Thursday, July 03, 2008
Retrospective, Part 1
Contrary to appearances, Card in Hand is not dead - it is however slow going. But, things are changing, and have changed so much over the past 3 years that I thought it might make sense to document the life of CardInHand (and its predecessor). From the beginning. And so...
FlashCards 0.93
Back in the Fall of 2004 I decided to take a Spanish class. How exciting. Immediately I realized that I needed some flashcards, and dutifully filled out quite a number. But, I had an old PalmIII and thought that there's gotta be some good study program out there. At first, I couldn't find any mostly because I wasn't looking hard enough and also b/c, hey, I'm a programmer - I like to make things. I threw together a program with SuperWaba, a mobile Java runtime.
FlashCards v0.93
My goal was to have the Palm monitor my progress through the flashcards. Pretty quick I learned that there was an algorithm that did just this. It was called the Leitner method. My program, called 'FlashCards', duplicated this method.
FlashCards v0.93: Edit card data screen.
This first version let you create your own cards on the Palm, and it would selectively quiz you on the flash cards based on how you had done before.
FlashCards v0.93: list of decks of cards on the Palm.
On the whole, the program did exactly what I needed it to. Unfortunately, it was pretty hard to see exactly what it was it was doing. How was it selecting the cards you saw? How was I doing? My next version of the program set to address these problems.
FlashCards 0.93
Back in the Fall of 2004 I decided to take a Spanish class. How exciting. Immediately I realized that I needed some flashcards, and dutifully filled out quite a number. But, I had an old PalmIII and thought that there's gotta be some good study program out there. At first, I couldn't find any mostly because I wasn't looking hard enough and also b/c, hey, I'm a programmer - I like to make things. I threw together a program with SuperWaba, a mobile Java runtime.
FlashCards v0.93
My goal was to have the Palm monitor my progress through the flashcards. Pretty quick I learned that there was an algorithm that did just this. It was called the Leitner method. My program, called 'FlashCards', duplicated this method.
FlashCards v0.93: Edit card data screen.This first version let you create your own cards on the Palm, and it would selectively quiz you on the flash cards based on how you had done before.
FlashCards v0.93: list of decks of cards on the Palm.On the whole, the program did exactly what I needed it to. Unfortunately, it was pretty hard to see exactly what it was it was doing. How was it selecting the cards you saw? How was I doing? My next version of the program set to address these problems.
