In this posting I offer some more comments on the desktop version of Mental Case for OS X following up on my review of the iPhone/iPod version of the application yesterday and an earlier review of Mental Case 1.2.2.

The desktop version of Mental Case is now strengthened by the ability to synch with its mobile counterpart, reviewed yesterday, but as I pointed out in that review, synch is slow and complicated to carry out. Like its mobile counterpart the desktop version has made some UI decisions, especially in the important flashcard arena, which make it frustrating to use for high-volume study. However, this remains one of the leading applications in its class. The price for the application has come down significantly and there is a further deep and welcome discount for educational users making this application good value for its feature set.Note: This review is primarily from the perspective of language learners. 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.

This is only a review update. See the full original review for more.

Application Name: Mental Case
Version Reviewed: 1.4.3
Software License: Commercial ($25, $15 for educational license)
Review Date: 2009.01.28
OS Tested: OS X 10.5.6

Note: Some things mentioned or discussed here may have been present in the earlier version and I simply failed to notice or comment upon them at the time.

A number of things I pointed out in my original review have been changed for the better. 1) You can edit cards directly in the case overview, without going into the modal edit mode, by double clicking the entries. 2) The price is much lower, offering much greater value, especially for students. I think it is now perfectly priced for the target market relative to the competition. 3) There is a form of cycle elimination now, wherein cards studied in a case and the lesson will continually repeat if they have been marked incorrect. This could be further improved if, at the completion of all cards, you were presented with come visual feedback that announced correct completion of all cards, preferably with some statistics on the study session. A kind of debriefing card, as it were. This gives the user a satisfying feeling of completion. Without such a debriefing card, one feels like you have completed the most difficult level of a computer game, but are given no victory screen.

An improvement in this version which addresses a problem I discussed in the interval study portion of my review of Mental Case is that users can now select from a number of behaviors for entries marked incorrect during lesson study.

It would still be nice to allow users to create their own Lesson spacing algorithm and I hope a future version will include this ability.

Just a few more areas where further improvements could be made in future releases:

Flashcard Study

-Given the attention spent by the developer on the UI, I continue to be surprised there is no full screen option and way to format the display of flashcards. There is a full screen theme but it doesn’t cover the screen fully. The developer notes that he wants to leave space for the controls, but these can surely overlap the background of the card. As it is, all my other applications in the background and my desktop background are still distractingly visible. There should be an option for a solid and full screen background. Also, from a language student perspective, we are mostly dealing with cards with text that we would like to see big and clear on the screen so the current smaller text is a waste of screen space.

-I have the same complaint about flashcard study on the desktop that I had on the mobile edition (See that review for the developers own take on this), that is, I feel it should be possible to immediately move to the next card (or show the reverse side) when the card is clicked, or when the card is marked correct or incorrect. Mental Case started with an image of flashcard study as a more passive slideshow experience, I believe, but for high-volume study by language students, it would be best to provide at least the option of being able to quickly mark a word “known” or “unknown” and have it immediately present the next thing.

-Students of Asian languages or who wish to include conjugation information etc. in a separate and distinct field still will not find Mental Case compelling, given the fact it still only supports two fields.

Other Issues

-I have already mentioned in my review of the mobile edition that synching is not a pleasant experience, even though we should celebrate the accomplishment of adding this powerful feature. I hope this will improve in future versions.

-I want to say again, as I mentioned in my full review of the application, the pie chart approach to interval study, which allows users to “complete” an interval schedule for cards and completely “memorize” a word goes against a very basic principle of long-term interval study that other developers, such as Andre Khromov (whose Kanji Flip iPhone/iPod application I recently reviewed) have understood well: For all practical purposes one never permanently memorize a word. It should never completely exit the interval study environment even if, in reality, we will probably remember a word for many years without forgetting it. In fact, and I speak from plentiful personal experience here, even native speakers forget their own language after a long enough period of disuse. Mental Case would do well to rethink their interval study approach to make it accord with this fundamental principle of perpetual learning.

-I have been doing more tests with the sorts of large sets that high-volume students will need to work with, containing 500, 1000, or cases up to 8000 cards (Which is appoximately the amount of vocabulary the average student will learn in a one-year advanced intensive language program such as IUC in Japan, IUP in China, or ICLP in Taiwan, etc.). What I found is that Mental Case is extremely slow, in comparison to competitors such as iFlash and even the cross-platform application Anki, in handling such large sets. In comparison to the fragment of a second or 1-2 seconds of its competitors, sometimes Mental Case will present a spinning wheel for long periods of time, even 7-10 minutes in some cases.

Some examples:

-Case of 2500 Chinese characters, select all, right click and choose “Restart Lesson Schedule” – took over 7 minutes. (same task less than 1 second in iFlash for example)
-Moving 200 words from one case to another took 4 seconds (should be almost immediate!)
-Changing the interval schedule of a case in one case took 1 minute, in another case over 5 minutes for the same number of cards.
-Moving 1000 words from a case to the trash took over 2 minutes, in another case, the application hung for 5 minutes.
-In a separate case deleting a whole case of 2500 Chinese words (thus moving its contents into the trash) took 12 seconds.

As you can see speeds were not consistent, sometimes it happened faster. In all these cases I was dealing with two side cards with no images or sound. I don’t know if adding images and sound makes this even worse. Drew McCormack, argues that he is much at the mercy of Apple’s Core Data framework for performance issues, but I find it hard to believe that there are not ways to further optimize performance. I can’t fully recommend this application for high-volume students who will be adding and managing large sets to the application until this performance is significantly improved.

Below is a review of the iPhone and iPod Touch client that Mental Case has released. The review concludes that, with the exception of highly targeted applications such as Kanji Flip and other Andre Khromov applications, Mental Case for iPhone and iPod is currently one of the strongest offering for interval study on the mobile platform but hopes that certain refinements in the flashcard UI and Wi-fi synching features with the desktop will be made in future releases.Note: This review is primarily from the perspective of language learners. 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.

Mental Case for iPhone and iPod Touch

Application Name: Flashcard Exchange presents Mental Case
iTunes Application Store Link: Mental Case
Version Reviewed: 2.0.3
Software License: Commercial (about $8, about $5 on sale)
Review Date: 2009.01.27
OS Tested: iPod Touch 2.2

Please read my earlier Mental Case review for information about the general approach of this application and more on the OS X desktop client of this flashcard application. Without that background some of the review below may be a bit bewildering as it assumes some familiarity with the desktop application.

The mobile edition of Mental Case offers five tabs which we will consider separately. The application is often slow to start up, but generally loads in between 4-8 seconds of waiting.

The “Cases” tab offers a location where one can add/edit/delete sets (Cases) and add/edit/delete cards. You cannot, however, indicate here that you want to schedule (or edit the schedule) a given case in the “Lesson” (which is the interval study component of the application). This can only be modified on the desktop client. This is frustrating when one has downloaded a new set from the Flashcard Exchange service provided and want to immediately begin studying on the road. The view tells you when the card was last studied, but not any other information about its interval stage, which is puzzling. Overall, however, the editing interface is a pleasure to work with and very well designed.

Through the “Study” tab, one may begin flashcard study. Select the case or the lesson button to begin studying the cards in it, conveniently shown with the total number of cards available to the right. This dives directly into flashcard study which is discussed below. You may also, in this panel, indicate that you wish to reverse the sides of the cards, and/or shuffle the slides being studied.

