You can jump ahead in any deck by holding the red trash button. Since the decks are ordered by frequency, you could probably jump ahead 1000-1500 words and then just get rid of any words you already know.
Otherwise, you can always just create your own cards. If you do that on top of one of CleverDeck's decks, it will autocomplete if we've already made a card for a particular word.
What do you think is a fair price for one of our 3000 word language decks? In the previous iteration of the app, people showed themselves willing to pay $15.
Repeat revenue makes it easier for me to make a living as an indie dev, so I wanted to give this model a try while charging what I think is a fair price. I'll keep an open mind about it and adjust if enough people want it. Appreciate the feedback!
> Repeat revenue makes it easier for me to make a living as an indie dev
Of course it does! "And a pony."
You have to realize that most people are exceptionally leery of subscriptions as they are open-ended long-term commercial relationships with some random entity. There gotta be rock-solid clear benefits for a subscription to be justified. There are none in your case. What you have is a product, not a service. A subscription makes no sense whatsoever.
With regards to the fixed pricing - 3000 word pack is not the best option. What's more useful from the language learners perspective are packs that cover specific domain area - foods, kitchen utensils, car parts, body parts, weather elements, household tools, etc.
"3000 words" = "Unclear what you are getting"
"100 words, Garage" = "I may be able talk to the mechanic"
If you have smaller packs, you can sell them at few bucks a piece. You can try and experiment with discounted bundles of packs. And you can also try an all-you-can-eat option with a monthly access (yes, subscription), but as one of the options, not the only one.
PS. Have an option of switching off photos on cards.
I don't think domain specific packs are very useful for language learners. You need a rather large vocabulary just to follow a normal everyday conversation. Basic conversation and reading skill are the foundation upon which you can build. You need to consume and produce a large amount of material in your target language if you want to master it.
Buying the language a few hundred words at a time won't get you to fluency as quickly as learning words by frequency until you have covered the most frequent ~80%. Only then does it make sense to focus on specific domains that are most interesting to you.
Actually, it does make sense to have packs that are structured in a particular way.
For example, I am learning German. I would rather have a pack with the 25 most frequent nouns, 25 most frequent verbs, and maybe 25 most frequent adjectives. Then I have a foundation of vocabulary to learn the dativ and akkusativ. I don't need the adverbs yet.
Also, if I'm learning the modal verbs, I'd like a pack of those.
Domain packs are not for those who are trying to master a language, but those who are starting up and merely need to pick up some day-to-day vocabulary quickly.
So I googled "And a Pony" and it looks like one of the first uses of it is from a coding horror page in 2006 where the guy is asking all websites to scale down properly for a phone and then scale up properly for a desktop. He's then ridiculed because asking such a thing from websites would be obviously impossible. (Remember: 2006.) It is now of course expected everywhere.
I just think that's interesting in the context of your use here.
Working on it! There's no really good way to do this on the device, so I need to build out a web app. But this is the number one most requested feature, so stay tuned :)
I don't necessarily feel like I have nailed the business model right now - I'll see how it goes. More broadly speaking, I think the jury is still out on subscriptions in productivity apps. Everyone is trying to get away with it now - and it is very attractive as an indie developer.
For what its worth, I feel similarly to you. I buy year long auto-renewable subscriptions, immediately cancel them, and then resubscribe if I'm still using them next year.
First, I was a long time power user of Anki and don't mean to disparage it, but I think CleverDeck has a much better user experience and design.
Second, we've spent a tremendous amount of time putting together high quality frequency lists (mostly for languages right now) that incorporate professional imagery, native-speaker audio, transliterations (where relevant), and example sentences. Usually, making or piecing together your own decks and cards is the most time-consuming part of using an SRS - and user content is often of dubious quality.
In terms of the spaced repetition, though, CleverDeck and Anki actually use the same algorithm.
Thanks a ton for the feedback - very useful. And thank you for the bug report - I'll check that out (my initial guess is that you don't have the CARD DISPLAY set to play audio on that side right now - which is itself a problem for being confusing).
Re: monetization. It's freemium right now - 100 cards to try out the app, then three bucks per month for access to all the decks we've made. Completely free to create your own content.
I'll look into Forvo integration - that sounds useful.
Ah, just found the deck settings and corrected this. Thanks. I've played around a bit more and have some further feedback.
Something that is really key for me: When I create cards, sometimes I want the audio to play on the front, sometimes on the back (and perhaps sometimes both). But there is just one audio value and I need to decide whether I want it to play on the front or the back across the entire deck.
For example, card 1:
FRONT: Text says "écureuil", audio reads out "écureuil"
BACK: Text says "écureuil", audio reads out "écureuil", and there's a picture of a squirrel
That's good for vocab comprehension, but what if I want the converse exercise?
Card 2:
FRONT: Picture of a squirrel
BACK: Text says "écureuil", audio reads out "écureuil", and there's a picture of a squirrel
At the moment there's no way for me to create both cards at once. I would need two separate decks because it's one template to a deck. And I would need to make the card twice.
I realise this is jumping ahead to 'power user' territory but it's definitely a feature I would use.
Bandwidth shouldn't be an issue here, although this is a side project (so I realise money is limited), from experience you can send and receive roughly 200-400 images per second for every $5/month you spend. I don't know your precise usage count, but I would be surprised if you were to get that many images downloaded every second.
Yeah, my mental model for the app has been that the main list of decks "lives" in the center, the settings live on the right, and the actual studying happens on the left (you'll see that it also slides in from the left - mirroring the exit animation).
You're not the first to mention this, though. I should probably change it.
Otherwise, you can always just create your own cards. If you do that on top of one of CleverDeck's decks, it will autocomplete if we've already made a card for a particular word.