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

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!

Hi all, a small bug caused the learn page loose retention requirements after cards had been reviewed 1 time. The bug is now fixed.

This should have only affected firefox add-on users and users of the web interface.

According to this article at Arstechnica, Medical researchers are manipulating electrical activity in the brain with electrodes and have found that stimulating the primary motor cortex can help people learn.

The authors focused on a learning task, one they describe as similar in principle to the process we go through when we learn a new sport. …One group of subjects received a current; the controls had electrodes attached, but received no current.

By the end of day one, those who had an anode placed near the primary motor cortex were already pulling away from their peers (a cathode had no effect), and had opened up a large and significant gap by the end of day five.

Can anyone get a good deal USB powered brain altering electrodes? On second thought, there may be some liability concerns here…

Since letting Popling out of my virtual backyard, it’s had a great week first week:

• The first Popling by someone I don’t know, HangulSounds was created to help you learn the sounds of the Koren alphabet. Thanks ub3rk!tten!
• 100 new users have signed up!
• The first comment on Popling’s getsatsifaction.com page was made, correcting some of my typos. Thanks BG77!

Speaking of comments, feel free to tell me about any problems you are having with Popling, or about any features you’d like to see. I’d love to hear from you!

Here’s a fun graph of the last 1000 pops by all of you! They Y access is the number of pops per user, the x is time. Colored dots represent different users.

Happy Popping!

My lastest trip to Baja was a blast, but it wasn’t without it’s problems. By the time we hit the small town of San Ignacio, I was low on gas. I had planned it that way so I would have a fresh tank for the long stretch of dirt road ahead, but I didn’t plan on the only PeMex (gasolinera) in a 50 mile radius being out of gas.

Rule number 5 for driving in Baja. Fill up when you can, because gas isn’t guaranteed anywhere.

The only way we could get to our destination was to go back the way we came 45 minutes, fill up and drive back to San Ignacio. This involved going back through the military checkpoint we had just come through. When we reached the checkpoint, the Federalies stationed there were very surprised to see us again, so I began telling them what had happened. When I got the to part about not wanting to wait until the station would receive a shipment of gas, I realized I didn’t know the Spanish word for ‘wait’.

I asked a soldier who was sitting on the ground cradling his machine gun: Como se dice ‘wait’? (How do you say ‘wait’).

“Waaait” was his reply, and all the other soldiers began laughing hysterically. I guess I should have added ‘en Espanol’ to the end! For the rest of the inspection, each Federalie took his turn saying ‘Waaait’, to much laughter from all of us.

When I  drove off, someone yelled ‘Waaait!’. I immediately hit the breaks on reflex. The effect was similar to air dropping Robin Williams circa 1980 on a mid-west highschool talent show. Everyone was crying with laughter. So I grabbed my iPhone, looked up ‘wait’ in the Ultralingua English to Spanish dictionary (which I highly recommend) and yelled back “ESPERA!!!!”, to more laughs.

We drove through that check point twice more on the trip and every time each of the Federalies had their turn at saying, ‘waaait!’ and laughing. Each time, I replied ‘Espera!’. I don’t thing I’ll ever forget that word.

Today I rolled out Pro Accounts. Pro users can subscribe to unlimited Poplings, see no advertisements and can create Poplings from their Most Missed Cards. That feature right there is worth it folks. Pro Accounts are only 20 bucks a year, payable through PayPal.

To celebrate and thank the alpha testers, I’ve waved my magic MySQL wand threw a dash of PHP over my shoulder and made you all Pro users. Thanks for your bug reports and your patience.

For the last few months (in between bouts of paying the rent), I’ve been reworking Popling to be less obtrusive but still provide that extra POP of motivation. I think I’ve met that goal and I am ready to release Popling to a slightly bigger audience. Welcome guys and gals.

I have to admit, I’m a bit nervous. Please keep in mind Popling is just getting started and is currently only one guy with a day job, sometimes a bunch of day jobs. That said, I’ll be working to integrate media like audio and pictures, improve interaction between the AIR application and the web app, squash all those pesky bugs, try and make some money with this thing and add more content. If you don’t want to wait on me though, you can always make your own. I’d appreciate your advice on anything related to the site. Just leave a comment or make a post in the appropriate forum.

If you didn’t get an invite code, leave a comment. I’ll get one to you as soon as I can determine the system is running fast enough for the current users.

I’ve always wanted to learn Spanish. I travel to Mexico often, live in a culture where I am surrounded by the Spanish language and I know tons of Spanish speakers. What I have always lacked however, was the motivation to consistently study the language.

I’m not entirely sure how I got there, but I had a eureka moment about the problem that went something like this… “I’m online most of my day, so what if my web browser could teach me Spanish?”.

I started by creating a browser plugin to ‘pop’ open a new tab with a quiz about a Spanish word every few minutes. Next I built some tools to help me learn faster. The first was a retention requirement to help me remember the word I’d just seen. Then came a banked list for words I knew and a hardlist for words that I needed to study more. Then I made it easy to make my own quizzes and flashcards (which I call Poplings) containing content like common phrases and pronunciation.

All these tools started to form the type of application I had hoped it would be. Popling doesn’t make me follow a set structure and I don’t have to set aside time to study, it just fits my right into my day. The coolest thing though, is that it can help you learn anything you want too… French, German, Math, Art History, 3 letter Scrabble words, or whatever you can find or create a Popling for.

Popling is currently in a closed beta version so I can work the kinks out. If you want to be notified when it goes live, leave a comment here.