A third panel offers powerful access to the huge online flashcard database “Flashcard Exchange.” While the online service usually requires a paid subscription, owners of Mental Case may download sets from the service for free. Unfortunately, downloaded sets are not included in the lesson by default and one must synch these cards to the desktop client to set up interval study for the downloaded cards. Flashcard Exchange offers perhaps the largest collection of downloadable flashcard sets online and though the cards are of mixed quality (we will consider this online service directly in a separate review at some later point) the inclusion of this feature is an impressive achievement, goes a long way in helping Mental Case compete with the Deck Library of iFlash, the Pre-made decks of Anki, and the Study Stack integration of gFlashPro.

What are you Synching About?

The fourth “Synch” tab puts the application into a waiting mode where it is ready to receive a synch command from the desktop client. It is very hard to get synch right on iPhones and iPod Touches so first I should say that it is excellent that Mental Case includes the synching feature at all. However, it would be much nicer if the whole synching process was much less convoluted. The developer could arrange automatic synching from the portable device or allow the user to simply open the synch tab and press “Synch” with the actual synch content being determined by a set of preferences on either the device or the desktop client. Instead, the synch process is an extremely slow and sometimes nightmarish, ambiguous, and convoluted process: 1) Go to the synch tab on your iPhone or iPod Touch 2) On the desktop client choose “Synch with iPhone/iPod Touch…” from the File menu (there is no keyboard shortcut, which is annoying if one is to do this every day) 3) A synch window appears with the device name, and three options below including “copy new notes and cases to my Mac,” “Remove notes and cases removed” and “Update notes that were edited” on the iPhone/iPod Touch. However, even after choosing among these options, you are then asked to 4) Select from cases you wish to transfer between the iPhone and iPod touch.

This approach to synch is far too convoluted, time consuming, and does not even speak to the incredible time consuming process of the synch itself, which in my experience crashed occasionally and resulted in duplicate cases or interval study data not getting transferred properly. This is not Mac simplicity at work. Also despite the fact I dealt with no images or sounds, synching a set containing a few hundred cards took far longer than one might suspect, certainly longer than the transmission to the iPod touch of several dozen content filled emails contained in the notes of to-do items being transferred by the GTD application OmniFocus, for example.

However, the basic architecture is in place, and if the user interface experience of the synch is completely rewritten to focus on both the speed and a better user experience, this could be a powerful and useful feature used by long-term students of language. One might start by moving all the options to a preferences pane, or perhaps, if I have downloaded a new case from flashcard exchange on the iPod/iPhone or made a new one myself, Mental Case ought to be smart enough to ask me, “You appear to have a new case on the iPod, do you wish to transfer it to the desktop and include it in future synchs?” Whatever the approach, it must be more intuitive and simple to use than the current one. The issue of the slow transfer speed is perhaps the harder challenge to face but is part of a general slowness of the desktop Mental Case application that I will mention in an update to my review.

Help

Finally, a “Help” pane in the mobile application provides a number of web links to help. It is nice to provide these links, which some iPhone flashcard applications such as Lexicon, StudyCards, leave out altogether, but, unlike the online but in-application help offerings of gFlashPro one is kicked out of the Mental Case application to Safari. Also, like gFlashPro’s help offerings it is only accessible with an internet connection. This contrasts poorly with the excellent in-application help of Kanji Flip and other Andre Khromov applications which serves an excellent model to other developers. These help files can be small and there is no reason not to embed them in the application.

Flashcard Study on the iPhone/iPod Touch

Mental Case gives you a nice clean graded slideshow flashcard experience. Studying from the “Lesson” uses the interval study approach found in the desktop, but, unfortunately, the lack of any way to view interval study statistics on the mobile client leaves the user somewhat in the dark until they synch with their desktop. Flashcards can be beautifully shown in landscape or portrait modes and the font is large and clean. Formatting of the font and size can be done in the settings of the application accessible in the general settings of one’s iPhone or iPod Touch (there is greater control over card formatting on the mobile edition than on the desktop client!). One nice feature is that the background of the card can be slightly different in color so that one recognizes what side of the card one is looking at immediately. This is a wonderful approach that other flashcard developers might consider.

It is absolutely essential to get the flashcard environment right, however, since this is where the user will spend the vast majority of their time when studying. I quickly found myself frustrated and annoyed by the flashcard graded slideshow of the application and I don’t think I could tolerate using the application in the long term for two reasons:

1) Like a number of other iPhone/iPod flashcard applications such as StudyCards and Lexicon, the transitions are way too slow. The flip takes way too much time and the slide is also slow. One can marvel in the beauty of the visual effect the first few times, but after a few hundred flips and swipes it gets really annoying. There needs to be a way to turn these annoying transitions off. The time it takes really adds up over time and it is a very noticeable contrast with the lightning speed of the swipes of Lima Sky’s Kanji, and the immediate transitions of Kanji Flip.

2) When I mark a given word correct or incorrect in Mental Case, I must sit and continue to stare at the card until Mental Case has “timed out” for a card and either flips or moves to the next card. Mental Case thinks it knows what is good for me. When I tell it I don’t know a word or that I know a word, it takes its sweet time. This was so annoying I immediately abandoned use of the application. I want to be in charge and I want flashcard applications to do my bidding. My feeling is that if I’m too stupid to give a card its due consideration, that is my problem. The default behavior (or at least an option should be provided) should be that marking a card correct/incorrect either a) shows the answer or b) moves to the next card immediately depending on context. However, I don’t know if the developer will be changing this any time soon since we have agreed to disagree on this issue. The developer, Drew McCormack, who is always willing to hear from users about ways to improve the application stands form on this issue and defends his approach with this explanation:

We thought about this a lot when we did it. Should the card stay on the screen. We concluded that it should: for a start, you may know immediately it is wrong, but want to study/think about it before going on. Also, what if you mark it wrong, and then rethink, and decide that actually you knew it well enough. There is a value judgement there, and the user should have a chance to back out (undo). So I like the way Mental Case does it, and dislike the approach of other apps.

I hope that the developer will reconsider. In fact, I would recommend that most flashcard applications consider the following approach, which in over a decade of studying four languages with flashcard software, I strongly believe to be the most efficient for high-volume and long-term study: When showing one side of a card a tap anywhere should show the other side (with the remaining fields or the next field if a three-step card option is available). A second tap (or click on a desktop) should mark the card correct and move immediately to the next card. There should be a button somewhere on the screen that allows the user to mark the card incorrect but it might be located in a corner so that the “correct” surface dominates the screen. Over time, users will get more and more words correct and will want to give each card less and less consideration unless it “drops” from memory. The UI ought to take this evolution into account and also keep high-volume users in mind.

It would also be nice if the buttons for correct and incorrect were not at the base of the screen, a common UI mistake of developers that leads to strain for high-volume users. When holding an iPhone/iPod Touch, the user’s thumb can more easily reach the upper half of the screen but must stretch their thumb further to reach the lower portion of the screen while balancing the device more precariously.

Overall, however, Mental Case for iPhone and iPod Touch currently leads the pack as the strongest interval study offering in a general flashcard application. Dedicated students of specific languages (especially Kanji characters in Japanese) may prefer the equally powerful but more targeted approach of Andre Khromov’s applications such as Kanji Flip but until iFlash Touch comes out of beta, the only other major competitor on the iPhone or iPod Touch with this kind of interval study features is found in iAnki, which comes nowhere near Mental Case as a full iPhone/iPod Touch client application.

Import: Wi-Fi synch
Export: Wi-Fi synch
Non-Roman Scripts: No problem
Modes of Study: Graded Slideshow
Media and Frills: Full Media support

Entry Creation: Good, but only two fields
Entry Editing: Good
Set Organization: Can create, modify and delete sets.
Flashcard Study: Fair, Cycle elimination but slow transitions and must wait to “time out” between cards.
Interval Study: Good, but finite number of stages, cannot schedule cases for inclusion on the mobile edition, only on the desktop client.
Formatting: Excellent. Both font and size can be customized
Design and Feel: Good
Statistics: Poor

Golden Coxcombs: 7/10 Powerful but flashcard UI eventually annoying for regular users. Possibly the best current interval study offering for this mobile platform.

