If you've ever studied a foreign language (or anything else that requires memorization), chances are you've used flash cards. If you're like me, you started by writing some out by hand, quickly tired of that, then bought a pre-printed set, which you used for two or three quizzes before forgetting about them entirely. Perhaps you would get more out of your flash cards if they were handily available on your shiny computer rather than dog-eared and forsaken among the broken pencils and lint in the bottom of your bag. If so, take a look at Keep Your Word.
Keep Your Word is a Mac app (requiring system 10.5) for creating, organizing and presenting flash cards. Each card consists of two user-defined sides: "their word" and "your word." Beyond that, you can attach your own tags, comments, and learning progress notation. The software even keeps track of other helpful metadata like date created, times viewed in exercises and date of last view. At a glance, you'll know which words you created months ago, drilled hundreds of times, and still haven't memorized, and paper cards just can't provide that kind of motivating shame.
All the functions you'd expect for getting the most out of your cards are here, with nothing extraneous or over-complicated. You can simply study your cards, view them as a multiple-choice quiz, or print word lists for whatever purpose. Card groups can also be exported or imported as comma-separated values lists.
There's no shortage of flash card software out there, some of which may even share such features. Where Keep Your Word shines is in its appealing and intuitive interface. In the main window, when you create or edit a card, both sides are displayed prominently and its metadata fields are instantly accessible. Commonly used functions (Add word, Print, Character map etc.) are readily available as buttons in the toolbar.
The basic interface for actually viewing your cards is slick. The cards are large and distinct, and arranged side-by-side with one brightly colored active card occupying the center of the window and the edges of adjacent ones visible. They can be flipped, advanced or scrolled through by simple keystrokes or entirely with the mouse. The "Quick Quiz" uses the same presentation, but shows a (user-defined) number of choices for what's on the back. Pressing the key for any choice simply turns over the card, revealing the answer; it doesn't keep score.
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