The MacReviewCast #237: Macworld Expo, Ripit, Pastor, iCasual, Freeware

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 realize 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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