Updated Review Comments on Mental Case 1.4.3 for the Desktop

I want to add some comments to complement my review of the desktop version of Mental Case which can be found in the next posting.

Mnemosyne is quite limited in its features, but its open source status, its sheer simplicity and the strong focus on the core task of spaced repetition makes it a strong minimalist offering for students of language using windows and Linux, and with the recent appearance of a binary download for OS X, Mac users can now also use the application without having to go through the incredibly complicated source building and installation process.

Application Name: Mnemosyne
Version Reviewed: 1.0.1.1
Software License: GNU Open Source
Review Date: 2008.06.29
OS Tested: Mac OS X 10.5.3, Windows XP Home SP2

Note: 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 features described below, as far as I can tell, work the same in the Windows and Mac versions. I have not tried the Linux version. My tests on the Mac version is based on the binary found here and suffers from some user interface defects described below.

Creating and Editing Entries

The program opens up into a simple central window. You add cards by pressing the add card button and then can move through the fields of your new card with the tab key. Once you have entered the information for the flashcard, you choose an initial interval stage for your card which establish whether you already know the card or not.

You can assign a single category to your cards, which are useful for sorting them later. You can also “activate” and “de-activate” categories, so that you temporarily stop studying some words. This is the only equivalent for organizing your cards, but like a similar feature in Anki, leaves something to be desired. The set/case organization based approach of Mental Case and iFlash is, in my opinion, superior. The fact that cards cannot have multiple categories is also frustrating.

When you create a card, by default, a second card is created which reverses the order. This makes sure that you are tested in both directions when you study. It would be nice to be able to turn off this feature, since not all of us want to study words in multiple directions if we are focused only on reading ability, or in production. In fact, strangely you can turn this feature off in the OS X version by unchecking “Add vice versa too” but I didn’t see a similar option on the Windows version.

UPDATE: The developer tells me that this option is also present in the Windows version. If you don’t see it, trying uninstalling and reinstalling the application.

One of the features which some people, such as myself, will find annoying while others will see as an attractive preservation of a clean and uncluttered interface is that many features of Mnemosyne are hidden from view in contextual menus and only accessible with a right-click. This is bad user interface design, even if some users will not mind it. If you right-click in a new card you get options for “Insert Image” and “Insert Sound” (I have not tested these features). This is also how you switch from 2-field to 3-field cards.

Mnemosyne does support 3-field cards, a must for Asian languages, but the three field support is weak and not well thought out. When 3-field cards are listed in the “Edit Deck” mode, the third field is not listed in its own column and you can’t sort by the field. Also, when you create a card, by default, a second card is created which reverses the order. This makes sure that you are tested in both directions when you study. With 3-field cards, however, there are still only two versions of each card created.

Once you have cards in the deck, you can click the “Edit Deck” button to get a list of your cards and edit them with (again) a right-click on the item in the list.

You can also get statistics for individual cards through another option in the right-click contextual menu but one wonders why some of these statistics are not shown as a column in the overview, where it would be sortable.

Import Features

Mnemosyne supports an excellent variety of import formats, included tab-delimited sets and SuperMemo which makes it easy to bring in new card sets, some of which are available for download from the project’s homepage.

Reviewing Entries

As soon as you have a collection of words, any time you boot up the application Mnemosyne prompts you to begin flashcard study, showing you the words it guesses you need to study. You respond to each card by indicating a number from 0-5 depending how well you know an entry, with 0 corresponding to not knowing the word at all or higher numbers if you have greater confidence. The application uses cycle elimination so you will be prompted to repeat words you didn’t know until you give it a higher score.

You don’t have to learn all unlearned words in the program and any time you boot the application it will first prompt you to review those scheduled words among those you have learnt before giving you the opportunity to continue studying as yet unstudied words.

The preferences offer the ability to control text size of cards, and can optionally boost the size of non-latin characters.

Interval Study

Mnemosyne uses an excellent form of spaced repetition similar to Anki and an earlier version of SuperMemo. Words come in 5 stages and the application keeps track of lapses and an “easiness” attribute. The process, also like Anki and SuperMemo is not very transparent, and unlike some other flashcard programs out there, there is no way to customize the process. You can’t sort words by their stage or easiness, and I don’t think it is even possible to reset the stage of the words. Some would argue for a “just trust in the application approach” but as someone who has designed a program with much more flexibility and currently uses another one which allows for such flexibility I must say that the freedom to control my own interval study, within limits, is rewarding, especially over the long term when the number of cards involved is very high.

Mnemosyne does let you see a limited number of useful statistics including the percentage of cards at various stages and, much more useful, a list of how many cards are coming on which of the upcoming days.

Mac OS X UI Problems

After several hours of trying, I was never able to successfully build a version of Mnemosyne on the Mac from the source using the instructions on the homepage. This kept me from being able to try it natively in the Mac environment for some time. Now that there is an easy binary download of the application, we can use the application as well but, like its more powerful rival Anki, it feels very much like most cross-platform applications that were not designed with OS X directly in mind. Design matters, especially when you use an application every day, and the idiosyncrasies of non-standard behavior and appearances can become grating.

The toolbar in the main menu is classic windows toolbar, the disabled buttons seem uglier in the Aqua environment of OS X. These are minor issues but a reminder of what operating system was in the mind of the developer when the program was designed. More annoyingly, the add card window is a palette style window and yet strangely modal, not allowing clicks outside it. Like other palettes, however, it disappears when you switch to another application.

There is also a frustrating visual issue in the current build. Anytime a window is opened, all controls on the window are dimmed, even though it is the active window, and you have to click once somewhere within the window before all controls suddenly become active again.

While the UI works on the Mac, it somehow doesn’t feel as sleek and simple as its counterpart on Windows. While looks really shouldn’t matter, coupled with the annoying clicking problem and the strange behavior of the modal-palette, it will probably annoy enough users to send them to another application.

Fool’s Final Word

Mnemosyne’s biggest asset is its clean simple interface, which looks especially good on Windows when compared to many competitors. It feels very lightweight but actually hides a lot of power under the hood. It should serve students well for long term language study, especially if they don’t need solid handling of three field cards. At least one online review compares it favorably with Anki, but if you want a powerful cross-application program which focuses entirely on interval study, it simply can’t compare.

If you use OS X, want flexible control of your interval study, set management, or a wider feature set, other applications have much more to offer, but for many, especially on Windows, this serves as a very easy to use introduction to the world of spaced repetition. You certainly can’t beat the price.

Import: Multiple formats
Export: XML and tab delimited
Non-Roman Scripts: No problem
Modes of Study: Graded Slideshow
Media and Frills: Images, Sounds (not tested)

Entry Creation: 8/10 (keyboard input not remembered)
Entry Editing: 2/10 (no editing of cards directly in list view or during review, all options by right click, bad handling of three field cards)
Set Organization: 3/10 (No set management. Single category can be assigned words, which can be activated or de-activated for study)
Flashcard Study: 9/10
Interval Study: 9/10 (Can’t be customized)
Formatting: 3/10 (Can change font sizes)
Design and Feel: 7/10 Windows, 3/10 OS X (Far too much use of right-click for options. Nice clean interface in Windows but serious UI problems on OS X)
Statistics: 6/10 (You can view grade statistics, and upcoming words, but can’t sort cards by them or view them in column view)

Golden Coxcombs: 6.5/10 Windows 5/10 OS X

Other Substantial Reviews

Review of Mnemosyne vs. Anki vs. SuperMemo

Rapid Memorization Using Mnemosyne

Application Name: Mental Case
Version Reviewed: 1.2.2
Software License: Commercial $39.00
Review Date: 2008.05.11
OS Tested: Mac OS X 10.5.2

UPDATE: After reading this posting, you may wish to read some additional comments about a more updated version (1.4.3) of this application here. See also the review of the mobile iPhone/iPod version of the application available here.

