You’ve probably noticed that I spend a lot of my time studying for things.  Seems like I’ve always been reading things or memorizing arcane formulae for one reason or another.  In the past, I have relied upon a large number of methods for this purpose.  However, I keep coming back to the tried-and-true flash card.  To me, it’s the most basic form of learning.  A question on the front and an answer on the back is all you need to drill a fact into your head.  As I started studying for my CCIE lab exam, this was the route that I chose to go down when I wanted to learn some of the more difficult features, like BGP supress maps or NTP peer configurations.  It was a pain to hand write all that info out on my cards.  Sometimes it didn’t all fit.  Other times, I couldn’t read my own writing.  I wondered if there was a better solution.

Cue my friend Greg Ferro and his post about a program called Mental Case.  Mental Case, from Mental Faculty, is a program designed to let you create your own flashcards.  The main program runs on a Mac computer and allows you to create libraries of flash cards.  There are a lot of good example sets when you first launch the app for things like languages.  But, as you go through some of the other examples, you can see the power that Mental Case can give you above and beyond a simple 3″x5″ flash card.  For one thing, you can use pictures in your flash cards.  This is handy if you are trying to learn about art or landmarks, for instance.  You could also use it as a quick quiz about Cisco Visio shapes or wireless antenna types.  This is a great way to study things more advanced than just simple text.

Once you dig into Mental Case, though, you can see some of the things that separate it from traditional pen-and-paper.  While it might be handy to have a few flash cards in your pocket to take out and study when you’re in line at the DMV, more often than not you tend to forget about them.  Mental Case can setup a schedule for you to study.  It will pop up and tell you that it’s time to do some work.  That’s great as a constant reminder of what you need to learn.  Another nice feature is the learning feature.  If you have ever used flash cards, you probably know that after a while, you tend to know about 80% of them cold with little effort.  However, there are about 20% that kind of float in the middle of the pack and just get skipped past without much reinforcement.  They kind of get lost in the shuffle, so to speak.  With Mental Case, those questions which you get wrong more often get shuffled to the front, where your attention span is more focused.  Mental Case learns the best ways to make you learn best.  You can also set Mental Case to shuffle or even reverse the card deck to keep you on your toes.

When you couple all of these features with the fact that there is a Mental Case IOS client as well as a desktop version, your study efficiency goes through the roof.  Now, rather than only being able to study your flash cards when you are at your desk, you can take them with you everywhere.  When you consider that most people today spend an awful lot of time staring at their iPhones and iPads, it’s nice to know that you can pull up a set of flash cards from your mobile device and go to town at a moment’s notice, like in the line at the DMV.  In fact, that’s how I got started with Mental Case.  I downloaded the IOS app and started firing out the flash cards for things like changing RIP timers and configuring SSM.  However, the main Mental Case app only runs on Mac.  At the time, I didn’t have a Mac?  How did I do it?  Well, Mental Case seems to have thought of everything.  While the IOS app works best in concert with the Mac app, you can also create flash cards on other sites, like FlashcardExchange and Quizzlet.  You can create decks and make them publicly available for everyone, or just share them among your friends.  You do have to make the deck public long enough to download to Mental Case IOS, but it can be protected again afterwards if you are studying information that shouldn’t be shared with the rest of the world.  Note, though, that the IOS version of the software is a little more basic than the one on the Mac.  It doesn’t support wacky text formatting or the ability to do multiple choice quizzes.  Also, cards that are created with more than two “sides” (Mental Case calls them facets) will only display properly in slideshow mode.  But, if you think of the IOS client as a replacement for the stack of 10,000 flash cards you might already be carrying in your backpack or pocket the limitations aren’t that severe after all.

The latest version of Mental Case now has the option to share content between Macs via iCloud.  This will allow you to keep your deck synced between your different computers.  You still have to sync the cards between your Mac and your IOS device via Wi-Fi.  You can share at shorter ranges over Bluetooth.  You can also create collection of cards known as a Study Archive and place them in a central location, like Dropbox for instance. This wasn’t a feature when I was using Mental Case full time, but I like the idea of being able to keep my cards in one place all the time.

Mental Case is running a special on their software for the next few days.  Normally, the Mac version costs $29.99.  That’s worth every penny if you spend time studying.  However, for the next few days, it’s only $9.99.  This is a steal for such a powerful study program.  The IOS app is also on sale.  Normally $4.99, it’s just $2.99.  Alone the IOS app is a great resource.  Paired with its bigger brother, this is a no-brainer.  Run out and grab these two programs and spend more time studying your facts and figures efficiently and less time creating them.  If you’d like to learn more about Mental Case from Mental Faculty, you can check out their webiste at http://www.mentalcaseapp.com.

Disclaimer

I am a Mental Case IOS user.  I have used the demo version of the Mental Case Mac app.  Mental Case has not contacted me about this review, and no promotional consideration was given.  I’m just a really big fan of the app and wanted to tell people about it.