Tons of frustration

I love everything about this app in THEORY. The theoretical easy sync between devices, the theoretical study schedules, the multi-facets, reversable cards, it all sounds wonderful.

In practice I have never been more frustrated with an OS X or iOS app. Here’s my laundry list:

Sync: This has gotten a lot better (as in apparently it works now for iCloud, I use dropbox) I don’t know who’s fault this is, but the end results are the same. It used to be hit or miss whether it would sync or not, now it does. Each device constantly logs out so I’m always turning sync back on, entering my username and password, waiting for the long sync process to happen…

Study Schedule: Wonderful, but super easy to accidentally reset. Then you’re back to day one and this can be super discouraging when you have thousands of cards you’re studying. Once you commit to card template you had better not want to change it once you have some studying under your belt!

Reversable cards: once you finally figure out how to make a card reversible….. You can’t pick what side you want to come first, so if you’re studying a language, you’re stuck with random cues, so you can’t go from just side one to side two for one round, then side two to side one the next time, it’s always a random mix. If you switch a card/stack from a non-reversible template to a reversible template it starts your study schedule over.

There’s a big learning curve with all the features. Confusing options in weird places.

Navigation in the iOS app is a bit clucky. For example: if you’re studying a card and want to correct a typo or add something it’s a big ordeal.

Overall, if it worked as expected and described it would be amazing. Unfortunately it doesn’t. I’ve been using Mental Case since the first version and I’m always hoping they fix everthing with the next update (which are frequent, I’ll give them that). It does make all other flashcard apps seem feature poor and ugly, but after so much trouble I finally had state my irritations publicly. This is both it’s strength and down fall, it does a LOT, but it doesn’t do it well.

travlcas1 about Mental Case 2 — Flashcards for the Serious Student