Interface Rating:

The interface is very clean and mac-like. The idea of libraries and smart folders should be very familiar to just about every mac user by now.

There is also tagging support and quite a few ways to test yourself on the material you’ve entered. The cards look like cards and there is a certain eye candy aspect to that.

My problems with the interface is the lack of really good keyboard integration: both in entering and editing the content and quizzing yourself. Too many modifier keys are used in entering the cards and editing them. There are also way to many modifier keys used in quizzing. There needs to be some more thought put into the design of the keyboard shortcuts.

In short, while the interface is mac-like and generally looks good, usability could be better.

Functionality Rating:

The categories of funtionality that I will be looking at are based on the bambooapps website, which is essentially the entry and manipulation of vocabulary terms.

Entry

Entering the data is both easy and frustrating. The keyboard shortcut command-n is the normal choice for creating a new item in most apps, but in Keep Your Word it creates a new dictionary, not a new word. Command-a is the shortcut for creating a new word, and there is no option to change it. Entering the foreign word and the corresponding native word into the list is easy, but adding other metadata is much more work than it should be. To add tags and comments you must click to another part of the app or use the keyboard shortcuts to navigate to a certain field, you can’t simply tab over the tags or comments fields. As much as I like the interface of the app, and as much as I like apps with one unified window, there has to be a more streamlined way to enter the data into the app.

I used the import from CSV feature to enter most of the vocabulary into the app. It worked fairly well, but there were some issues. I had some blank tags in my new words, which I attribute to the process I was using to make the CSV file, but it was somewhat annoying. While Keep Your Word is clear about the order the data goes in, it would be very helpful if it offered the ability to change the order of the input fields.

Data entry works, but is more cumbersome than it needs to be.

Organization

In terms of organizing the hundreds of terms that will probably be entered into the app, Keep Your Word does a pretty good job. Groups, smart groups, tags, searching, and more make it easy to organize all the vocabulary in ways that should be obvious to most mac users. No complaints here.

Quizzing

The crucial ability of any flash card program is quizzing users on the items they’ve entered. Keep Your Word has several ways to do this, but none that feel satisfying to me. There are three ways to quiz yourself on your terms: first, flash cards.

Flipping the cards works as expected, but marking your progress is a pain because the keyboard shortcuts, again, use too many modifier keys and there are no GUI buttons to make it easier. The second method is a quiz with the flash cards.

Selecting one of the options flips the card, but the app doesn’t keep track of if you got it right or not. I was also unable to find what selecting right or wrong on the card does to the card in looking through the documentation. Finally, Keep Your Word will generate a printable worksheet of terms. Here is what a portion of the print page looks like.

This is a handy feature I haven’t seen in most other flash card apps. It’s especially good for people who are more comfortable with a pencil and paper to work than their computer. This makes the contents of the app portable, which is also enhanced with the native iPhone client.

iPhone Client

Bambooapps offers an iPhone client for free to augment Keep Your Word. It syncs with the desktop client over the local network, though it only syncs word that are in a collection of some sort (i.e. it won’t sync the entire library by default). It also organizes the cards by collection and allows you to search through the cards.

Reviewing the cards is pretty self explanatory, you tap the card and it flips over.

There is also some basic options to set the font and number of cards to be reviewed. The iPhone client preforms as advertised, and adds value to the package, especially since bambooapps gives it away. The only feature I wish it had is tracking of your progress with the cards. Though this should also coincide with improved tracking of progress in the app.

Sharing

Keep Your word also has a website where users can share dictionaries of vocabulary terms with other users called wordsparade. There are some good dictionaries available and it does enhance the utility of the program.

Value Rating:

Bambooapps is offering Keep Your Word for $25. This is one of the more expensive flash card apps, since others like Genius and Anki are offered for free, and iFlash costs $15. To be fair, the iPhone app is part of the price of the desktop app, and there is the sharing service, which also adds value. But I think they could stand to be more competitive with other apps that are easier to use.

Conclusion Overall Rating:

The Interface is very mac-like and pretty, but it’s hampered by clumsy keyboard shortcuts and some interesting design choices. I think the app suffers from confusion about it’s workflow. Most all apps have a certain workflow that users are encouraged to follow, this makes the features of the app easy to use and more intuitive. The problem with Keep Your Word is that the app has an ill-defined workflow that leads the program to feel clumsy in places. Anki is my flash card program of choice, and perhaps I’m biased towards apps that keep track of your progress for you, but I think that adding meta-data to the words could be better and tracking your progress while reviewing the words could be done much better.

While Keep Your Word does what it says it does, it lacks an element of polish that keeps it from being exceptional, though there is definite potential it.

We have problems remembering things. David Alan made the point that our brain is good at making decisions but terrible at retaining information. But when we do have to memorize something, there are many strategies for doing so. Flash cards are one of the most common approaches, and this is where Anki comes in. It’s program that knows when to show you a card based on how well you remebered it last time and how many times you’ve seen it in the past. There is even a free web-service which can sync your cards with the desktop. I can even access my cards on my iPod. This is not a native mac app, but it won’t look too out of place your desktop. Anki is available to download here for most platforms.