I went from 'well it's OK' to 'I quite like this' to 'it's great!' in about 10 minutes.
Creating a new web account loads the tutorial page, but it's a little confusing at first how to add a node. Also, there are quite a few spelling and grammar errors on that page which will make an unfair negative impression. If you clean those up you will get more conversions.
Examples:
It's my job to keep your complicated brain neat and tidy and remember **things** for a long time!
Here's how you can **create** a neat Note Garden.
2. Structure what you have learned and put **it** in order.
I even take care of your knowledge so that you won't forget **it** for the rest of your life!
(The road to being a great gardener** was **not easy, but we did it!)
Note also in the last example how the bold markdown surrounds the whitespace. I highlighted this manually (and carelessly) but clicking on a word also selects trailing spaces. You should probably strip the whitespace.
On the landing page 'Write Smartly' is correct English, but people rarely use the word this way - although it is technically correct it feels weird, and you don't want to create that feeling on a landing page. 'Write Smart' would be better.
Also, you wrote 'Law students - People who study for a long time that should not be forgotten'. I suggest 'Law students - People who need to study and retain knowledge for a long time.'
These are small language errors, but they would be very quickly noticed by your target audience.
Finally, the desktop sign-in with Google seems not to work - it opens a blank window and then closes again. Maybe it is just from server load right now.
Anyway I like it a lot and will consider using it regularly. I am more of a pencil-and-paper note person but this is one of the nicest digital notebooks I've found.
As for the part where desktop google sign-in does not work, regarding your description, it seems that the part that executes the app protocol using a browser does not seem to work.... I'm sorry. Let me see why not.
To those interested in a more modern-looking Anki (minus the Notion as in the OP): I do suggest having a look at Mochi (https://mochi.cards/). As someone new to spaced repetition (https://ncase.me/remember/) it's been absolutely amazing and I can't praise their support highly enough for being so responsive! It's one of the better subscriptions I've opted for.
I'll pile on to the Mochi lovefest as a former Anki user: the ease of noting cards using Markdown is a blessing. I usually use org-mode for just about everything but I made an exception for Mochi. Cross-linking cards really makes you feel like you're building an interconnected web of tiny thoughts.
And if you're a Linux user, Mochi has you covered too!
As I understand, Mochi is one of so many "Pretty Anki"s. Maybe it's better than Anki because it's Prettier. But, of course, compared to Note Garden, it's sloppy. It is very outdated in that you have to create cards one by one. The cards that are made even after doing the labor are just messed up cards that are not connected to each other.
I think you underestimate the value that creating the cards individually provides. For me the first learning step is the way I create and structure the card, think about mnemonics, add a photo e.t.c.
Mochi is a great help there, since it provides a lot of small conveniences especially for language learning.
The ability to automatically add a translation and spoken pronunciations is super nice and built in a way that it seamlessly integrates into the keyboard-centric markdown flow of the app.
IIRC Mochi is written in ClojureScript and it shows, it's a really simple, yet composable and powerful tool.
The author also keeps polishing it continuously, which I found to really streamline everything.
It's my absolutely most favourite tool for learning languages, because it does its job beautifully, efficiently, and doesn't get in my way, and that's a property that's hard to come by in software these days.
I totally agree, even though I'm not using that, Mochi is really well thought-out and maintained app. I'm testing it from time to time and it's always better, I'm pretty sure some day I'll switch to them. They allow for hierarchical structure of your notes/cards and also you can easily link between them with [[wikilinks]] (with auto backlinks).
I'm sorry if my expressions sounded unpleasant. I had no intention of doing that. It may have sounded that way because I am not sensitive to expressions in English. But I wanted to emphasize that if Mochi made Anki better, our app is a complete upward compatibility with it. Sorry to be rude once again. I also have a strong love for this app, so I think I was being harsh.
The main issue was “it's sloppy” and “very outdated”. “Sloppy” implies lack of care went into its creation, which is often seen as an attack on the creator(s). “Very outdated” is imposing your idea of what's “new” and “old” onto your contemporaries, then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_snobbery on top of that.