Note: 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.

Flashcards are called “notes” or “mental notes” in Mental Case. Mental Case organizes notes into sets called “cases” and these notes can also appear in a special set called “lesson” which shows entries that are due for interval study.

Creating and Editing Entries

Notes can be added quickly by the keyboard through Command-N. The list of existing entries are unfortunately hidden as the window transforms into a dedicated editing interface. It is very unfortunate that you cannot edit entries directly in the list view or during flashcard review. In the editing mode new content can be added into two fields. No more than two fields are supported, which will be a problem for many language students who need three or four, such as students of Asian languages, or European language students who want to store conjugation information, etc. Also, the keyboard input mode is not remembered as new cards are created, which is a great inconvenience as students will have to switch back and forth between keyboards for many languages.

The editing window also supports images in both fields, a welcome frill but one that often distracts developers from focusing on basics such as support for multiple fields. While editing you can, however, tweak the interval stage of the entry and choose a different interval schedule, overriding the default interval schedule assigned to the entry’s enclosing case. You can also determine whether an entry is reversible and thus the possible directions of study for the entry.

The biggest inconvenience, however, is the inability to quickly and easily edit entries in the main list view.

Managing Sets

Sets can be organized in “cases” which determine the default interval schedule (“lesson schedule”), note reversibility, and the default viewing time of each side during review.

Entries can only be in put into a single case. Thus you cannot have a case for all your “Russian” words and have a separate case just for the verbs. In my own case, I like to have a set with all my entries learned through my history research in one set, but also broken up into smaller sets according individual topics for convenient reference and review. In other words, being able to put entries in multiple sets, just as songs can be put in multiple playlists or photos into multiple albums. This feature is very handy when you want to target your study on demand and get an overview of certain groups of information. It is difficult to see how future versions of Mental Case could accommodate this useful ability without changing the way that cases work. A different approach would be to allow users to set up certain “note templates” which allow them to assign to any group of selected cards as they please, rather than allowing the case to fix these features. Cases are currently blue. Perhaps a future version of Mental Case could introduce blue cases that do not monopolize the entries they enclose, perhaps green cases that are “smart” cases matching entries with certain attributes, and then maybe a “yellow case” with more exclusive membership (every note can only belong to one) that enforces a particular study template. This is only one of many ways this can be approached. The “models” used by Anki (see earlier review) are an example of another way of creating templates.

Reviewing Entries

Mental Case uses a form of graded slideshow, but it assumes a “correct” answer and will move to the next entry after a designated period of time. Despite numerous themes available for choosing in the preferences, not even the “full screen” theme slide is full screen, in order to make room for a small control panel below the body of the slide.

This control panel allows you to manually move through the entries. The keyboard arrow keys also work for left and right, while the spacebar works as the pause/play button. You can indicate whether the card is correct or incorrect by pressing the tab key on the keyboard. Given these keys (tab, arrow keys) are located far from each other, it would be nice to be able to customize these keys in the preference since students will be spending a lot of time working through these slides.

There are also buttons for resetting the interval stage, or fast forwarding it to the highest possible stage. You can also delete the note directly. You cannot, however, edit the note while studying it, an excellent feature found in applications like iFlash.

There also appears to be no way to control formatting of the review slideshow (or the list view or editing view, for that matter), despite abundant options for eye candy filled transitions between flashcards and themes for the slides themselves. This appears to be an unfortunate example of what happens when developers get so excited when they find out how to include a useless cool-looking feature that they forget to include some more basic useful ones. In this case, I can only assume the developer discovered how they can deploy the cube transition effect familiar from Keynote slideshows, which is completely useless when you are reviewing hundreds of words a week, but didn’t think to provide an easy way to increase the font size of the slides.

There is cycle elimination implemented, but only for study on demand of a selected case. There is no reason this should not be added to “lesson” study in interval study mode as well. The developer needs only to make sure that interval statistics are recorded only on the first cycle through the slides, and then further cycles of review are provided for incorrect slides until the student finally masters all the words.

Interval Study

Mental Case does better than average in its interval study implementation. While it does not allow you to create your own unlimited number of schedules with customized intervals like Mindburn (see previous review), or even a single interval schedule for a file like iFlash, you can choose from a range of decent existing interval schedules. These can be fixed at the case level or overridden by individual notes.

The schedules available range from the “Standard” (8 stages, intervals at 1 day, 3, 7, 16, 35, 70, 140 and 280) to “Very Intense” (24 stages intervals at 1, 3, 7, 16, 35, 70, 140, and 280 but each interval occurs three times) as well as less useful static intervals for those who want reviews on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. I don’t really understand why applications like Mental Case, Mindburn, and others have a maximum number of stages. There is no good reason to treat any entry as permanently memorized, the intervals should merely continue to increase, or at least repeat at the highest interval available. I hope that future releases of Mental Case will allow users to create their own interval schedules to fit their own circumstances, and this is a key advantage to applications such as iFlash.

When new notes are created that are given a schedule, the first review is scheduled for the following day. It would be nice if it was scheduled for study the moment it was created. Few people add 50 new words to their flashcard software today because they want to start practicing them tomorrow. They want to start today. If cycle elimination were also included for interval study then that first key opportunity to study the newly added words would quickly move words already known to the next stage while giving the student a first chance to repeatedly practice the remaining words until they get them all.

Words that are gotten incorrect do one of three things in Mental Case, determined by the “Lesson” preferences. Either the note remains in the lesson for the next study session (which only punishes the student by making them review it again once more, but allows it to keep whatever interval score it had before), simply reschedule it for the next day (which in my opinion doesn’t help at all), or “Repeat the last lesson schedule period.” While it is nice to have options, my years of interval study suggests that the best and default option should be to 1) decrease or reset the interval score of the entry and 2) schedule the word for review very soon in the future. Assuming cycle elimination is implemented, any interval study session where a student gets the word incorrect, they will have the opportunity to continually repeat reviewing the word as they cycle through incorrect entries until they finally get it correct and will then be again forced to review it soon in the future.

Fool’s Final Word

Mental Case is a stable and clean first attempt at a flashcard application with strong interval study features. If development continues, there is great promise for the application. The Fool hopes be able to review a future version that addresses some of the issues raised above with better keyboard shortcuts, support for three or four fields, better set management, support for editing notes in list view and during review, better formatting options, more flexibility in customizing interval schedules, and the full implementation of cycle elimination during interval “lesson” study. Depending on the needs of the learner, Mental Case will certainly find supporters with its current feature set but, as it currently stands and given the availability of cheaper or even open source alternatives, this application is somewhat over-priced. At its current price, users should expect to see a lot of premium features, perhaps including, for example, extensive statistics on past and upcoming interval study.

