Supermemo World

[Rolando Kumar]

Ipurchased SuperMemo 16 two weeks ago now, and these have been the most frustrating two weeks of my entire life! It utterly FAILS to meet my needs. This is deeply, personally very frustrating to me because I NEED better learning software. I NEED the capabilities that SuperMemo attempts to provide, but your software is a total catastrophe of broken user interface, missing features, and utterly abysmal documentation. On top of all of this is a consistent tone throughout your website and documentation that is belittling and condescending towards your users, and fails to own up to the inadequacies of your software.

Let me explain where I am coming from: I am a university student, in my 5th year of studies, yet am only halfway through my Mechanical Engineering degree. One of the largest issues is that I have struggled tremendously to find effective and efficient learning techniques. This summer I decided to try and learn German, and my attempts have really brought home the inadequacies of my study and learning skills and tools. I have spent months searching out ways to learn more effectively. When I learned about the benefits of spaced repetition, I was elated! Finally, here was a tool that could help me cease forgetting what I was learning in my classes. And naturally, SuperMemo was referenced all over as the most advanced spaced repetition system available. I was very interested in what I read. It sounds like, in theory, SuperMemo is exactly the tool I need to finally be successful in my language and university studies.

The incremental reading tools in particular are of interest to me: Anki and other flashcard software simply does not provide these same tools. They are far more inflexible in how you can formulate your cards, and provide no tools for processing notes and texts to create cards. The idea of being able to incrementally process my class notes and textbooks and rapidly generate cards to help me remember all the information is so appealing. It is exactly what I NEED to finally be successful in school!

I purchased your software in high hopes. I am an extremely computer-savvy person, I am not afraid of learning new and different ways of doing things on a computer. I have taught myself to use vim and emacs, both pieces of software with very unusual but very powerful models of user interaction. I am convinced of the value of your incremental learning methods and ideas. I think the way SuperMemo allows you to break down large bodies of text into smaller and smaller pieces for memorization is powerful, and spaced repetition reviews are tremendously valuable in helping remember things. I have no doubt that SuperMemo has the best algorithms in the world.

Have you even looked at a calendar recently? This is the year 2015. PDF is one of the most common file formats for exchanging long text documents containing exactly the sort of material best suited to Incremental Reading!!!! Journal articles, academic texts, ebooks, everything can be had in PDF format. IT IS INEXCUSABLE NOT TO PROVIDE NATIVE SUPPORT FOR PDF FILES!!! Manually copying and pasting content into SuperMemo is a hassle and a waste of my time, precious time I would rather spend, you know, LEARNING THE MATERIAL IN THE PDF FILE!

In theory, this is a fantastic feature. I would love to be able to setup workflows with services like IFTTT to email material directly into SuperMemo. But SuperMemo can only read .eml files, a file format no modern desktop email client uses anymore! It is silly to have to manually export emails, then import them into SuperMemo.

These days, who even uses a desktop email client anyway? Nearly everyone uses a web client. It would be far more useful if SuperMemo was able to integrate with my email account via IMAP, so I could apply filters to automatically send content into SuperMemo from other programs and devices, without having to do anything.

The reality of the modern world is that we use cloud services to hold our data. I need SuperMemo to be able to integrate into these services, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and note-taking services like OneNote and Evernote. I need the capability to seamlessly import materials from these services directly into SuperMemo for processing and memorization.

Integration with note-taking apps Evernote and OneNote would be particularly valuable. These applications are extremely good at importing and annotating information. I need my class notes and learning materials that I collect and gather with Evernote and OneNote to be available to me within SuperMemo!

I have failed or withdrawn from so many university courses because I did not have the tools and learning skills I needed. Just try to imagine the sheer amount of frustration and discouragement I have suffered because of that. It has been a long, discouraging, and excruciating experience. In theory, your software and the learning techniques it is intended to facilitate should be exactly what I so desperately need.

The past two weeks of trying to use your software have been severely, deeply, gut-wrenchingly frustrating to me. I have never been so let down by a piece of software in my entire life. To say I am dissatisfied would be amongst the greatest understatements of all time.