Apart from that, your comment was a fairly objective criticism. When criticising, you should write down all the things you want to criticise, then (without removing any) re-write it so it's as kind as you can to the thing you're criticising. Especially if you're comparing it to something of your own.
I think this is just an ESL tone misunderstanding. The content of their post is completely fair and highlights why looking pretty doesn't automatically make it a good product. Nothing about it came off as intentionally trying to be offensive to me.
I had the same questions. Skimming the other comments, it sounds like it's proprietary. It boggles my mind that people think they have an alternative to anki when it's not free software.
I hate to be a downer, but I found the following using anki - so basically anything with SM2 algorithm, no matter the UI - as a learning tool for my tech notes:
1) it doesn't scale. You'll be overwhelmed with repetitions once you're in the high hundreds, and you will be if using Q/A style questions. And what's your daily strategy once it hits thousands?
2) I've converted all my notes from libreoffice writer to anki using python and various formatting tricks, and while the import outcome was perfect, most of the notes are useless - too ambigious/too broad/WIP - you'll never remember those well.
3) premade cards are mostly useless for long term - say you want to remember linux stuffs - you can find cards with thousands of items, but to what point - there's only so much time in a day and you want to learn something different than the author did - you def won't spend a year reviewing them.
I myself am confident this problem can be solved with supermemo and creating tailored q/a from my notes and thinking hard what I actually want to remember long term.
Anki does scale. It won’t ask a new user to review too many cards per day. As cards are memorized the increasingly spaced intervals make room for new cards. So if you dump a thousand cards in at once, which you shouldn’t do, you’ll be directed to load them into the memorization process over several weeks of daily reviewing.
Agree that most notes from other documents don’t make good cards. Making your own cards is worth the time spent, for the most part, although there are plenty of standard decks you might as well clone (Greek letters, as a simple example.)
If I remember correctly, the default is 20 new cards a day which is IMO still too much.
Anyway, Anki scale in the sense that you don't have to do thousand cards if you don't want to. But the UI was designed to help combat psychological problems of tackling an intimidating amount of cards.
As for (1), one of my decks has ~10,000 mature cards currently gives me ~3-5 reviews per day.
If you plan on sustaining dozens of new cards per day indefinitely, you’ll bury yourself in reviews, but spaced repetition does ensure that if your recall rate is high, review count degrades over time, and eventually becomes negligible. I go through periods of daily new cards when I’m focused on learning something, and periods of review and consolidation. If my daily reviews get over 200, it’s time to let the new cards rest for a while.
I'm at thousands of cards my main Anki deck. Since starting it, I added 10 new cards most days. My daily reviews are usually around 100. Granted it's a vocabulary deck for language learning so I just pass most cards in a few seconds based on knowing the word. For fields/types of cards that take longer I'd suggest scaling down the new cards per day accordingly.
There are definitely many things that Anki is _not_ good for. But for the things where it's good, there's nothing else like it. The UI might be stale, but this is outweighed by the add-on ecosystem.
Note Garden solves those problems by exploiting the tree structure and properly connecting it to SR algorithm. In fact, Note Garden doesn't even use a Q/A style.
Sorry for leaving a rude reply. I had no intention of being rude. But you're talking about Anki, not Note Garden, and the shortcomings of Anki you mentioned are what we've been trying to overcome so far.
I’m an idiot that isn’t going to use your product because I decide what to use based on more calculations than just if the product is good. I also consider license, philosophy and politics. Telling people they are idiots is not a good sales pitch. You should walk away from this thread.
I tried the software and then when I opened an app the screen became full of windows. Never seen that before. I have to stop the computer.
So I desinstalled it. That seem a good reason to not use it to me.
Have you thought about a strategy for when someone starts having many cards to review? I used Anki daily throughout my PhD to never forget a ton of machine learning and math. I used it for about 7 years daily (PhD + postdoc + 1.5 years) and I had around 20,000 cards. I just had to review them every day and I basically seemed like a fountain of knowledge.
But a year into my professorship, I just didn't have time to do all of them daily and this compounded to disencentivize me as the number of cards to review piled up into the thousands. I still have Anki installed but I haven't used it much since 2016.
