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Keep Your Word: Flash Cards for the Mac

Tim (Surfbits) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:55:46 +0000

Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast here, hosted at podfeet.com.
This week we’re going to look at a flash card application for the Mac called Keep Your Word from http://bambooapps.com/kyw/
bambooapps.com/kyw. I really like flash card applications for some reason. I really do need to spend some quality time with one because, believe it or not, I have a complete blind spot about arithmetic. I took two years of calculus and aced it without breaking a sweat, but ask me to add 5 plus 8 and I’ll start to cry! I blame it on New Math.

Hopefully you’re either too young or too old to have had New Math inflicted upon you. Here was the brilliant idea - instead of making you memorize all of your math tables, they thought it would be better to teach you how to figure it out. So here’s how it worked - you did have to learn a few things, like everything that adds to 10. So 8+2=10, 7+3=10. But once you learned those, they stopped teaching you any more. So if you had to add the dreaded 5+8, you were supposed to think, ok, 8 is actually the same as 5+3, so 5+5 = 10, then throw in the 3 and you get 13. Not too hard, but understand that EVERY time I see 8+5 I have to do all that mental juggling instead of just simply KNOWING the answer. Think about it like if you had to read phonetically every day. I do math that way every day.

Now of course since I’m a brilliant engineer, I can’t REALLY do that so instead I try to pretend that I actually did memorize my addition tables, so I guess, and about 50% of the time I get the right answer. It’s very embarrassing. So that long drawn out story about my handicap in life thanks to the two year span they pushed New Math until sanity returned to the US school systems was all by way of saying that I need a flash card program to help me finally learn my math tables! Let’s see if Keep Your Word is the application for me.

Keep Your Word is intended for words not math but it works for both so we won’t hold the name against it! Keep Your Word is laid out like the lovely Mac applications we’ve come to expect. The left pane holds your library of words, classifications which I’ll explain later, and smart folders. The center pane is where you enter words and their definitions, along with tags and comments, and the right side pane started as a complete mystery to me, requiring research to understand. I’ll come back to that too.

Starting in the center pane, you enter “their word” and “your word”. I thought this was an odd way to describe the fields, because if you enter a word in their word, and a definition for example in your word, those became the front and back of the flash card. Not sure why they named it that way. You can enter tags for your entries, but they worked a little bit weird to me. If you tag entries, you can then create smart folders that group them together by those tags, but you can also do that by simply dragging the entries into a folder or group as they call it. They have a tag browser, but I didn’t immediately figure out how to use it - thought maybe it would be possible to drag tags from the tag browser to an entry but that didn’t work. The tag browser also didn’t pick up tags I’d created on existing entries, so for the life of me I didn’t know what it was for.

Adding entries was obvious but could have been easier. There’s a giant green plus button that says add word at the top, very standard, but it seemed intuitive to me that I should be able to click in the existing list to start typing. Maybe that would get harder after you had a lot of entries and the plus button would be easier. Removing a word was easy too with the big remove button.

Creating groups was harder than it needed to be - the left pane has the standard plus/minus buttons at the bottom leading you to believe you could add or delete groups or smart groups from there, but that button only worked if you had a group selected, so it would create a sub-group, which then you have to drag out to the top level again. Instead you’re expected to go up to File and select New Group, or use the keystroke command-shift-N or command-option-N for smart groups. Unfortunately new group doesn’t work at all using the keystroke - it asked me to name the group but it didn’t create the group. Smart Groups worked ok with the keystroke though. Oddly to edit the smart groups you can’t right click on it, and edit smart group isn’t under Edit where I would have expected it, instead it was under File. I guess they figured putting edit near where you create groups made more sense?

The folks at Bamboo Apps spent a lot of time on the options for doing your flash cards - for example I did sort of figure out what that right pane was - you can actually set an image for a flash card. It’s really cool - there’s a button that says iSight so you can take a picture of something to use for the flash card. I took a picture of me with my iPhone and made a flash card out of it. That was really cool - until I enabled viewing the flash cards as images, and then I realized they squashed the photos so I look about 40 pounds overweight! That’s a bit of a fail in my opinion. Even if it were just my iPhone that looked fat in the picture I think they need to fix the aspect ratio.

I had some trouble with Keep Your Word, had to quit and go back in again to get some menus to wake up. Not often, but it did happen.

