Comments on: Review Update: Mental Case

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:28:28 +0000

If you’re concerned about background distractions, I find this little free utility superb:

http://www.freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=7013

By: Ernie

Ernie — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:58:43 +0000

Great to hear on the improvements, what about the full-screen view mentioned in the review. that would be great and remove the background distraction

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:53:52 +0000

Hi Guys,

Having used a number of these applications I find your reviews and the comments extremely helpful.

Although it appears that the reviewer enjoys a simple programme without the ‘eye-candy’ I must admit that I for one, quite like the eye-candy. Studying is boring enough without having to look at an ugly interface. My motivation to study does increase if I enjoy using the programme.

I would therefore say that both eye-candy and no-animation are dependent on the user.

Keep up the good work guys.

To the reviewer: I really appreciate the depth to which you review the programmes, it certainly influenced which app I ended up purchasing.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:33:39 +0000

These kind of exchanges are awesome. Keep up the good work with the blog!

By: K. M. Lawson

K. M. Lawson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:23:03 +0000

Really great to hear that you are looking into these performance issues. This is just what I was hoping for with these reviews: to hopefully encourage developers to take another look and make improvements in their software. I’ll post the info here when the new release comes out.

By: Drew McCormack

Drew McCormack — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:27:26 +0000

A quick update: after this review appeared, we took a look at these performance issues. Some can’t easily be fixed, so will have to wait, but others could be fixed relatively easily by working around issues in Apple’s frameworks.

So in the next few days, we will release an update that makes dragging notes between cases very fast (<1 second for 1000 notes), and trashing notes fast.

The places we couldn’t improve were the scheduling changes, because these have to do with the cascading defaults.

We have also now added a short cut for syncing, and improved the stability of syncing with iPhone, and — in some cases — the performance.

All of these changes will be released in a day or two. Hopefully that addresses some of the more serious issues raised in the review.

Drew

By: K. M. Lawson

K. M. Lawson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:42:00 +0000

Thanks Drew,

On the first point about scheduling perpetually – that is a good point and a method I hadn’t thought of. Would be nice if there was a way to make that automatic (again, perhaps a setting in the “Lesson” tab of preferences: After interval schedule is complete, switch to ____ schedule)

Good luck with those performance improvements!

By: Drew McCormack

Drew McCormack — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:35:59 +0000

I’m the developer of Mental Case. Thanks again for the review. Here are a few responses to the criticisms:

Although the ‘standard’ schedule does not go on perpetually, there is nothing to stop a user from changing to a perpetual schedule, say, ‘yearly’, when a case has finished the standard schedule.

Regarding performance: it is true that performance is not great when moving large numbers of cards around. The reason for this ‘weakness’ is actually one of Mental Cases ‘strengths’, namely, ‘cascading defaults’. Mental Case has a powerful inheritance-like system for determining a cards learning schedule, viewing time, and reversibility. This controlling these variables much simpler than in other apps, once you know how it works.

The problem is, this is also quite computationally expensive. We have some ideas for performance improvements, and hopefully they will be added in a future release.

Thanks for the review!
Drew McCormack
MacCoreMac Software