I like spaced repetition apps, but I'm kind of annoyed that this is just a sloppy landing page without a demo or a concrete description of what the app does. I would resubmit after the app is ready to launch, or you at least have some kind of demo.
You're right. This is a just landing page I put together really quickly after I got annoyed with managing my flashcards in Anki. However, I want to use the interest and feedback of HN as motivation and inspiration to really flesh out the details of noot.
edit: fyi I do have prototype working in Django but it really looks terrible and I'd be embarrassed to show screenshots of my work so far.
I've been wanting to build a good SaaS flashcard app too (I'm interested in flashcards since that's how I study Scrabble words - tournament player) but I have no time. Good luck =)
I would absolutely love to see a well designed SRS Flashcard app!
I've used both Mnemosyne and Anki and I have to admit, while I love their rich feature sets, I reallllly hate their interface design and usability. Not only is it unintuitive and overly complex, but they both run really slow on my laptop.
I still can't believe there aren't better solutions available. Anki is probably my most used piece of software and it sucks to have to use a crappy interface.
So, what exactly is wrong with Anki's interface? The basics seem pretty simple - load a deck, and if you know the answer, click the green button, and if you don't, the red button. I can't imagine why you'd need to delve into the complex features daily.
I think for 99% of usage, there are only a few buttons in Anki. But this may be a case where any sufficiently "simple" interface is insufficiently rich, and any sufficiently rich program will have some interface complexity somewhere.
The interface for making/entering cards is not so hot. If I were even minimally competent at scripting or not bone lazy I would learn to use a proper text editor and get it to spit out cards from a text file.
All that said, I agree. Anki is one of the most useful pieces I software I have ever encountered.
To anyone who is on the edge about using SRS I recommend downloading it onto computer and phone and getting a good shared deck to build the habit. Building your own decks is superior but really, just start.
Me too, so I gave it a shot myself inspired by the many Med students in my area. I started with a Mac app (Flashcard Hero), currently working on an iPhone counterpart with iCloud sync. Tried to keep the interface as simple as possible. Cards can only be rated easy/unsure/hard, the UI hides the actual algorithm and marks cards from red (very hard) to green (memorized).
I've been using Mnemosyne for over 4 years (9000 cards) and have been quite happy with it. The only slowness I've noticed is when generating graphs of extended time periods (over a month).
Hi there, developer of noot here.
Anki was actually the inspiration of noot for me. In my opinion, Anki's clunky and has too many options. While I understand it's good for power users, it also presents a learning curve which I feel might turn off a lot of prospective learners. I envision noot as a simpler, nicer alternative to Anki, with more stuff hidden behind the hood (for example, answers can only be right or wrong, instead of Again, Hard, Good, or Easy) so people can just focus on their material and not spend hours configuring and designing templates for their cards. Also, Anki doesn't currently have a good way to sync cards; AnkiWeb feels outdated and more centered around the computer version of the application. I want noot to be a lot like the Rdio music service: with nearly all user info stored on the cloud and the various platforms just to be interfaces to that service.
I rely on flashcards for medical school. A few requirements that I would need to switch from Anki--
1) Copy paste of images. This is key. With my mac I screenshot a slide from an anatomy atlas to the clipboard. Then use the image occlusion editor to hide labels on the slide, and then I use the editor to highlight a certain area on the slide and ask "what is this muscle?" 70% of my cards require copy/paste of images. Without this feature I could never switch.
2) Cloud storage that synchronizes flashcards on my mac and mobile device. I do a lot of flashcard review in the gym, bathroom, waiting in line, etc. Without mobile I could not switch.
3) Searchable index of cards. I make a flashcard for every major piece of information that I need to know for school, and I use search to connect that information. For instance we spent the last 6 weeks learning about metabolic pathways and what factors regulate enzymes within them, but we never focused on specific regulators. With Anki, however, I can search for a certain activation enzyme, say protein kinase A, and then have a deck of flashcards showing me what pathways are affected by said enzyme.
Those are the biggest must have features for me that set Anki apart. There are loads of great minimal and social flashcard applications (eg Study Blue or Quizlet) available for average users, eg, someone learning spanish. You'll have to find a way to stand out from them.
I've been working on this too, but only with an iPhone client to start (though still with the data "in the cloud"), and only targeting Japanese to begin with. Anki runs into trouble when you need to customize it to suit your material - and then when you download any shared decks, each one uses its own scheme of representation. It's great software but not very friendly.
There's no excuse for you to use Leitner though. Anki is based on the SM-2 algorithm which is well-documented (though only a starting point).
AnkiWeb is probably outdated because nobody cares about it. That's because their Android, iOS and PC apps are great.
How accurate can your spaced repition algorithm predict my forgetting curve? The time between repitions can be substantially different depending on the answer I give to Anki (a day between a week or something like that)
In which other aspects do you want to be like Rdio? Closed source, analyzing user data, advertisement, monetization?
