About a week ago, I released Little Phrase Book for macOS to the Mac App Store.
If you’re learning a new language and want a way to keep track of all the foreign phrases you’re learning, try out Little Phrase Book. You can easily search existing phrases by typing in the search field and seeing results displayed right away. It also has a built-in flash card feature so that you can review all of your phrases and commit them to memory over time.
Download Little Phrase Book today from the Mac App Store.
I’m quite proud of this release because unlike a lot of projects I’ve worked on in the past, I released this one as soon as it was good enough. Essentially, I had in mind a sort of minimum viable product in mind, and when it got to that stage, I cleaned up the UI, fixed as many bugs that prevented the golden scenarios from working, and then sent it off to Apple to review.
In all, it took less than a month to go from the first commit to it appearing in the store. With that in mind, I also didn’t work on it nearly that much. In total number of hours, I’d guess I spent maybe 20 hours working on this app before shipping.
I have more plans ahead for it, but it was important to get the basic features working so that I could dogfood it daily to see what worked and what didn’t. I added a very early flash card implementation. It’s quite naïve at the moment, but it’ll be full-featured in the future. I plan on implementing a spaced-repetition algorithm so that you can truly use this app daily to memorize things.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that the app is actually quite useful for just storing general notes that you need to recall occasionally. For instance, there are some command-line tools at work that I need to use, but their syntax is a little cryptic and hard to remember. I just created a phrase book for commands and whenever I need to “recall” the cryptic command, I just type in the search term and it immediately appears. This is much faster than putting things in a notebook or text file and having to do a cmd-F to find the entry.