OS X: Flash cards and quizzing

Once a software engineer, always a software engineer. And once stubborn -- well, still stubborn. I tend to have an idea, code it poorly, work on it for a long time, then look around and find someone else has done it already, and way better than I ever would.

As is the case with flash cards / quizzing applications. A few years ago I wrote a PHP/MySQL web site for flash cards and shared it with my Anatomy & Physiology class. It was clumsy, web-based, I was the only one who could add cards, but it worked for me. It wasn't the solution I needed for med school though, so I finally looked around for OS X software to do the job.

I found two:

iFlash is $12 and has some excellent features -- your cards can have multiple "sides" (which is handy given that there's more than one thing we need to know for each herb, for example), and they can have embedded sounds, which means that I just made a deck of cards incorporated the lung sounds I downloaded from somewhere. There's a free 30-day trial, which I'm still working from. [iFlash review and iFlash download]

Genius is free and has a cool quizzing algorithm. One of the features I liked about the tool I wrote was that you had to get questions right more than once in order to have them deemed "known," and the more you got them wrong, the more you had to get them right to get back in the black. Genius has a similar idea going and seems like an excellent tool. [Download Genius]

What's your impression? Are flash cards helpful for you in learning? Do you find added value from computer-based flash cards instead of that huge deck of 3x5s fraying in your back pack?