Import: Comma delimited text files (supports UTF-8)
Export: Comma delimited text files, image slides
Non-Roman Scripts: No problem
Modes of Study: Graded Slideshow
Media and Frills: Images, “Quick Notes”

Entry Creation: 7/10 (keyboard input not remembered, two sides maximum, isolated from list view)
Entry Editing: 5/10 (no editing of notes directly in list view or during review)
Set Organization: 7/10 (Notes in cases, but only one at a time)
Flashcard Study: 9/10 (no simple keyboard feedback)
Interval Study: 7/10 (Several schedules to choose from but can’t be customized, no cycle elimination during interval study, problematic handling of incorrect words)
Formatting: 0/10 (Eye candy themes and transitions but nothing useful)
Design and Feel: 9/10 (Overall excellent, but lacking in keyboard shortcuts)
Statistics: 3/10 (Upcoming study dates, last study dates, visualization of interval stage but no useful statistics compiled on study)

Golden Coxcombs: 7/10

UPDATE: I missed the keyboard shortcut in flashcard mode and have updated the review and final score to reflect this. Thanks to the author, Drew, for pointing this out.

Other Substantial Reviews

Kinkless: Getting Things …. Remembered

Application Name: Mindburn
Version Reviewed: 1.2.4
Software License: Commercial $24.90
Review Date: 2008.05.11
OS Tested: Mac OS X 10.5.2

Note: 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.

Mindburn is, from start to finish, marketed as a tool for interval study. It suggests that you use the application to input any kind of information you want to remember into the software, set up a schedule for its review, and as you make progress, watch the snippet of information you are practicing proceed along a “burn wheel” until it is finally “burned” into your memory.

Various stages along the “burn wheel” correspond to interval stages, and you optionally view your progress visualized in the form of the forgetting curve.

Inputting and Managing Notes

The Mindburn window is divided into three panes by default. One pane lists folders and notes hierarchically. A second pane lists upcoming reviews of information in chronological order of when they are due for review and the final pane displays the content of the flashcards themselves.

The equivalent of a flashcard in Mindburn is a “note.” Unlike most flashcard applications which have a card of two or more sides, the default view in Mindburn for a “note” is simply a rich text file where you can type whatever information you wish to remember. You can optionally divide this into two tabs, one for “Notes” and one for “Question” via the File menu’s “Add Question Tab” option. You cannot add a third or fourth side. It also wasn’t clear to me how one can easily move between the two tabs by keyboard when inputting large quantities of information or when reviewing the information.

Notes can be created very quickly by keyboard control but the keyboard input method is not remembered and there are no import options. The created Notes can be organized into sets (folders), which can themselves be organized into multiple levels. However, notes can only be in one folder at any given time.

Schedules

Every note in Mindburn has its own schedule and here is where the application truly shines. The creation and editing of schedules is incredibly flexible and powerful. The schedule is essentially the TTF schedule or interval schedule to be followed along the forgetting curve for that particular unit of information. The application comes with several standard schedules you can assign to notes and each time you create a note it will, unless you indicate otherwise, be assigned whatever schedule was used in the last note. You are completely free to customize this through a powerful “inspector” where new schedules can be created and old ones edited.

The progress of any note in its schedule is indicated through small “burn wheels” next to the note in the list view or, when the note is selected, through an optionally visible forgetting curve shelf attached to the main window or located in the inspector palette.

You can manually move any note further along or back again in the interval schedule via buttons at the top of the window. The default schedules have only six stages in the burn wheel, at which time the information is thought to have been “burned” or, presumably, permanently memorized. While this is probably usually the case, my experience with interval study over the past decade or so suggests that providing the ability to continue spaced repetition schedules into the 8th or 9th stage is never without merit, even if the intervals at those stages are many months or over a year in length. Fortunately, you can create schedules with as many intervals as you deem necessary.

Reviewing

Studying the notes or flashcards is where Mindburn is at its weakest and ultimately where it cannot compare to even far more simple flashcard applications, at least for the average student of language. This is understandable, since it was not originally designed with the flashcard model in mind.

When a note comes “due,” that is, the time for its next review in the schedule has arrived, it will be added to the cue and you will be prompted to “review” the information. You can either directly click on the instance of a review in the chronological list, or more likely, click on the “Next Note” button, which looks like a play button in the toolbar of the window. Alternatively, you can choose the “Next Due” item from the “Review” menu.

Reviewing a note simply means that the rich text file for the note is displayed. Instead of marking that card correct or incorrect, as a student would normally do in a graded slideshow, in Mindburn, they have the choice of marking the card reviewed by a check box in the toolbar (or Command-Shift-U, a very inconvenient shortcut) or they can, if they like, manually move the note back an interval, again by means of a button in the toolbar (no shortcut for this that I can see). The card is not displayed to you in its own window and there are no options for hiding other windows, which can be distracting during study. This is a very clunky interface for reviewing and it also lacks any kind of cycle elimination common in most flashcard applications.

Mindburn has a lot of flexibility built in to its schedule management, card text formatting (images can be embedded as well, and templates can be used via the advanced preferences), set management, and a really solid clean OS X interface. The use of the “burn wheel” and an easily accessible visualization of the forgetting curve are also great ideas and beautifully laid out in the interface but, in the end, the application just doesn’t deliver when it comes to the review experience itself, which for any flashcard application is the very core of its functionality.

There is no simple viewing of multiple sides of cards, no easy keyboard feedback or cycle elimination during review, no study on demand of sets of notes without manually clicking through them, and despite the rich editing environment for schedules of individual notes, surprisingly little is done in the way of providing students with statistics on their study, past and future, beyond a colorful depiction of where a given word is located along the forgetting curve. Once the effect of the eye candy fades, one realizes this is no more than a visualization of the number of its interval stage.

Fool’s Final Word

With the implementation of a true graded slideshow feature, cycle elimination, and support for study on demand, Mindburn could become a serious contender among the OS X flashcard applications currently available. As it stands, however, many students of language would rather choose the most simple flashcard application with far lower scores here at Fool’s Flashcard Review over the richer interval study schedules in Mindburn due to its weak review environment.

Import: None
Export: None
Non-Roman Scripts: No problem
Modes of Study: Slideshow
Media and Frills: Images, rich text

Entry Creation: 7/10 (keyboard input not remembered, one side by default, two sides maximum)
Entry Editing: 10/10
Set Organization: 7/10 (Notes in folders in multiple levels, but only one at a time)
Flashcard Study: 1/10 (no simple keyboard feedback, no study on demand, no cycle elimination)
Interval Study: 8/10 (Powerful and flexible, schedules can be edited, modified, visualized and customized, somewhat confusing)
Formatting: 10/10 (Full formatting)
Design and Feel: 9/10 (Beautiful app, too much packed into inspector, decent help files, notes not isolated during review)
Statistics: 2/10 (List of upcoming words, visualization of forgetting curve but no useful stats compiled on study)

Golden Coxcombs: 6/10

Overall, it is best suited for learners looking for a score keeping study-on-demand application that prefer the fill-in-the-blank method. However, due to its extremely limited and inflexible interval study implementation, inability to manage sets, two field limitation, and lack of a graded slideshow study mode, I can’t recommend it for serious long term language study and maintenance. The fact that the application is open source, however, creates an opportunity for any interested developers to pick up the torch and make improvements in the future. Read on for a more detailed review.

Application Name: Genius
Version Reviewed: 1.7.520
Software License: Free and Open Source (GPL)
Review Date: 2008.05.10
OS: Mac OS X 10.5.2

Note: 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.

Card Creation, Editing, and Management

Genius has a very simple and smooth interface. The application works in the way you would expect it for all features except interval study. New entries can be added to a flashcard file by pressing command-shift-N, which is perhaps overly complex for a command one will often need, but the enter process of adding cards can be done by keyboard relatively comfortably. There are only two real fields to each card so you can tab from the first the second and then either press the command short cut for creating a new card or tabbing again will move the window focus to the “plus” button and you can then simply press return to create a new card.

