastery” number, which shows the lowest mastery of any card among those in a set is not a useful number and I would recommend replacing it with a more useful statistic (See the stats section of my Basics page for some possible replacements). Words are not all created equal. Not only do we find some more difficult to memorize than others, we also unconsciously prioritize all words we learn according to how useful we deem them to be. The only exception to this is in preparation for a vocabulary examination in which the probability of a given word being tested is equal to that of all other words on a vocab list but the many language programs I have gone through suggests that students quickly learn that this is usually not the case. If my set contains 100 Chinese legal terms, for example, and I have real difficulty in remembering 2 very obscure contract terms that I’ll probably never have any use for, Knowing how well I know (on average, for example) the other 98 of them is far more useful than how much I suck on two words I’ll never use but am too lazy to delete from the list.

The actual algorithm being used is not transparent to the user or even posted on the web page. Interval Study in software applications has been around since Piotr Wozniak designed SuperMemo for DOS in 1987 and I designed Flashcard Wizard for Mac OS 9 in 1999. The maturity of this approach, which all the most powerful applications now include, is such that developers could benefit from exposing their algorithms (at least in general terms) for advanced users of flashcard study to help guide them in their purchasing decisions.

The iFlipr developer Joseph Kumph is, however, open about it and was kind enough to explain to me how it is done in the case of iFlipr:

The algorithm is fairly simple: cards in the deck are broken up into different groups based on their card mastery level, and one of these groups is choosen based on an exponential decay function coupled with a random number generator. Specifically, the cards with the lowest card mastery are the most likely to be choosen. There is also a “ghost” pile, where a card goes immediately after it is marked incorrect, and kept there for about 30 seconds, to make sure the cards are not shown again too quickly.

There are a number of good elements at work here. The use of a “ghost” pile is an excellent advanced feature that will be familiar to Anki and Mnemosyne users. The iFlipr approach also guarantees that for large sets of cards, a user will be more likely to be prompted with unfamiliar words before more well-known ones. However, iFlipr has a very serious case of the Insatibility Flaw since it continually drags out words which are not on the verge of forgetting. I hope that the developer will revisit his interval study approach and develop an algorithm which focuses as much as possible on only prompting those words in need of review (with an optional study on demand feature for crammers).

It doesn’t seem that, as in the case with synching iAnki, Mental Case, or some other powerful iPhone applications, that interval study data is synched with the server. That means if you practice your flashcards directly through the web interface, this study has no connection to whatever progress has been made on the mobile client. Given the tight integration between the mobile iFlipr client and the web page, I find this somewhat unusual.

Other Comments

There are a few UI issues with iFlipr which may be easy to fix. Much of the application feels more like a web page than a native iPhone/iPod application. Double clicking (by mistake) ends up slightly zooming the “page” which shouldn’t happen. The panes should be solid and stick in place, but instead one can often accidently “drag” the page out of position or find it out of position when a new dialog set of options appear:

These are very minor UI problems I think can be addressed without too much difficulty.

It is fantastic that data is completely portable in iFlipr, through its online interface. There is excellent import for CSV and tab-delimited data and it will also export CSV data (without formatting data, except for   for carriage returns).

The support page for the application is essentially through Facebook. Here the Wall shows that the application has some very enthusiastic fans. However, though facebook is popular, contrary to common perception, not everyone on the world is on the site yet. I would recommend providing some support interface or forum outside the environment of Facebook.

Fool’s Final Words

iFlipr is a clean and strong contender in the iPhone/iPod flashcard application market. The web interface is clean, simple, but powerful, and provides an easy way to download one’s data. However, there is too much dependence on the web interface and the client ought best gather the web interactivity options in one place to allow for gradual expansion of other useful features, especially in the realm of set management, study statistics, and so on.

As explained above, biggest issue for long-term students of the application is the Insatiability Flaw in its interval study approach. The biggest problem for high-volume students is the UI of the flashcard study itself. I thus suggest further refinements in the algorithm to eradicate this problem, and possibly provide filters for truant users to easily return to study while prioritizing words with certain tags or at certain interval stages.

The slow visual flip transition is cute the first few times but slows high-volume study significantly. I have also not tested performance of the application with the high-volume sets (3000-8000 words) that students in intensive language programs will want to subject their software to. I was not comforted by suggestions on the support page to keep it to 100 words per set. The lack of full touch-ability for the card and the hard to reach buttons in the bottom of the screen should be given a second luck in future releases.

Finally, support for only two fields will mean that students of Chinese, Japanese, etc. will want to look elsewhere for a more flexibility three+ field solution.

There are some real gems in this application, however. With some improvements here and there to address the issues above, I feel like this application could easily catapult itself to the top of the pack.

Import: Tab-delimited and CSV.
Export: CSV.
Non-Roman Scripts: No problem
Modes of Study: Graded Slideshow
Media and Frills: Images and Sound.

Entry Creation: Excellent if two fields are enough.
Entry Editing: Excellent
Set Organization: None.
Flashcard Study: Poor UI, slow
Interval Study: Fair, Insatiability Flaw
Formatting: Excellent
Design and Feel: Fair, could use some improvements
Statistics: Poor

Golden Coxcombs: 6/10 but with great potential…

The insatiability flaw is exhibited by flashcard applications which provide no pause or “completion” during the course of interval study in such a way that recognizes that some cards are not currently in need of review. It is problematic because it provides users with no way to efficiently manage their time by endlessly prompting them to review cards which the student is not likely to be on the verge of forgetting. Obviously, they can and should be continually prompted if there are indeed words that are untested or which are due for review, but otherwise, the application shouldn’t drag out cards that need not be reviewed for weeks or months (Though they should provide a way for users truly eager to continue reviewing, or offer a comprehensive study on demand feature).

Students turn to flashcards because they believe their study is a useful and efficient form of study. Most of them recognize that, when it comes to vocabulary acquisition and maintenance for example, it is an inferior method when compared to the frequent and sustained production and practice of a language in an organic communication setting. However, given that we do not always find ourself in such a setting, or find the range of our communication more limited than that needed for reaching and preserving our desired level of proficiency, flashcard study is an imperfect but helpful alternative.

However, given that our time is a limited resource and we may be engaged in flashcard study of multiple languages or sets of knowledge units generally defined, flashcard applications which are “insatiable” in their appetite to prompt us to review words give us no indication of when we have completely reviewed all words we are on the verge of forgetting.

The best way for a developer to think about this when designing their application is to remember that while it is crucial that the developer avoid the more serious Cookie Monster Flaw they should also keep this principle in mind:

An interval study system nears perfection the further it approaches an environment which only prompts a student to review those units of knowledge they are on the verge of forgetting.

If there is some advanced algorithm included which takes into account the user’s truancy it may want to provide early prompting of words that are not quite yet on the verge, but only based on some statistically guided expectation of future truancy of the user.