Popling was recently featured in the Make Use Of directory of cool applications. If you can, take a minute to drop by their site and digg, stuble, twitt and/or add the site to delicious, so’s popling can reach the Make Use Of home page!
In the last few days, I’ve created a few simple Hindi poplings from wikitravel’s Hindi phrasebook. They are great for travelers who want to interact with locals, or people just gettings started learning Hindi.
All vocabulary and phrases are transliterated to roman characters which means you don’t have to dicipher that lovely script. You can however see the script in the notes if you have a compatible font installed.
For the web geeks out there, Userfocus (a usability consultants and training center), created a usability trivia popling. It’s short, but refreshes some usability concerns that should be on all web dev and designers minds. I shudder to think about all the usability errors I’ve introduced to the Popling website and application. 
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…
Everyone knows it’s much easier to learn when you are immersed in your subject matter. Popling widgets aim to place the stuff you are learning where you’ll see it frequently… your blogs, your start pages and other pages around the web.
Add a widget to your start page and you’ll see recent cards every time you open your browser. Put them on your blog or website, and your friends can see what you are learning and help you along. You can see mine in the sidebar of this blog. Roll over the cards to reveal the answer!
Widgets currently work on iGoogle, Blogger blogs and sites you can paste Javascript script into. I’d like to make more sites available, so let me know what your favorite startpage or website is in the comments below and I’ll try to add it to the list!
If you’ve installed Popling, you’ve also installed Adobe Air, which means you can get lots of great apps for doing things like updating your twitter status, building photobooks, tracking time and well… just about anything.
To help you wade through all the applications available, check out the beautifully designed refreshingapps.com. Their review of AlertThingy (which helps you manage your ‘lifestream’) got me started using the service.
Since letting Popling out of my virtual backyard, it’s had a great week first week:
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.
After a long absence caused by a deadly combination of summer time, quite a few trips to Baja and too much client work, I’m back on it. Today, I have for you a new release of the desktop application that allows you to:
As always, bug reports are most appreciated!
