Another bar, another flash card program

Last time I studied for the bar I reviewed several different flash card programs for your cell phone and said which one I liked the best.  (The answer was MobilePrep, but not by much.)  Now I have a BlackBerry, and things are different.  The problem with my old phone was that although it was a real smartphone, it used a rare form of Linux that no one else used.  The result: very few people were writing software for it.  With the Blackberry, there are tens of thousands of programs available (plus java, of course, but it's usually better to run native code).  The problem with the BlackBerry is it's aimed at the business market, where people have expense accounts and lots of money, and so most of the software for BlackBerry is not free.  Still, there are some delightful exceptions.

The new hotness is gWhiz.   Even in "pre-beta," the software is slicker than anything else out there.  It's visually attractive and stable.  The best part: it can get its flash card stacks from a spreadsheet stored on your phone or--ready for this?--from a Google Docs spreadsheet.  So all you have to do is create a spreadsheet and the phone will import it.  Wirelessly.  Automatically.  It can then email your flash card stacks back out again, to whoever you want.  Cool.

It also comes with a "reference" program which takes your flash card stack and displays all the questions and answers in one big list.  Actually rather handy for reviewing.  It also comes with a graphing calculator that can do algebra, metric conversions, etc.  Not something I would have downloaded on its own but now that I have it I have to admit it's pretty handy.

I discovered that "gFlash+" (why does it already have a plus?) had trouble displaying some of my flash cards because some of my cards go on and on (hey, you try fitting a comparison between 1st degree murder and 2nd degree murder on one square inch).  So I emailed the company . . . and they got back to me within hours, asking me to share my stack with them.  Within half a day they had a new version of the program, with a custom feature designed just for me (the ability to scroll through a large flash card).  The designers have given me an incredible level of customer service for a free product; when I reported that the new version had a new bug, they said they'd come out with another version in a day and asked me if I had any more feature requests.

Compare that to my own company where fixing software bugs can take weeks or even months . . . I'm impressed.  And I'm totally sold on this product.  If you have a BlackBerry and need good flash card software, this is your program.