To receive the unlock password, click on the red bar, fill in your Order ID, and send your Machine identification code to SuperMemo World (automatically or manually via e-mail at address register2024(@)supermemo.org).

Figure: Registering SuperMemo dialog, available upon clicking the red registration bar at the top of the element window, assists you in submitting your registration data in order to receive the unlock password

Important! If you do not receive the unlock password within two business days, please get in touch via e-mail. The most likely reason is that your mail was blocked by a spam filter, it was lost in delivery, or you have misspelled your e-mail address when purchasing the program. In case you cannot get in touch via e-mail, please send us an alternative e-mail address, or simply leave your message at SuperMemoPedia.

When you use a demo version of SuperMemo, you are given a credit of 100 points. Once this credit is used up, by using SuperMemo, you will be asked to input the unlock password. The credit available is displayed in the parentheses on the red registration bar (see above).

Those steps will result in sending an e-mail with your data. In response you will receive further instructions (e.g. how to get the unlock password, how to get SuperMemo in return for writing learning material, how to buy a license, etc.).

If you want to redistribute your own collections, you can use File : Installation : Lock before putting your collections on the web or passing them to your friends. If you have questions about redistributing your own collections with SuperMemo, please get in touch.

The goal of SuperMemo World is to popularize SuperMemo. We are happy to welcome every new member in the SuperMemo family. We would love to provide customers with a free working version of SuperMemo. At the same time, we could not forget that the company has to earn for its operations. On one hand, we cannot make all SuperMemos free, on the other, we cannot reward "clever" users with an easy way to circumvent the license fee, as we do not want to contribute to a world where it pays to live by hook or by crook.

Our experience shows that the shareware approach does not work for SuperMemo. In the years 1991-2016, we have gained thousands of users of freeware versions of SuperMemo 2, SuperMemo 5, SuperMemo 6, SuperMemo 7, SuperMemo 9, SuperMemo 12 and SuperMemo 15. At the same time, we received just a handful of shareware contributions while the number of support requests was a thousand times greater!

SuperMemo stores your most important knowledge. This makes it one of the most important pieces of software on the user's disk. This makes many users nervous. What if it stops being compatible. What if the company stops the support. What if the company goes out of business? This discussion reflects those worries.

I'm getting more and more nervous with SuperMemo, and the reason isn't SuperMemo itself (actually I really like the idea of the program), but the old legacy technology that lies in heart of SuperMemo.

Today I saw this online counter -- -to-ie11.netlify.com. And I thought then: "Oh man, you're not even thirty yet, and you're probably not going to die soon. So why are using such an old technology? You must learn to live without it, or find some acceptable alternative, otherwise after 5-7 years you will greatly regret it."

I know, I know that SuperMemo can be used with any other web browser, and I actually never use Web import feature at all. But I very often copy-pasting something to my collection from the web, and if I do this with Chrome, FireFox or Edge, pasted text contains so much garbage inline styles! Filtering by F6 doesn't work well for me, because it just deletes "style" segment from elements. For example this was been copied from Wikipedia with Chrome:

Yes, it began to look better in SuperMemo browser, but not under the hood. And if I want to edit source HTML directly (Shift+Ctrl+F6) I have to break my eyes on this mess of unstructured code. I hate SuperMemo WYSIWYG editor, it's so bad in deleting unwanted markup, but I often need to fix something in source. It's great that pasting from Internet Explorer 11 is much cleaner, you did a great work, but more and more sites refuse to support Explorer (Reddit, for example).

In addition, there is my little silly off top. There are more and more rumours that Apple soon will abandon Intel x86 processors in favour of their in-house ARM processors. Also this year, they ditched support for 32-bit applications with the release of macOS Catalina. 32-bit programs now simply do not start. Microsoft does not stand aside either, and clearly has big plans for Windows on ARM. For me, it is clear that in the case of consumer electronics, the future is for portable devices running on ARM. I see that more and more people are switching to iPad, and for most of them, tablets are really a replacement for traditional computers. Even some programmers begin to flirt with programming on iPad and code compilation on remote servers. I'm a big fun of classic powerful computers, and the situation seems fairly scary to me, but I can't ignore the fact that the world has changed. Don't you feel that the wind is changing?

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