The latest release of Popling for Chrome is hosted at Google:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kiffjebdnjehclenjgkbohiimgmjeebi
If you’ve installed a previous beta version, you’ll need to uninstall the old version then install the new Google hosted version.
The new version includes numerous bug fixes as well as a start and pause feature.
Today I’m launching an exciting new feature: audio in the Popling desktop app. It’s been a few months coming (the web interface has had audio for a while now) but it’s finally done! You can set the audio to automatically play in the app preferences and pause the audio when it’s playing. For me, audio on flash cards has become the most important addition I’ve made to Popling and I think you’ll find so as well.
Like audio in the website, Audio is available only to pro users. At 20 dollars a year though, audio it’s the same price as 5 fancy lattes, 4 trips to the burger joint or only one book on learning Spanish that ships with no audio!
The bad news is, you’ll have to manually uninstall the old desktop app to install this version. Here’s to how to uninstall the old app:
Mac
Go to Applications folder
Throw away popling.app
Install new Desktop app
Windows
Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Applications
Find Popling and click remove
Install new Desktop app
Another exciting day here at Popling! I’ve added audio pronunciations to seven German glash card sets totaling 593 audio pronunciations! Again, each card is pronounced normally, then slowly, syllable by syllable. Audio is currently only available in the web interface, but I’m hoping to add support in the desktop app in the next month.
As with the Spanish flash cards, audio is only available only to pro users. The twenty dollars a year is worth it to work on your pronunciation, plus you get a ton of other great features.
If you would like more German flash cards, leave a comment linking to the specific flash card set! Current German flash cards with audio are:
100 German Descriptive Qualities
German Basic Phrases
German Numbers
German Basic Operations
German Picturable Things A to K
German Basic Nouns S to Z
German Basic Opposites
Next to get audio: French and Japanese flash card sets.
There’s a new way to Pop and it could be the best yet… the Popling extension for Google Chrome! What’s so great about this new way to view flash cards? Chrome allows Popling to show notifications over all your apps just like the desktop application. Clicking a notification displays the Learn page in the browser, which means you also have access to the new Spanish Audio flash cards (French, German and Japanese audio is on it’s way). Also, Chrome is arguably the fastest, most secure browser out there!
You should install Popling for Chrome and test it out.
Chrome is still in beta, and so is the Popling extension for it so I need your help to work out the bugs. If you find something that doesn’t seem right, leave a comment here, or in the forums.
It’s an exciting day here at Popling! I’ve just added audio pronunciations to twenty Spanish Flash card sets. That totals over 900 audio pronunciations containing both words and phrases! Each card is pronounced normally, then slowly, syllable by syllable. Audio is currently only available in the web interface, but I’m hoping to add support in the desktop app in the next month.
The audio is only available only to pro users, so get your pro account today and learn to pronounce those words you’ve been memorizing. It will take your Spanish to a whole new level.
The flash cards were read by a friend who lives in the mainland Mexico city of Tehuacán. I think you’ll find his voice is clear and friendly! I’ll be adding more voices to the cards as well, so if you’d like these recordings in a different dialect, please feel free to leave a comment.
Key Spanish Phrases, numbers, Phrases That Trip You Up,
Commonly Missed Spanish Words , Spanish Basic Operations,
Days of the week and 15 more sets…
Next to get audio: French, German and Japanese flash card sets.
You’ll notice Popling is at least one, if not two bajillion times faster since just this morning.
I’ve achieved this boost by removing the complicated card selection feature from the site for all users. For the time being, cards will be selected linearly. The much cooler algorithm will find it’s way back to the site when I have the little MySQL gremlins worked out of it.
I’ve just launched a round of changes to the Popling web interface. The biggest is a temporary change to how Popling selects which cards you view.
For free accounts, Popling will temporarily select cards linearly. This is to speed the server up for everyone. Pro accounts will continue to get the benifits of seeing their hard list and recently missed cards more often.
Other changes include:
Retention Settings: Flash card set creators set the retention (requiring a user to type the question in) default, but users can still turn retention on and off in flash card sets they subscribe to.
Immediate retention, no review round: If you have retention on, you immediately see it, no review cards first, so study the popling once before diving in!
Bugs: lots of little fixes.
As always, let me know if you see any bugs!
I’ve received a TON of great feedback over the last week. I want to thank everyone who took the time to send me both suggestions and errors. Your feedback is really helping me make this the service what it should be. Here are some of the most popular requests and voiced concerns from the last week:
Speed. It’s slow. I’m working on getting a faster server going and speeding up code on the back end. This is my top Popling priority. I may need to make some cuts in free account features to keep the speed up for PRO users. Sorry!
Difficulties logging into the desktop app. There’s definitely a bug in the desktop app that rejects passwords. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but if it happens to you, quit the app and try again. Make sure both user and pass are the correct case.
Offline card access in the Desktop version. This one’s tough. It’s a big project and I can’t get the time away from the day job to tackle it for a little while.
Display the entire question and answer in the Popup window. This has been requested from several users. The problem is, retention is difficult to do in the poppup window context and the retention is the ONLY way I’ve been able to learn as much Spanish as I have. This is mostly requested by users of ‘Display only’ flash card sets who don’t need retention. I can see why they want it so, I’m going to try and work out showing the entire question first. Its going to take some time though.
That’s just a few of the items I’m hearing. Thanks for staying patient while I work through some of the bugs and add new features. Also, I’m trying to be as quick with the support as I can… so drop me a line or post in the forums or blog posts.
Thanks!
-rob
A site called komando.com linked to Popling on Friday and sent so much traffic to the site, I didn’t have time to thank them. I immediately went into tech support mode helping out all the new users who were signing up. Thanks to their great feedback, that process is now much easier.
Komando is the site of radio talk show host and author Kim Komando who seems to be doing a great job of help ordinary people be better geeks. In addition to her radio show, her site features a daily digital downloads, cool sites and videos, news and more.
You should go check it out.
Thanks for the traffic Kim and team!
New feature for the web interface to Popling’s ‘flash card‘ engine…
Remember Me logins!
Check remember me and log in to have your login set for a few weeks. This means web interface users won’t have to keep logging in to see your flash cards. It’s been my pet peeve with the site for some time now, and I’m happy to have put it behind us.
Yay!
