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.

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.

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…