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

Users learning Kanji need big type sizes to see the characters clearly. This is possible in the Popling desktop app preferences:

Click the gear icon (app preferences) in the top right corner
In the preferences pane, find the ‘theme’ drop down and select the ‘large vocab’ theme

That should increase the size enough to help you see characters correctly.

If enough people request this feature, I can add it to the web interface as well.

- Happy learning!

I’ve updated Popling to version 0.5043 with some bug fixes and a new feature.

New Styles Preference
I’ve included a new styles preference that allows you to select different color schemes and font settings for the app. For people learning Kanji and/or vocabulary there is a special style called Large Vocab that will make those hard to read characters bigger. The styles available should grow in the future.

Fixes
This release also fixes a bug in the prefs when window which caused the save button to be difficult to click. Also accidental selecting of text in the notify window and the preferences tab should be fixed as well.

New version of the desktop beta available… .0517, fixes problems new users had entering user and pass with beta version. Like the previous beta, this one isn’t for the shy or those expecting error free software.

After a few weeks of hard work, a beta of the new desktop app is ready to be tested. I’ve completely rewritten the interface, enhanced stability and added a few small features.

If you don’t mind helping me work through some bugs, sending me the odd log file and commenting profusely about what you’ve found, visit the new Desktop Beta page. I’m looking forward to your comments and suggestions!