Forbidden countries
I went to Iran in 2011 and there they have no access to the android market and many other sites (blogspot, google-code, ...) are blocked by the site owners making the governmental blocking (facebook, twitter, ...) even worse.
For all victims of such unspecific embargos, my apk can be downloaded here.
Translations
Flux Cards now is localized to several languages but the completeness and quality
of the translations depends on people doing it. As soon as I make money with this
App, I will pay to translate to more languages but for now I'm happy for every
translator that just helps out with ten words over at
getlocalization.com ;)
About Spaced Repetition in Flux Cards
Spaced Repetition is the
gold standard in flashcards apps.
When practising cards, cards that are not known are repeated more often than the known cards.
Unfortunately only for iPhone there is a very nice comparison of many flashcard apps at
flashcardapps.info and they also explain spaced repetition quite well. Also notice how few apps actually have this elementary feature!
Ok, so what's so special about spaced repetition: Imagine you want to learn the 10,000 most common Italian words. You find the list and start repeating. When repeating, you will quickly get lost in words that you already know, searching for words being worth to be repeated.
With spaced repetition these groups of words will separate very quickly so you find yourself mostly practising hard and new words while you sometimes confirm that you still know an old word.
Our brains are designed to forget. That's actually one of its most important features :) Not actively practising a language means it will be forgotten. By challenging our brain from time to time we can tell it that we need this piece of information. By increasing the intervals of repetition, we can try to find a balance between boring over-repetition of what we know and the risk of not having that word ready when we need it.
flashcardapps.info also lists SRS-PLUS. What's PLUS? PLUS means that these apps will ask you, how well you knew a card to determine if the repetition interval should be increased a lot or only a little.
Well, in Flux Cards you are only asked if you know a card or not.
I'm convinced that asking how good you knew it is making things more complicated with little to no benefit. A card that I know very well I normally spend less than one second on each time I see it. bumping it to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 days is a matter of 6 seconds. If it is a duplicate, I should delete it and not bump it up to a month as it would render my statistics pointless (yes, I love stats :) )
Also the app should be able to tell how good I know a card by looking at its record. Cards that I barely get beyond 4 days apparently are tough cards but again I would not want it more complicated for my users. If this card suddenly doesn't double its repetition interval, this can also be frustrating as in the user's head the question "Do you know this card?" quickly turns into "Do you really want to practise this card more?".
Lastly I'm convinced that even as the
prediction of forgetting a card is not perfect, Flux Cards does a pretty damn good job at not annoying you with known cards even when you add many more or less easy cards to your routine per day.
You can download it from the market at