You can also optionally show a “Group” and a “Type.” This is an example of what happens when a flashcard developer is not able to fully think through a feature. The group and type fields do not show when you are reviewing the cards and the only use they seem to have is that you can sort by them and they show up in a search. There is also a “Notes” field that can be added to any card. This can not be displayed in the list view, however, and thus there is no sorting by notes. Results from notes do appear in the search, however. Many users may not need a group, notes or a type field, but could really use those two fields as part of their flashcard and make it part of the study process. Genius would thus better have given users the option to customize the number of fields, or at least offer the option for three or four fields. You may also give words a grade of importance, which color codes the words in the list.

You cannot set the exact fonts or sizes for anything in the application, and the keyboard input source is not remembered across cards in like fields.

There are no set management features within each flashcard file. This is an inconvenience if you are managing large amounts of vocabulary of a particular type and want to engage in interval study. You can, of course, tag cards with the use of the type or group fields and then search for the appropriate term, but this can’t beat the availability of a point and clickable list of “playlists.” An ideal program will offer both tagging and grouping into sets but otherwise, set management is preferred over tagging availability unless tags can be listed and clickable.

Reviewing Vocabulary

Flashcards begin with the “Study” button. Genius uses fill-in-the-blank method which some learners admittedly prefer because their feedback is directly tested by the program for accuracy. It can be helpful to confirm whether you really know how to spell certain words correctly, etc. However, in the long term, especially with flashcard files with hundreds or thousands of words it is time-consuming and physically exhausting to type all these answers. For this reason I strongly suggest all flashcard developers offer the graded slideshow. Flaschard programs are not for testing, but for memory management. If you don’t remember a word, you should honestly mark it incorrect or you are only cheating yourself, not your French teacher. The lack of this feature in Genius is the reflection of the approach of the developer, and he certainly is not alone in offering only this study mode, but it ultimately detracts from the long term usability of this in daily study.

There are a few interesting features not immediately obvious about reviewing vocabulary. Genius has full support for cycle elimination and words are removed from the pile when they are correctly answered. Not only do incorrect words appear again, but they are only slightly delayed, rather than not appearing until all cards have been cycled through and I seem to have noticed incorrect cards getting repeated more than once. There are two modes of review: Learn and Review. A slider determines the amount of words reviewed versus those learned. When a word is reviewed, it is like any other flashcard system: hiding a field in the direction you indicate to Genius that you want to study (see below for a problem with this). However, in learning mode, a word is first presented with all fields shown and you are asked to memorize it. You will then be asked to guess the hidden field several times after a few cards have been shown in learning mode. Words can only be “reviewed” when they have first been “learned.” This is an innovative approach which may appeal to some students but does lack some flexibility.

Although somewhat clunky, you can determine the direction of study via the view menu, optionally having words go in both directions. There is also a kind of “fuzzy” logic in checking the answers, and you can also indicate that an answer was in fact correct, even when the software does not recognize it as such. This is an improvement over many similar implementations of fill-in-the-blank.

Interval Study

There is some kind of interval study incorporated. Choose “Auto-pick” from the Study menu. If you have a large number of cards (a small number of cards results in all of them being chosen) a small select number
according to some non-transparent method. I have not been able to determine what algorithm or method is used in the selection process. Words are assigned an interval score according to the student’s performance across time and this is incremented or reset if you get it wrong. The number of words chosen, the method of their choosing, the amount of incrementation, etc. are all completely inflexible and the whole process lacks any form of statistics, customization, or transparency. It can’t be recommended for anyone looking for a serious interval study solution.

Overall, Genius has a nice simple and solid feel to it and its strong OS X feel make it a comfortable environment. However, its poor implementation of interval study, lack of set management features, lack of a graded slideshow method of study, and overall lack of flexibility and customization make it difficult to recommend to any serious student.

Import: tab-delimited, but broken import of non-Roman scripts
Export: tab-delimited
Non-Roman Scripts: No problem, except on import.
Modes of Study: Fill in the blank
Media and Frills: No media. Can assign cards “importance,” notes, labels

Entry Creation: 7/10 Two fields only, keyboard input method not remembered.
Entry Editing: 8/10 Simple, clean, but nothing special, no edit during study
Set Organization: 3/10 No set organization but can organize by “group” or “type”
Flashcard Study: 5/10 Cycle elimination and interesting learning/review approach but no graded slideshow
Interval Study: 4/10 Limited interval study features. No customization or transparency.
Formatting: 1/10 Can change font size in list text
Design and Feel: 8/10 Easy to use over all and solid stable feel
Statistics: 3/10 Minimal and not particularly useful stats.

Golden Coxcombs: 5/10

Application Name: Ebbinghaus
Version Reviewed: 1.5
Software License: Free
Review Date: 2008.04.28
OS: Mac OS X

Note: 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.

Ebbinghaus has a single iTunes-style interface for all its sets which it calls “File Boxes.” The only buttons available are “Study,” “Statistics” (sic), “Inspector,” “Export,” and “Import” Cards can only have two fields and an image attached to each side.

New entries are created by menu or Command-N. However, when a new entry is created you have to use your mouse again to double click the field you want to enter. The keyboard input source is not remembered so you have to constantly switch to the keyboard mode needed for the field in question.

Each entry has a “Progress” bar which has a colorful visual representation of how you have performed on the word during study. You can thus sort your words by progress, select only the words that you suck at and study them by pressing Study. Otherwise clicking study will prompt you to indicate how many words you want to study total and which direction you want to study in. The progress bar is thus somewhat useful but is really just a sorting feature.

There is no implementation of interval study in Ebbinghaus, despite the promising reference in the application’s name to Hermann Ebbinghaus, who discovered the forgetting curve principle that lies behind SuperMemo and the many other kinds of flashcard software out there now. As far as I can tell, the application does not prompt you to study words that are due for review, or otherwise have any kind of spaced repetition features.

The statistics collected by the program include only “average progress” of words, “average number of correct answers,” the number of cards, and “number of correct anwers” (sic). None of these are particularly useful but offer more than many other applications do.

The application does offer excellent export features to iPhoto (if there are pictures) and a CSV file with the option to designate its separator. It has a similar import feature but after attempting several tests with various formats supported (comma, semi-colon, the “Tabulator”) the only files I could import were those exported by Ebbinghaus itself. On all other occasions the import produced only an empty “File box.”

The program is not particularly stable either. Deleting all the sample entries provided when you first open the application and then clicking on another file box consistently crashed the application for me and I experienced a number of other random crashes.

Despite the iTunes appearance, there was no way to add file boxes from buttons within the window, no way to drag and drop entries from the list overview into multiple file boxes (you can put it into only a single file box and this must be chosen from a drop-down menu).

Flashcard study, which is done through the excellent graded slideshow method is itself pleasant enough but you can’t edit entries while studying. You can however reset a card’s “Progress.” The keyboard equivalents during flashcard study are unnecessarily complex. Who wants to press Command-T every time they want to show the back side of a card or Comment-F to mark a word correct? Surely this can be done with spacebar, enter, arrow keys, or by allowing the user to customize the keys. A key problem with flashcard study is not only the fact that no interval study is available but also that when words are marked incorrect there is no cycle elimination. This is an absolute must when doing study on demand and really a basic feature for flashcard applications. Flashcards must optionally be able to cycle through words, eliminating those that are correct until all of them are mastered. That is what every child does with their paper flashcards when they practice the night before their vocab quiz and there is no reason to abandon this sound practice in the digital world.

