Studies · Premium Flashcards 4+

Updated review

Updated review (initial review below)
After years of usage I still enjoy very much the program. I am now up to 7000 cards on many subjects with pictures, sounds, etc and syncing is a breeze. I am truly impressed. And the very few times I needed to get support, they were responsive and efficient.

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I had used Mental Case heavily and was happy with it so it took me a little time to switch to this updated iteration.
No regrets. Syncing has been greatly improved. It’s not perfect but I’ve never seen any perfect sync from any apps. Nevertheless it is working well.
As an anline plilot I have several thousands of cards on the airplane I fly, procedures, regulations…
It does the job quite well. Syncing between iPhone/iPad/Mac makes it really convenient to keep the "same level" of scheduled studies between machines. And with the iPhone I can use any downtime (van to/from the airport, sits between flights…) to make progress on my scheduled learning/recurrent program. Great app! Thanks to the design team.

Developer Response ,

Glad to hear you are happy with Studies. We always enjoy hearing stories of Studies making a genuine difference for customers.

Your data scrambled!

This would be the best flash card program out there if the programmers had been able to implement arrays and iCloud without corrupting your data. Tags, sides of cards, you name it, will be irretreviably scrambled by array indexing errors and broken references. Give something a tag and you will find it somewhere else, or everywhere else. Either iCloud simply can't do what they tried to do with this program, or this is a terrible implementation of what it can do, or both. All your database will be corrupt.

Poor performance with large decks

I loved this app until I hit about 500 cards. To be fair, about a third of my cards contain a picture. At this point, however, adding a card started taking 10-20 seconds, which didn’t fit my work flow. The switch to Anki wasn’t easy but was worth it. Anki, unlike Studies, handles large decks without blinking. I’m now up to 20k cards, also many with pictures, and there is absolutely no delay in performance. I also like the ability Anki has to grade a card as hard/moderate/easy and it’s database-like features which automate making similar cards.

Overall, Studies served me well when I only had a bit to learn, but once I started to depend on it to hold more info, it let me down.

Developer Response ,

500 cards is very few. We have customers with 20000 or more. If the app is feeling slow at this number, there is probably something going wrong somewhere. Adding a new card should take no more than half a second or so, no matter how many notes you have. You should contact our support to investigate (support@mentalfaculty.com).

I'm a bit suspicious of your motives with this review. Sounds like you stopped using Studies long ago, if you even used it, and are now simply advertising Anki.