Cramberry: the blog

Cramberry now supports math notation with LaTeX. To use LaTeX in your flash cards, surround your latex markup with “[latex]” and “[/latex]“. When you study, your LaTeX markup will be converted into proper math notation. For best results, use a modern browser. More advanced (simpler, actually) LaTeX support is coming soon. That’s all.

We weren’t planning on rolling out this feature until at least a few weeks after our recent update, but after working on it for a while, we decided it was ready for release. Hot on the heels of our big update, we present to you: the redesigned add-cards page.

What’s new?

1. Simple, one-line card mode: This is the equivalent of our old “standard mode”. You type a front, hit tab, type the back, repeat. It’s limited to four cards per entry (instead of submitting each card individually in Javascript), but it’s a lot simpler to use than the old one.
2. Long mode: You can add multi-line flash cards in long mode, as well as use more advanced Textile formatting. Similar to our old “advanced mode”.
3. Translate mode: This one is super-cool. Choose a language in the drop-down menu. Type the front, and Cramberry auto-translates what you’ve typed and fills in the back for you. Save 50% of your typing when learning foreign languages!

Here’s what it looks like:

As you may have hard by now, we just released a major update to our website and iOS apps. Over the next few days, we’ll be discussing each major change on this blog.

To begin with, let’s take a look at the new studying page.

Our old studying page worked well enough for most people. So why did we change it? From the feedback we received, users had 3 main complaints with the studying interface:

1. It was slow. The old studying page required a round-trip to the server with each new card. Most of the time, this wasn’t a major issue. But occasionally, individual cards could take multiple seconds to load. Not good for studying.
2. It was confusing. The old page had only one box, which displayed either the front or the back at any time. This meant that if you flipped a card to look at the back, the front disappeared.
3. It wasn’t transparent. The old page would drown you in an endless stream of questions and answers until you gave up or finished. There was no way to check your progress, or to see how well you had been doing.

In Cramberry 2, we redesigned this page with those points in mind. The result looks like this:

(click to enlarge)

The new page doesn’t need to wait for the server to load each card, so it’s lightning-fast. We expanded the page to show both the front and the back of the current card clearly, even when the back was hidden. This change alone helped to make Cramberry’s studying model much easier to understand for new users. You’ll also notice that we give you statistics in the corner about your progress, so you know exactly how far you are.

We hope you find these improvements useful. Keep checking this blog and follow us on Twitter for more information on new Cramberry features.

(this post includes screenshots!)

After months of effort, we’re finally putting the finishing touches on the next major update to Cramberry. This update, which we expect to release sometime next week, will include new versions of the website, the iPhone app, and the iPad app.

Several months ago, we asked you which features you wanted to see improved and which you didn’t need. Based on your input, we redesigned the website and iOS apps from scratch. We took out features which weren’t really used, like card scheduling, and focused our efforts on refining the ones which were used the most, like studying and adding cards.

The most significant features missing in the new version (because few people used them):

1. Drag-and-drop studying (“learn mode”) on the iPhone and iPad apps
2. Card scheduling (“study this set again in x days”- now, you can study whenever you want)

We’ve added a bunch of new features in this update, too:

1. Support for long cards in the iPhone and iPad apps (they scroll!)
2. Support for formatting in the iPhone and iPad apps (textile)
3. New, faster and more robust syncing
4. Completely redesigned look and feel
5. Performance improvements on the website (it’s a lot faster now, really!)
6. and many more small improvements…

The transition will require converting and migrating every account, so there may be several hours of downtime next week. During this time, you will not be able to access the website or sync the iPhone/iPad apps. If you have any important tests next week, be sure to study in advance or print a copy of your flash cards!

Some screenshots of next week’s update (click to enlarge):