The fact that the application only allows two fields immediately eliminates easy study of Chinese or Japanese or creating sets that contain additional fields of study like verb conjugations etc. Instead, it seems to be targeting learners that might want, for example, to memorize the names of fish by seeing its picture, or the bones of the body.

Fool’s Final Word

For language learners, Ebbinghaus has little to offer. There is no interval study, no cycle elimination, no support for more than two fields, a broken import system, poor set management flexibility, almost no formatting options, and few statistics.

Import: custom CVS, but feature broken
Export: custom CVS, iPhoto
Non-Roman Scripts: No problem
Modes of Study: Graded slideshow
Media and Frills: Images

Entry Creation: 4/10 Two fields only, need to double click field for entry and keyboard input source not remembered.
Entry Editing: 7/10 Simple, clean, but nothing special, no edit during study
Set Organization: 5/10 No drag/drop, entries can only be in one set
Flashcard Study: 4/10 Command key for keyboard control, no cycle elimination
Interval Study: 1/10 Progress bar but no interval study features
Formatting: 2/10 Can change font size in card show
Design and Feel: 7/10 Looks like a Mac app, but missing some expected basics
Statistics: 2/10 Minimal and not particularly useful stats

Golden Coxcombs: 4/10

Anki is an open source flashcard application with full support for interval study that is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Anki ain’t pretty but it has a lot going for it under the lid, offering language learners a powerful environment for reviewing large bodies of vocabulary over the long-term. Other flashcard application developers ought to have a good look at the many features this application has to offer, some of which can be found in more professional Windows flashcard applications but which in many cases have not made their way into OS X flashcard applications.

UPDATE: Anki has gone through many updates since I composed this review in mid 2008. In early 2009 I adopted Anki as my personal flashcard application of choice and later wrote a posting on why I believe it is currently far ahead of its competitors and the Fool’s official favorite. Read more at: Anki All the Way

Anki’s strongest areas are in the many statistics it provides, its tagging features, its strong interval study centered approach, and its “card model” approach. Anki’s biggest weaknesses are to be found in the overall program design, its complete absence of set management features (in favor of a tags-only approach), relatively poor list overview and editing features, and the fact that it does not allow the review of vocabulary on demand. If your goal is long-term mastery of vocabulary and you are willing to get past some of its quirky behavior, this program can serve you very well. If you want a familiar Mac OS X design with a simple “enter and review” interface, then this may not be the best program for you. I would keep an eye on the further development of Anki, which is available under the GPL license, since future versions may resolve many of the issues discussed in this review (bolded text highlights problems). Read on for more details.

Application Name: Anki
Version Reviewed: 0.9.5.7
Software License: Free, open source (GPL)
Review Date: 2008.04.28
OS Tested: Mac OS X

Note: 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.

Structure: Deck-Model-Card Model-Card-Fact

Anki takes an interesting and overall effective approach to organizing information for students to study. It uses the word “deck” to refer to a set You can only have one deck open at a time and the last open deck is automatically opened upon launching the application. What I call a card Anki calls a “fact” while what Anki calls a “card” is a particular way of reviewing a “fact” such that the same “fact” can have multiple “cards” depending on its direction of study and the fields displayed on each side.

Each deck contains one or more “models” which corresponds to a field template. It supports more than two fields and has full support for non-Roman script languages. The deck models, in turn, each have one or more “card models” which determines the various directions of study and fields which are displayed when any individual “fact” is reviewed. For example, one card model might show the Chinese pronunciation on one side, and the Chinese character and English on the other side. Another card model might show the English on the front of the card, and the Chinese pronunciation and character on the back. By using this approach, which allows you to automatically create separate “cards” or directions of study for each “fact” you enter into your deck, Anki promotes both active and passive mastery which it calls “production” and “recognition,” respectively.

Deck Properties: Through this menu item you can give a description for your deck, synchronize it online for review online or on another computer, designate certain tags so that cards of matching tags will be given higher or lower priority when being studied (high priority cards appear at the top of a study queue), modify the TTF Schedule, and manage the available models for the deck.

Model Properties:Through this menu item can name your models, assign them comma separated tags, give them a description, and determine delays in seconds between different cards corresponding to the same fact. You can assign it multiple fields, and optionally require these fields to be unique, required, or numeric. You can customize the font and display features of the various models in your deck through the “Display Properties” menu item.

Creating Entries

Although the menu item and button used to add new entries is called “Add Cards” you are actually adding “facts” to your deck. Each time you enter a “fact” into your deck, it may create one or more cards, depending on the model you choose for your new entry. By default, the last chosen model will be used when you add a new card. The new “facts” are entered in a separate editing menu, which allows you to designate the model, the card models (and thus the number of cards created for that fact), and tags for the entry. It has large editing boxes where you can then add information into each of the fields for the fact. Every field is potentially rich text and also supports the import of images, sounds, and latex tagged text. Shortcuts are listed to the right but on the Mac OS X the “Ctrl” shortcuts correspond to the Command key, not the Control key. You can add new entries entirely form the keyboard, adding new entries with Command-Return. The input source is not remembered across cards so you have to constantly change keyboards when working with non-Roman script vocabulary.

The main developer probably has studied Japanese and possibly Chinese as there is automatic lookup of the pronunciation of Japanese and Chinese characters in those included models. The possible pronunciation of words is put into the appropriate field.

Editing Entries

In addition to the separate fact editing window, there is an “Edit Deck” window which offers gives an overview of the card list. Note that the card list shows all cards, not the “facts” they are based on. The fields of a card don’t necessarily have their own column in this table but are shown lumped together as they will appear together on the card in question. A smaller editing window below can be used to make quick edits of existing information. If you edit a “card” that is visible in the list, you are actually editing the original “fact” and all other cards based on the fact will be changed automatically. However, the changes made are not immediately updated in the card list. You have to close the editing window and open it again to reflect the changes in the card list. The card list can be filtered by tag, or sorted by various card fields and statistics. However, the only column shown in the overview besides the fields displayed in any given card is a column showing the time to next review and you must click on a card to view all its information in the corner of the window. There are no column headers, no drag and dropping, and you cannot choose what columns to show or hide. In the editing mode you can add tags to multiple cards or multiple facts (and therefore all of its cards), mark cards for deletion, and reset its interval score. You cannot edit cards while studying them through the graded slideshow, they must be edited in the card list window. It is also difficult to delete cards, you cannot simply press the “delete” key. Instead you must mark a card for deletion and then it will be deleted the next time you close the deck or quit the application.

Reviewing Cards and Interval Study

Anki is developed from the ground up as an interval study application. It implements one of the algorithms found in the pioneering interval study application SuperMemo (SM2). When you launch the application, any cards that are due immediately appear for study. Interval study should indeed be the primary method of study for students in the long-term but often times a language student will want to review a particular group of words in preparation for a test or just to refresh certain vocabulary. As far as I can tell Anki offers no way to study cards on demand. If cards are not due, they don’t appear for study, and if they don’t appear for study you can’t study them unless you reset their interval score. There is also no cycle elimination, so words that are marked incorrect do not immediately continue to cycle through so that they can be quickly reinforced for future reviews. This is a deal-breaker for many users and unless this is fixed in future versions it will be hard to recommend Anki to anyone but the most hard-core interval study fans.