One of the best things about Anki is it is free. I wouldn't want to subscribe with a recurring payments, and I like having a non-web app to ensure I could use it indefinitely even if the product dies.
Because I apparently watch youtube videos about anki plugins, I recently heard about Load Balancer (https://www.britvsjapan.com/top-20-anki-add-ons/#load) to solve this exact problem. Hopefully this helps you continue to be a fountain of knowledge. Good luck!
Out of curiosity, have you found yourself getting rusty on the information that had seemed long-term locked-in when you were a regular user?
1. Regarding the problem of having to review a lot of cards, this is actually somewhat inevitable. Still, Note Garden made several attempts to alleviate this problem as much as possible. For example, you can choose which range to learn very flexibly on demand exploiting a tree structure. In addition to this, we plan to make the content that the user already know not appear in the learning course as much as possible by connecting each other's difficulty measurement between the notes.
2. Regarding the issue of when the product dies, we are also considering making it open source to minimize the harm to learners when the Note Garden can no longer be maintained. And we have already been developing Note Garden for over 3 years. It won't die right away
I'm going to guess that some/many of your cards have a high cognitive load - not just a question of recall, but perhaps solving a problem/proving a theorem. Or even stating a complex theorem can take time.
I solved this problem by having two separate decks. One that is purely quick recall, where if you know the answer you'll flip through the card in seconds. The other deck is the high cognitive load one, where it may take, say, a minute or longer for some cards.
I review the "quick" deck daily - it takes perhaps 5 minutes. It's hard to convince yourself you can't spare 5 minutes.
The other deck I do less frequently - perhaps target once a week, and block out time on your calendar for it?
I downloaded it and installed it, but could not try as it requires a signup with email!
1. The feature set on paper is impressive, but there should be a way of trying out the limited features in offline mode, without requiring a mandatory sign-up. So consider adding a demo mode both in the downloaded and web version.
2. Is there a way to host data locally?
3. The Privacy policy & Terms of service take forever to load. The loading times need some serious tweaking.
1. Originally, there was the function for trying it out without sign-up, but that function was removed. Our marketers didn't want that feature. I'm sorry.
2. It can't be. But you can use the app offline or by exporting & importing local data.
3. I'm sorry. I have nothing else to say but to reload. It's fine on our side.
Well, throw me in the bucket of people who've been lost by that decision. Sounds potentially interesting, but I'm by no means invested enough already to go through the whole account creation thing just to try it.
After reading your comments, Our marketers just decided to add the function to use the app as a guest again. So now you can use the app without signing up. Isn't it good?
I feel there should be some demo contant to showcase the learning process. I tried the guest account, but didn't see some demo content to import or try out with and didn't really want to spend the time to manually add content to test the learning process.
Having some demo content would help me quickly decide if this could be a good tool for me.
Nitpick: I think "Study different" should be "Study differently".
Here's why in case you care. Different is an adjective, which describes a noun. Differently is an adverb, which describes a verb. The sentence "study different" has an implicit subject "you", so it could be written "you study different". This makes it more obvious that "different" is trying to describe the verb "study", not the noun "you".
I hate creating notes on the computer. I wish e-ink devices would implement some good spaced repetition to their hand written notes apps. When I do use the computer for notes it's hard to beat Anki or org-drill.
"It's better to do this by hand than on a computer" was a common saying before software was sufficiently advanced. That word has always changed. And now is the time. The moment when the utility of doing digitally exceeds the utility of doing it manually.
It was never a utility problem, digital always beat physical in almost all regards there ('flicking through' notwithstanding). It's an input problem: some (many?) people just prefer to write.
(And maybe output? I didn't realise at first, but now seems more likely GP is referring to e-paper devices being easier on the eyes.)
It’s not only that some people “just prefer to write”, there is published research[0] showing that writing things down by hand performs better in context of learning.
The reason handwriting is helpful for learning is that handwriting naturally induces structuring of content. And in Note Garden, the content is naturally structured while taking notes.