Keep Your Word has a free iPhone application. I downloaded that from the iTunes store and they were very good about pointing out in big bold starred letters that the iPhone app has zero value if you don’t have the desktop application. I fired it up and it started searching for my Mac. It told me clearly to launch Keep Your Word, and then to tell it to sync from the Mac side. The instructions didn’t match what was on screen but I was able to figure it out. After telling the Mac to sync the Mac app tells you to go back to the iPhone and hit sync again. Seemed like a lot of back and forth, must be for security reason I suppose, but maybe hooking up the usb cable would have been easier, but less slick.

What wasn’t slick was what came through on the iPhone. I told it to give me everything from the application. It duplicated one of my multiplication cards, and didn’t sync the photo card I did at al. I didn’t play with it at all after that, doesn’t matter what features it has if it doesn’t bring in your cards and it duplicates others.

Keep Your Word on the Mac has many different ways you can interact with it - Flash cards, quick quiz, printed test, written test, time challenge and memory. However I just felt like there were too many bells and whistles going on with this app with less attention to making it easy to simply enter words or other things to memorize.

I hate to pan a program but for $35 Keep Your Word from bambooapps.comhad enough funkiness to turn me off. I even tried reading the manual and I didn’t get much further into becoming adept at this tool.

Back in 2007/2008 I did several reviews of Flash Card applications and even a website for it and I found all of those more intuitive to use than Keep Your Word. Check out quizlet.com which is a great interactive website where you can enter what you have to learn, or use sets other people have created for the same classes you’re taking. They have a great tagline - “Quizlet eats flashcards for breakfast!” The social media aspect on this site is great - you can study for SATs using things other people have put up - heck, 5756 flash card sets were uploaded IN ONE DAY while I was there, and there were 478 users online.

If you want an app for your Mac, check out jMemorize, a funky little Open Source (free) Java based flash card program at sourceforge.net. If you want something a little more elegant, check out iFlash from Loopware.com. It’s $15, and when I reviewed it 3 years ago now it was excellent (my son used it all through High School) but now it has a free iPhone application too. I’ll have to go back and do a refresher review on that one soon.

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iKeeper: Keep Track of Your Info

Tim (Surfbits) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:54:13 +0000

Hi kids, Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Podcast here, hosted at http://podfeet.com! It's been AGES since I've been on — have you missed me? Well, I've missed you. I really love the Mac Reviewcast. Well let's see what we have on the ticket today.

As always we have to start with a problem to be solved. The problem I have that I'd like to have solved is a way to keep track of all the license codes I have for all the software I load. A nice hard drive failure, or a clean system install and where are you without all your license codes? I used to use RapidoSerial to keep all of this information, but the developers have dropped the project and so there hasn't been an update in a year and a half. After I had to bail on it, I sadly pasted all of my data into Excel. It's not as bad as you think, but it's certainly not ideal. The worst part is that I'm too cheap to buy the latest version of Office just for Excel, so I'm running an old version that takes forever to launch in Snow Leopard.

Now how about another scenario — you buy a Mac and decide that you want to roll the dice on buying AppleCare until right before the first year is up, and only then pay for the extra 2 years. You'd like to have some easy way to keep track of when that warranty is up. And what about all those internet passwords? You've got to keep track of those too.

Enter iKeeper from yenco.com. Mike Yenco, the developer, created iKeeper to scratch his own itch — he had a drawer full of scraps of paper with warranty information and license codes, so many he could barely get the drawer shut. Let's take a look at iKeeper.

iKeeper has a very simple interface. There are basically two modes - Internet, and Product. Internet is where you store passwords for websites, and Product is where you store license keys and warranty information.

Before we get in too deep, at least half of you are going to be thinking, "Why would I like iKeeper better than 1Password?" I asked Mike this question, and prefaced it with the fact that I don't actually use 1Password. He wrote back and confessed that he hasn't used it either, and that while he's aware of it, he can't really comment on the differences between his product and theirs. He went on to say:

"My goal is to focus on and design the best software I can to accomplish a task and make each version better than the last based on what I see Apple designing in terms of interface, based on features I would love and have the capability to add at the time, and most importantly based on my efforts to respond to user feedback. I'd like to think that makes my software rather unique and not a carbon copy of other apps or feature sets. I'd also like to think that the Mac market is big enough (and growing larger every day) for software approached from different points of view to solve some of the same challenges." So don't expect a comparison here, but look at iKeeper with fresh eyes and see if it fits a need for you.