All study in Anki is done through a graded slideshow. This is an excellent choice and best for language learners in the long-run. The fields shown on the front and the back of the card are determined by the card model for that card. To display the back of the card you can press spacebar or return. Sometimes however, the default button becomes deselected and you have to click it with your mouse, an annoying bug. Instead of simply having the option to mark a word correct or incorrect, you can designate a card as “completely forgotten” (the interval score is reset), “Made a mistake,” and three other options which each increment the interval score of a card: “difficult,” “about right,” and “easy.” There are two very interesting aspects of interval study in Anki: 1) The next due date for each is shown to the right of the button and, interestingly, there is not one fixed day in the future, a random day or hour will be chosen within a certain range. This feature helps to spread out cards and not overwhelm the learner when they come back to review in the future. 2) Cards are not all treated as equal. Depending on how easy you marked the card, its next interval is made larger or smaller. This means that some cards can jump very quickly into the higher interval score range while the more difficult words will still increase in interval but at a slower rate. My limited testing shows that this works very well.

Anki offers excellent flexibility in interval study. You can reset the interval score of any card but you cannot tweak the intervals for each card directly like you can in some applications. However, you can set the default starting intervals for “hard,” “medium” and “easy” cards (by default these are .3-.5 days, 3-5 days, and 7-9 days, respectively). You can also set the amount of time until a card marked incorrect is shown again, separately determined for totally forgotten cards, “young” cards that you have gotten correct a few times and “mature” cards you should know well. Intervals thereafter seem to increment at reasonable rates.

If there are multiple cards for a given fact, French to English and English to French, for example, on two separate cards, then these do not get reviewed in close succession, with the delay determined by the model properties. If you have just answered a card from French to English, then you will very likely get the same word correct when asked to go from English to French if you see it very soon after, therefore the feedback you give will not accurately reflect whether or not you really know the word well in the opposite direction. Anki, by default, spaces these cards coming from the same facts out, forcing you to depend less on short-term memory. This is on of Anki’s most interesting and effective features that I have not seen in any other OS X applications.

You can “Suspend” cards by giving them a special suspension tag and this will remove them from the interval study pile until you delete the tag in question. Tags can also be used to force Anki to put high priority words at the top of the queue when you have a lot of words to learn.

Statistics

Many developers make an attempt to include some statistics on study but they often don’t think through what will be useful to a learner engaged in interval study. There is no other OS X application I have come across which comes anywhere close to the rich amount of statistics available to the learner, displayed both numerically and in colorful charts.

When studying your cards you can see how many words you got wrong, how many are remaining, the estimated time it will take to complete cards in the queue. The main deck window also has two bars which show less useful “daily recall” statistics (% correct answers for today) and a more useful “retention” bar which gives you an overview of how you are doing overall in your interval study. If you click the “Card statistics” button while studying a card, it will show you when it was added, first reviewed, changed, next due, its current interval, the last interval, the current “factor,” the last factor, the review count, the correct count, how many times you repeatedly got it correct, the average time it took to answer the card, and the total time, the state of the card (new, young, mature). Unfortunately a far smaller set of statistics about individual cards is available in the card list overview when you click on a card and I don’t know why the developer doesn’t offer the same rich data there as well.

When you are viewing the deck as a whole you can view a whole range of statistics related to the deck (card counts, correct answer statistics, and average interval, average workload in cards/day, and average cards added per day/month. All of this helps the learner evaluate their long-term language patterns. Students of Japanese have an added bonus feature by choosing “Kanji statistics” from the Tools menu which will show how many Kanji characters of each level of difficulty are included.

The most impressive aspect of the statistical features of Anki, however, are the graphs provided. While they may take a while to load (a minute or more), you can view how many cards are coming due in upcoming days which is great for students wanting to estimate how much time they will need. If a learner is planning to go on vacation for a few weeks, they can also see how many cumulative cards will be due over time assuming no study is done. There are also graphs for card intervals, added cards, card difficulty, etc.

Import/Export

Good flashcard applications all provide a way to quickly get data in and out of the application so that if learners already have a large database of words they can easily adopt the use of the application or if, for example, the software one day becomes obsolete, to abandon the software in favor of a better alternative. Anki provides import from tab or semi-colon delimited files. These can be tied to certain sides of a card model, and optionally tags can be added to all entries imported from a file. The export feature will create tab delimited files and you can choose whether you want to export “facts” or all “cards.”

Extendability and Integration

I haven’t had a chance to try them out but Anki also supports synchronization via an online account and there is freeware Palm pilot software out there for reviewing your Anki cards on the go. It also has a plugin structure which allows the program to be expanded in various ways.

Disadvantages and Criticism

In addition to some of the specific problems mentioned above, there are some major problems that I want to emphasize with Anki. As mentioned above, there are no study on demand capabilities in the application. This is a severely crippling problem that needs to be addressed in future releases to widen the appeal of the software.

Another major weakness of the program is that there are no set management features at all. Increasingly flaschard developers are choosing some version of iTunes style organization system which allows users to easily browse through many sets they have inside a single flaschard file. Some provide the ability to put these sets into folders. Anki has chosen to forgo this ability and rely completely on tags to organize cards. However, while this is an admirable bonus, it is a poor substitute for providing a way to manage seperate sets. If the developer is convinced tags is the way to go, then they should provide a way to view lists of tags just as if they were sets, clicking on them to show the cards that have been given that tag.

Another major complaint I have with this software is its overall poor design. This is partly due to the fact that it looks and feels like a Java application that is targeted for multiple platforms. In general I’m thankful that I have encountered as few issues as I have with Anki since many of these multi-platform applications are prone to all sorts of errors. In this case, it is mostly a design issue rather than a crippling of performance. However, as a result Anki has a lot of GUI elements that do not have the look and feel that users expect in a OS X application. Here are some examples:

1. Show preview in fonts and colors is a regular button but shows and hides a panel
2. Drop down menus for Facts and Cards when they look like regular buttons
3. Columns are sorted by a drop down menu rather than by clicking on the column header (there isn’t one)
4. No select all in edit menu.
5. No copy/paste in edit menu – but it works anyways when editing cards
6. Application quits if you happen to close the main window
7. You can’t get the opening screen options if there are cards to be reviewed without closing the deck.
8. Overall poor handling of table data.

Other minor bugs and annoyances not mentioned above:

1. When you open a file it opens directly into interval study, hiding the opening screen that has various useful options.
2. When you ask for model properties, you get whatever model is on top, rather the model attached to the highlighted card, or an overview of models in the deck.
3. There is no offline help
4. When I reset interval stats for all cards, it told me “The next qeustion will be shown in -55 seconds” when I tried to reset one card, it wasn’t immediately reflected in the main study window. Apparently there are some bugs in the way stats are reflected.

Fool’s Final Word

Anki has an impressive range of features with a solid, advanced, and flexible implementation of interval study. With some attention to design details and the introduction on study on demand, Anki could become a real leader in this field. The fact the application is free and open source is truly commendable and I encourage everyone to make a donation to support their further development. At the very least, it will help set the standard for many features in flashcard study and inspire other developers.

Import: Tab or semi-colon delimited
Export: Tab delimited
Non-Roman Scripts: No problem
Modes of Study: Graded slideshow
Media and Frills: Images, sound, rich text

Entry Creation: 8/10 (Ctrl=command, keyboard input not remembered)
Entry Editing: 5/10 (Poor table interface, no live updating, no edit during study, clunky delete)
Set Organization: 3/10 (Tag organization only, no set organization)
Flashcard Study: 4/10 (Excellent cards, but no study on demand, no cycle elimination)
Interval Study: 9/10 (Powerful and flexible but no direct interval score editing)
Formatting: 9/10 (Slightly clunky and overwhelming but flexible)
Design and Feel: 5/10 (Mac users are all xenophobes. Drop-down menus from rounded buttons? You ain’t from around these parts)
Statistics: 10/10 (Best I’ve seen)

Golden Coxcombs: 7.5/10

Other Substantial Reviews:
Anki vs. Mnemosyne vs. Supermemo