> We conclude that because of the benefits of sensory-motor integration due to the larger involvement of the senses as well as fine and precisely controlled hand movements when writing by hand and when drawing, it is vital to maintain both activities in a learning environment to facilitate and optimize learning.
There is nothing about structuring content.
Which does not mean your statement is necessarily wrong; it’s just a speculation presented as a fact with no supporting evidence in the name of promoting your product.
Ah, I confused what you suggested with another study. I'm sorry. If so, what I can say about the study is that the utility of organizing content well and making it possible to review it using SR algorithm may be greater than the utility of taking notes by hand.
Physical input always beats keyboard when it comes to sketching things out quickly. I don't want to spend an hour trying to get a diagram correct on a PC when I could spend 2 minutes drawing it on a tablet.
Thanks for sharing your great work! I think your project will be helpful, as we also want our learners to be able to learn without any hesitation. I'll take it seriously!
Interesting project! Wondering if it’s open source ?
Also I’d be interested to know a little more about the translation from notes to testing. To me it seems when I’ve used Anki that it takes great care and time to make a well formed question. A poorly formed question has a massive detriment in knowledge recall. Just wondering how you’ve managed to bridge that dilemma to automate the process.
Very interested in contributing, I’m a programmer, clinical educator and love spaced repetition.
Sorry, this is a commercial project, not open source. In fact, if this fails, we will starve.
Anyway, it is the core of this app that automatically connects the naturally written note-taking into a form that can use Spaced Repetition. It's hard to explain in more detail, but I hope you enjoy the experience of being able to use Spaced Repetition for the content by simply taking notes in outliner form. Anyway, thanks for the compliment.
“Commercial” is not incompatible with “open source”. If you have a policy of “release last year's version under AGPLv3” (and then buy indefinite proprietary licenses for the best community patches off their authors), we'll all benefit from open source without you having competitors leeching off your work.
In fact, some companies can do it with no time delay, like https://plausible.io – but, of course, it depends on your business model and your field.
Agree, would much rather this was an open source project like Anki and then charge for extra services like cloud sync or whatever to generate revenue.
I feel very uncomfortable contributing huge amounts of content to a product that I have no control over. With no Linux version I can only submit all my data to the cloud. It does appear you can export to JSON or Anki deck though so you could always do regular exports to ensure you have a copy of your data.
It sounds promising in theory and I agree that linking the Q/A cards to more detailed notes and tree structure is useful but in implementation it felt very clunky and I did not gel with the UI at all. The most immediate issue was that identifying how to actually markdown the notes into a usable question and answer format wasn't clear from the brief description in the intro document. The tool REALLY needs a tutorial. After I worked that out though the "learn" tab just felt like any other SR flashcard app and it didn't present the notes in any useful way to make it better than a well curated Anki deck.
I've never really tried anything except Anki, Memrise and now this app but it's just hard to recommend this over Anki, as a widely accepted and open source standard. I found this frustrating to use.
As you said, I think we should prepare the tutorial more kindly. Of course, it would have been great if it had been fully prepared, but we thought that the first thing to do was to release it in the best condition in terms of functionality. And from now on, we will update our usage examples and tutorials to be more specific. I am looking forward to showing more potential in the future.
The reason the app's learning course doesn't look so much different from traditional SR programs is probably because your notes don't have a rich structure yet. As your notes get richer, you'll see their structures reflected in the learning course.
Does someone have a way to use any of these apps solely with voice, so I can use it while driving? I’ve looked into anki plugins but did not find anything complete (that is, you can reply with voice), and I can’t be the first to desire this…
One of the AnkiDroid maintainers here. This is entirely my personal opinion and not representative of a general consensus.
I am strongly opposed to this for ethical reasons. Distracting drivers will kill people. This functionality would also increase the risk of death for non-users of the software.
Drivers distracted by talk is already a thing through radio, phone and physical company. A purely voice-driven anki should not entail more risk than a conference call.
That makes sense and I respect your opinion, but I don’t share the concern.
My country, Spain, has reached just 29 deaths per million inhabitants and year due to road accidents by focusing on the big risk factors, such as dui, speeding, lack of seatbelt use, overall disregard for traffic rules, texting and handling phones, bad infrastructure status, etc. and I don’t think talking while driving is a big part of the remaining risk factors that contribute to deaths.