Starting with Internet mode, you have fields for Site Name, Site Link, Label, username and password plus a date you entered it, and the expiration date. My first question was how secure this application is if I want to store my internet passwords in it. I asked Mike what encryption algorithm he used, hoping to hear words like 128bit AES encryption. I have no idea what that means actually but I know it makes security people happy. Instead he came back and said he's using blowfish. Um, ok, isn't that the guy that sings with Hootie? Of course I turned to my security expert, Bart. When I asked him whether blowfish is any good he said, "It's the cat's meow. It's the best practice state of the art." He also said, "I think if you whispered blowfish in Steve Gibson's ear he'd wet his pants!" If you don't know Steve's work, he's a well known security expert and does the Security Now! podcast. Great - now we know this is a secure way to store our passwords, we can keep going.

Once you make an internet entry, you see the list of all your entries with website, username, and password showing on screen. Your password is not hidden with those little dots, so make sure you don't work on this with someone lurking over your shoulder to pick up your bank account password! There are two little symbols next to each entry. One is an arrow, which is very cool — click that and it takes you right to the website. The other icon is an "I" that you click to open the entry. I would prefer just being able to double click the entry, I kept naturally doing that, forgetting that I had to click on the I instead. Opening the entry lets you view all of the info you've entered and edit if you like.

I think the Internet module will help me keep passwords in one place, I've always done it on a wing and a prayer, and half the time I can't remember how to get into my sites! Now where I really got excited was the Products mode. In Products you enter a lot more data but it's the stuff I really need to keep track of. In this module you enter the purchase date, whether there's a warranty, the product name, another a label. Then the good stuff — who it's registered to and the serial code. If you want you can also enter information about the company from whom you acquired the product — phone, email and a web link. Again if you enter a web link, then that nice little arrow in the full list view will take you right to their website.

Now expand your thoughts beyond the software world, and think about your refrigerator, or your car — entering the warranty date could be the difference between a serious problem later and reporting it now when it's under warranty. Unfortunately with iKeeper I couldn't figure out how to actually enter when the warranty was up. I had a purchase date and then a pulldown for days/weeks/months/years but no way to enter how MANY of those units till it was due. That was until I wrote to Mike and asked him about it. Turns out there's a grey area between Warranty and the units that if you click in you can enter the time period. That's one thing they could improve — it's not completely obvious where to click to enter information, some sort of indicator that there's a field there to enter info would be an improvement. Once he told me where to click I was able to set my warranty info on AppleCare to 3 years so I'll know when it's coming up. This is a feature I don't think I've seen in other standalone applications on the mac.

In the preferences you can set the defaults for when iKeeper should start getting worried about your warranty status — by default, your caution status turns from green to yellow when you get within 15 days of your warranty running out. I would like to see a feature where iKeeper also sends you an email warning you that a warranty is coming due, that way you don't have to depend on yourself to check iKeeper all the time to check on things.

iKeeper has a nice search functionality — makes it really easy to find your products or sites quickly. I did notice though that you have to be in the right mode to have a successful search. For example if the pulldown is set to product, but you're looking for an internet site, you won't find it. I'd like to see the search be global so I don't have to pay attention to that. iKeeper allows you to save your searches, which are then easily accessible in a little slide out drawer. There's one product I'm struggling with right now that I have to enter my serial number every time the developer does an update, the saved searches in iKeeper would save me a TON of time with that. I had one issue, I can't figure out an obvious way to get out of a saved search. There's no x box to click, no all button. The only way I figured out how to get out was to swap the product/internet mode pulldown, that seemed to let me out.

iKeeper has labels that you can apply to your products and internet sites, but they're a bit immature at this stage. You can create your own labels but not on the fly as you're entering a product, you have to go into preferences to add them. Oddly when you add a label in preferences it doesn't show up there until you exit prefs and go back in. I think that one is a little bug. In search you can use your label names to search, but that's about all you can do with them. You can't apply multiple labels to a single item, so they're not really like tags, they're more like categories really. I'd like to see this developed more too.

The help file in iKeeper is fantastic. Simple and quick to search, answered most of my questions right away. I know, it's not like me to read but I'm starting to realize that if I'm really going to dig into a review I really should scan the help file just so I don't miss any functionality!

I know I've nitpicked a few things in iKeeper but I really like the product. It will definitely fill a hole in my world at the very least for an easy place to drop in my software serial numbers, and a secure place to store my internet passwords. I may even start paying attention to my warrantees! Here's the best part, iKeeper is only $20 from yenco.com. It's perfectly priced for the functionality you'll gain and I have complete faith that Mike is a developer who will keep improving his products.

For more reviews like this, be sure to head on over to podfeet.com and subscribe to the NosillaCast Podcast. That is, AFTER listening to the Mac Reviewcast!

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