Show HN: I built FlipCards – a flashcard app with variations to improve learning

1. The landing page and app UI is beautiful and fast, great work.

2. Never require signup for trying an app, especially for a Show HN.

3. I see the value in trying to prevent memorization of Q → A patterns, but creating cards takes time. Instead of making 1 card, I now need to make 3, that triples the amount of time spent. Additionally, why do variations need to be associated to a parent card? What's wrong with flattening your card structure?

4. The annual subscription price seems a little high, especially since there are so many free SRS programs out there.

5. Memorization of Q → A patterns can be mitigated by other means, such as making more open ended cards, requiring longer answers, or by simply trying not to just memorize and forcing yourself to think about the card and it's applications.

> Would you use an app like this for learning? Would I use it? Perhaps. Would I pay for it? No. Anki has so many more features, plugins, local control over my data, and... it's free.

The meaning of this is obvious to you, while being obscure for me. Perhaps have a link within your site to expand on the meaning of 'Decorating Cards'. ( I assume it is prettifying. Perhaps it is initial card creation, or bulk loading. Perhaps it is includes other steps. ) Describe how your software is superior to putting minimal effort into using default anki cards with text and images.

What is this app on? Is it just a website or is it a mobile app? Is it going to work offline?

What does "decorating cards" mean? I haven't heard that term before but it seems to be a key part of your selling point.

Also, how does adding variations to a card in your app differ to just adding variations as new cards in another app?

The screenshot of the app could be a lot bigger (Firefox mobile). There's two layers of blank space around so I can't actually read the text without zooming.

"Most apps use reverse cards (Q->A, A->Q)" I don't understand what this means.

I like the pricing scheme. It's simple. The only thing I would change is to add rent to buy. E.g. if you pay 20 for a year and then decide you want lifetime it's only 30. This helps to avoid the situation where 50 is too much for someone when they aren't sure they'll keep using it but 20 feels like a bad deal if they end up using it a lot and get the lifetime anyway (they've "wasted" 20).

I only ask because I've implemented various sm-2 packsges in Python, Typescript and Rust and have made them available under the MIT if anyone's interested: https://github.com/orgs/open-spaced-repetition/repositories?...

(Also, nerdy aside, but the original sm-2 technically had 6 possible ratings)

It's part of my AnkiAiUtils: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/AnkiAIUtils

I'm taking this to extreme with Vocabuo[1] for language learning. For a single word, I have cloze cards, reverse cloze, definition cards, dialogs, audio and a few more.

At some point, I'd like to take the card type into account when calculating the next repetition stage, but that's a bit far into the future.

[1] https://vocabuo.com

I’ve been exploring a similar idea, feel free to reach out if you ever want to talk.

https://rickcarlino.com/notes/creating-micro-lessons-from-sp...

Without an export option (which I didn't see listed in the features), you're going to have to convince people that your walled garden is worth the price of admission.

Related, I used to have a dedicated flashcard study application that could handle "card variations" but it was a hassle since the app was desktop only. With a bit of JS and custom card types, you can actually do this in Anki now which gives the benefit of dedicated mobile app, syncing, etc.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/163606663

I experimented with autogenerating variations of a single card using LLMs but at the end of the day, the best flashcard is probably the one you write yourself. (similar to mnemonics)

This is where Anki falls short for language study, because we as language learners also want to look at listening & reading comprehension as well as pronunciation.

Any reason why you're using SM-2 over FSRS? In Emurse we're using an algorithm similar to SM-2, mainly because FSRS wasn't out when we started building it. it works well enough because we've come up work arounds for Anki's problem of workload distribution. Looking into FSRS a bit, I am definitely interested in giving this a shot and seeing if it improves it in that area.

Here is one to demonstrate:

  Variation 1:
  This famous escape-artist was born in 1874 and died in 1926.

  Variation 2:
  What famous magician born in 1874 passed away of peritonitis 52 years later?

  Answer: Harry Houdini   

Answering any variation causes the next review time for THIS CONSOLIDATED CARD to get pushed back.

I achieve a similar variation system in my own flashcards but use javascript + Anki to accomplish it.