
Noot: Spaced repetition flashcards - twee
http://www.noot.io/
======
clin_
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.

~~~
lawrencewu
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.

~~~
stephenbez
A few years back I created a basic open-source web spaced repetition app in
Django: [http://memizr.com/](http://memizr.com/)
[https://github.com/stephenbez/memizr](https://github.com/stephenbez/memizr)

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ISeemToBeAVerb
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.

~~~
beering
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.

~~~
barry-cotter
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.

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Rinum
This isn't even built yet? I feel cheated, I wish I didn't give my email
address.

~~~
geekfactor
If it was built already you've be asked to give your credit card number, not
your email address.

~~~
justin66
Let's be honest, if he needed to give a credit card number to try it, most
likely nobody would have bothered submitting it or voting it up.

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6d0debc071
How is this different from Anki?

[http://ankisrs.net/](http://ankisrs.net/)

~~~
lawrencewu
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.

~~~
jkscm
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?

~~~
lawrencewu
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.

~~~
zhubert
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](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.

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hngiszmo
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/](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.

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coherentpony
I read the homepage and I still don't know what this does. Spaced repetition?

~~~
dazmax
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.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition)

also:
[http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...](http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all)

~~~
coherentpony
Thanks!

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chrizbot
You should check out our implementation of our own SRS for learning how to
read and write Chinese at
[http://whizzlearning.com](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.

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Tr4pSt3R
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](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](http://www.memolyapp.com)

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jaredklewis
Looks cool.

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?

Best of luck with the project!

~~~
lawrencewu
Thanks a lot! I just commented on the motivation for this project:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7127884)

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riffraff
missing specifier in homepage: how is this better than <a million other SRS
software> ?

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bjz_
Will it support latex math?

