Archive for April, 2010

Introducing the Popling Google Chrome Extension!

Friday, April 30th, 2010

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.

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Learn Spanish Flash Cards With Audio!

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

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.

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Now 1 Bajillion times faster!

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

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.

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Web Interface Changes

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

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!

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Thanks For the Feedback!

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

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

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