Preview: Mnemosyne for Maemo

Hello everybody.

Today I’d like to proudly present you the result of Google Summer of Code developement cycle from my good friend — Max Usachev.

He was working at porting something very useful and unique to the maemo platform — card-based education app called “Mnemosyne”
and I’ve gladly helped him with visual appearance of this port and I’d like to show you the results. But first of all some facts bout Mnemosyne itself.

The Mnemosyne software resembles a traditional flash-card program to help you memorise question/answer pairs, but with an important twist: it uses a sophisticated algorithm to schedule the best time for a card to come up for review. Difficult cards that you tend to forget quickly will be scheduled more often, while Mnemosyne won’t waste your time on things you remember well.

Maemo port is a full-featured stand-alone app with touchscreen oriented interface. Let’s start from the general screen:

Learn is the main mode, where you’ll interact with various kinds of cards, trying to improve your skills and knowledge. For example, you can not only try to remember words, but also sounds or pictures:

When you’ll hit “Show answer” – you can rate your answer from 0 to 5, so if you’ll rate it 5, this card will appear much more rarely so you’ll be able to continue learning stuff without senseless repeating. Also you can easily edit, add or remove card right from this screen (if you suddenly remembered something or noticed the mistake)

Also you can do it Input mode with some advanced features.

You can create one-sided card (simple question/answer type), two-sided card (question and answer can appear randomly, very good feature for language learning), *closed* card (For example, you’ve typed in “*London” is the capital of *Great Britain*. Each word covered with * can be hidden or visible. It’s similar to “two-sided card” but you can use as much closed words as you like) and finaly – [transcription] card where you’ll need to pronounce the word and then listen to the right answer. Yes, there is a text-to-speech functionality! We’ll come back later o it.

Next important feature of Mnemosyne is syncing option. You can easily sync portable version with the desktop one and get all of your cards and stats right on the device.

Settings contain two tabs with options for text-to-speech and general settings.

Text-to-speech options

General settings

About andQuit buttons are really obvious and I can’t tell you a lot bout them :)

Expect Mnemosyne for Maemo soon in Extras near you :)

In conclusion I’d like to say that Max has made a hell of a job, fixing bugs, collaborating with desktop Mnemosyne developers and I’m really happy that I had a chance to help him with this awesome peice of software. That’s for reading, and good luck.

P.S.: Very special thanks goes to Ed Bartosh – without him this stuff won’t ever happen!