Their iOS version is quite expensive if I recall correctly. It also isn't quite up-to-date in its design. Neither are any of the Anki apps, in my opinion.
Anki does have a huge advantage from its excellent spacing algorithm. The prototype I have working so far uses the Leitner system, which is very basic, but an advantage of keeping all the data on the web is the huge potential for A/B testing to figure out the actual best spacing algorithm.
Lastly, I'm not too interested in generating revenue from this project. I don't even have any ideas for monetizing it. This is mainly to scratch my own itch. If I can make enough to cover the cost of running the project (which is currently zero; it's being hosted on a free heroku dyno), I'll be happy.
Howdy lawrencewu, I think it's fantastic that you're working on something to scratch your own itch!
It's exactly what I did a year ago when I started work on http://www.memorific.com to build a SRS that was fine-tuned for software developers. We just changed to public beta a few weeks ago and started generating revenue and it's been a great experience helping people learn, grow, and meet their goals for learning.
Keep up the good work on noot.io and have a blast doing it! There's nothing like making a product that people use and enjoy.
Anki unfortunately jumped the AGPL shark recently, making the code dangerous to have around. I've personally been thinking about forking the pre-AGPL version, or just writing my own. I'll probably just write my own.
(I'm looking to extract audio clips from video files by using the subtitles and timing information, to create listening flashcards. Since Anki doesn't really do this, not reusing their code isn't really a big deal.)
> (I'm looking to extract audio clips from video files by using the subtitles and timing information, to create listening flashcards. Since Anki doesn't really do this, not reusing their code isn't really a big deal.)
Just fyi, I recently hacked something up that did exactly this, using a bit of csv parsing in python and ffmpeg to extract the clips. It wasn't too hard to write, though I can see it becoming more difficult if you want more sophistication.
>Anki unfortunately jumped the AGPL shark recently, making the code dangerous to have around.
Seriously?
Do you sometimes sneeze and, in the process, integrate your projects with external code (that isn't even packaged as a library) and push it out to users in one fell swoop?
It's far more "dangerous" to have any proprietary software "around" -- if you somehow violate that license, you'll face a lot worse consequences than if you violate the AGPL.
The problem is that the AGPL taints the output of the software, not the software itself. I'm fine with the GPL, that's well-understood, well-deployed, and well-tested in court. The AGPL? Nobody knows.
That's entirely untrue. There's no way to even do that, short of having a copyrighted asset included in every output (but that could be trivially changed and has nothing to do with the license).
I also fail to see how such a thing, even if it were true, would make the AGPL "dangerous to have around."
Ok, competitor here. I developed FluxCards for Android and also am at zero with my web version but will put money on it right now. Just a few random thoughts:
* Do you know how many flashcards learning apps there are out there? It's not hundreds but thousands. http://www.flashcardapps.info/ lists just those available for iPhone.
* SRS? Well there you get the number down considerably (100?) and if only the customers knew how good SRS is! Many apps (Duolingo anybody?) are vastly more successful (or hyped) than any other ugly but good SRS app. Yet in my opinion everybody should at least have learned with SRS once in his life. If I had known about SRS apps when I was at school, I would have been so much more successful, yet when I had to learn Spanish fast, I literally worked through 30 different apps on Android that were all without SRS. After learning with "the best" of these for 2 weeks I realized that being asked the easy words over and over again was utterly pointless and decided to program FluxCards in 48h. Version 1 was in the play store 46h later and now stands at 11k active and happy users.
* Over these 2 years I soaked up all there is about flashcards apps and it is a lot. Of course I came across Anki, Supermemo, Mnemosyne and many others but with that knowledge I'm about to build the next generation of a cross platform (web + android) flashcards app.
If you are good at front end development, maybe you wanna be hired? By Monday I want to kick off the development.
It's a learning technique where the software tries to show you a flashcard for review right before you would have forgotten it otherwise. So each time you see it, it will be longer until the next time you see it. That way, you're not wasting time looking at a bunch of stuff you already know well.
You should check out our implementation of our own SRS for learning how to read and write Chinese at http://whizzlearning.com.
I agree that Anki can be a bit clunky and I don't like how it makes you manage your deck. We should be able to have an algorithm help you learn more efficiently.
However, we don't allow you to create your own decks either... we figured it was better to optimize for ease of learning and reduce frustration/anxiety since Chinese is considered to be so tough.
We are looking for beta users for our next version that streamlines the experience, adds traditional characters, etc. if anyone is interested.
Hi Lawrence, i share your pain and just like you the frustration of forgetting my learnings has led me to build http://www.memolyapp.com
We can work together to come up with a more powerful solution than Anki. Are you up for it? And do take a look at http://www.memolyapp.com
What motivated you to start the project? I'm just curious since there are already so many SRS flash card apps, including the impressive Anki (cross-platform, powerful features, open source, free). Is it just for fun/the challenge or is there some shortcoming of the existing apps you're looking to fix?