That last part is just my opinion though; I’m just saying the problem is serious but imo lies elsewhere.
This looks great. It seems like there are issues with sign up. There is no sign-up link on the home page. I found it via guest mode --> sign up. After clicking sign up,... there is no form. I'm using firefox.
I've yet to try it, but this looks incredibly impressive compared to the other spaced repetition apps on the market, especially UI and features-wise. I also find it a great idea to merge notes and spaced repetition, a la RemNote.
Out of curiosity, what spaced repetition algorithm is the app using? Did you create your own or did you use a pre-existing one?
> And if you've always been interested in SR programs, you'd probably want to ask what algorithm Note Garden uses, which is embarrassing to say, but it's an improved version of the old SM2 algorithm.
Minor, but annoying thing: On Mac the Option-key is hi-jacked so that it's not possible to jump one word when editing text. Instead, one gets sent to the previous page. This breaks the normal flow of editing and slows it down unnecessary.
This is cool! Anki + Notion is exactly a thing i'm in the early stages of working on! Any plans for an extensive plugin system? A big thing i desired was the ability to build Notion-like blocks/etc as userland plugins. I really enjoyed how some apps (Obsidian/etc) had great plugin support.
"Click the '+Add a New File' button to create a new file."
Call me stupid, but I can't find the '+Add a New File' button. Where is it? If I click "Files" on the sidebar, I only see a 'Let's Start!' card. I signed up as a guest.
I'm sorry. That button was supposed to be there, but it wasn't implemented... (yet) Anyway you can add new files by clicking the + button on the top page.
I'm still dreaming with a service which would allow me to build short online courses with a Google Primer look&feel; the course catalog and the course itself. I believe that for some specific types of audiences, that learning experience is unbeatable.
I was really confused for a little while, because everything was in Korean. It seems that if you enable JS for `notegarden.web.app`, then the content in English.
Maybe consider looking at the Accept-Language header for a default in this case
I can't use letters from Polish alphabet: ó, ą, ę, etc.
Doesn't look like for example option/alt+o doing something, but I can't type "ó" anyway.
Chrome on MacOS
Mochi, Remnote, recently Logseq, plus Obsidian and Roam with community plugins. Also Notion with Leitner algo hacked into database. All of these are note-taking apps and have flashcards. I would say it's not that bad :)
Thank you for this explanation. I am one of those who see the comments first before going to the actual app :)
One thing stood out to me in your explanation — you say “tree structure” is a natural way to organize knowledge.
Why is that the case? I generally use one of the modern “tools of thought” (first Roam and now mem.ai) and in these tools, you just dump notes and add tags and and links among notes, so you have a general graph structure (from the links) overlayed with tags.
As of now, there is the function to import / export from the app itself and the function to export to Anki (actually, these are not working now since the app was completely changed, it needs to be fixed).
Anyway we will implement more import/export functions in the future and the ones you mentioned will be included.
Creating a new web account loads the tutorial page, but it's a little confusing at first how to add a node. Also, there are quite a few spelling and grammar errors on that page which will make an unfair negative impression. If you clean those up you will get more conversions.
Examples:
Note also in the last example how the bold markdown surrounds the whitespace. I highlighted this manually (and carelessly) but clicking on a word also selects trailing spaces. You should probably strip the whitespace.On the landing page 'Write Smartly' is correct English, but people rarely use the word this way - although it is technically correct it feels weird, and you don't want to create that feeling on a landing page. 'Write Smart' would be better.
Also, you wrote 'Law students - People who study for a long time that should not be forgotten'. I suggest 'Law students - People who need to study and retain knowledge for a long time.'
These are small language errors, but they would be very quickly noticed by your target audience.
Finally, the desktop sign-in with Google seems not to work - it opens a blank window and then closes again. Maybe it is just from server load right now.
Anyway I like it a lot and will consider using it regularly. I am more of a pencil-and-paper note person but this is one of the nicest digital notebooks I've found.