User guide

Solid Memo is a flashcard app. You study cards, and the app brings each card back just before you would forget it, so a little study every day goes a long way. Your cards and your study are kept in your own Solid Pod, not on Solid Memo's servers. You can also try it first in your browser, without an account.

This page walks through the app as a learner uses it, screen by screen, at https://solid-memo.com/. Each section links the page that explains how that part works. The user journeys are the same walk-through as automated tests: they click through the real app in a browser on every change. The report of CI's run on the version the site runs, with a screenshot of every step, is online at https://solid-memo.com/journeys/ (none after a deploy by hand). The table at the end says which journey shows which part.

Words used here

• Pod: your own online storage, run by a Pod provider you choose, or by yourself. Apps that follow the Solid standards keep your data there, and you decide who may read it.
• WebID: the web address that identifies you, given to you by your Pod provider. You log in on your provider's own page: Solid Memo never sees your password.
• Instance: one collection of your decks and study, kept in a folder in your Pod. Most people need only one.
• Deck: a set of cards on one subject. Card: a front and a back, each with text, a picture, or both.
• Course: a deck that teaches. Short pieces of theory, each checked by questions; every question you answer becomes a card in your deck.
• Library: ready-made decks and courses, free to copy into your instance.

Supported browsers

Solid Memo runs in the current version of:

• Chrome and Edge, and other browsers built on Chromium;
• Firefox;
• Safari, on a Mac and on an iPhone or iPad.

Something that does not work in one of these is a bug: please report it, with the browser and its version. An older version or another browser may work too, but it is not supported.

Every change is tested in Chromium, in Firefox and in WebKit, the engine Safari is built on, and in WebKit on an iPhone's screen. Every user journey runs in Chromium. Logging in, trying the app as a guest and reloading in the middle of a study session run in all four (testing.md). These are Playwright's builds of each engine, not the browsers you install, so no test runs on a real iPhone.

Getting in

The first screen offers three ways in (onboarding.md):

• Try it without logging in. No account needed. You study as a guest, and what you learn is kept in this browser only. A line at the top says so, with "Keep my study: log in" and "Discard". When you log in later, Solid Memo offers to move your study into your Pod: added to an instance you have, or as a new one. You can also discard it, or decide later (guest-mode.md). For example: try it as a guest, add a deck from the library and study a few cards. Then log in, choose to move your study into a new instance, and the cards you studied are in your Pod, each where you left it.
• Connect your Pod. Type your WebID and press "Log in with Solid", or pick your provider from the list under it. You log in on the provider's page and come back to Solid Memo, which reads your profile to find your Pod and says "Your Pod is connected." Press Continue (authentication.md).
• Set up your Solid Pod. No Pod yet? "Create a Pod" opens a provider's sign-up page in a new tab. Come back when you are done, and choose "I already have a Pod".

The first time you log in, Solid Memo asks for a name for your instance and where in your Pod to keep it. If your Pod has more than one storage, it asks which one first. After that, logging in takes you straight to your decks. "Log out", at the top, ends the session.

On every screen

• At the top: the Solid Memo logo, which takes you home; the language list (a globe and the language's name); the light and dark toggle; and who you are logged in as, with "Log out".
• The instance bar names the instance you are in, with "Open in your Pod" (or "Kept in this browser", for a guest), and links to its Statistics and Preferences, "Open in Studio" and "Switch instance".
• The breadcrumb under it shows where you are, such as Decks › Spanish › Browser, and each part is a link back up. The browser's own Back and Forward buttons work too, and every screen has its own address, so you can bookmark it or open it in a new tab (routing.md).
• "Skip to content" is the first thing the Tab key reaches, for keyboard users.
• "Something went wrong" takes a screen's place if it breaks, with the top and the footer still there. Try again, or Go to the start; Copy details and Report it help you tell the project, but nothing is sent unless you send the report (privacy.md).

Your decks

The deck list is home. From the top:

• Today: once you have studied today, a strip with your streak (days in a row), a word of praise, and the day's numbers, with a link to all your statistics (statistics.md).
• Your courses: each course you have started and not finished, how many of its chapters are done, and a button to go on where you left off (courses.md).
• Decks: each deck with a Study button when cards are waiting for you today, or "Done for today". Click a deck's name to open its page. A deck copied from the library says "New release" after its name when the library has a newer release of it; its page offers the update. A newly created instance with no decks offers the library's course for newcomers here: "Start the course".
• Each deck's menu (the button at the end of its row) offers its preferences, Rename, moves up, down and into groups, "Open in Studio", and "Delete deck". Drag a deck onto another to make a group, and drag decks in and out of groups. Deleting a group keeps the decks in it.
• At the bottom: Create deck, Deck library and Add from a link.

A deck's page

Click a deck's name. The page says how many cards are due today and how many are new, with a Study button. It also shows:

• who made the deck, its license and its description, when the deck says so, as a library deck does;
• a notice when the library has a newer release of the deck, with an offer to update your copy card by card, keeping your changes and your progress (migrations.md);
• "Reset today's study", once you have studied the deck today, to undo today's answers for this deck (srs.md);
• the deck's own statistics in short, with "More statistics" for all of them, where its cards stand, and what is hard in it: the cards you forget most, and in a course's deck the wrong options you choose most.

Its buttons lead to Preferences (the deck's name, its own daily limits, and the languages of its text), the Browser (its cards), and Open in Studio.

Studying

Press Study. A session holds the cards due today, plus a few new ones, mixed in among them (srs.md).

1. The front of a card is shown. Try to remember the answer.
2. Press Reveal (or Space) to see the back.
3. Say how well you remembered it, with the buttons or the number keys. The buttons are either a scale from 0 (no memory at all) to 5 (easy), or Again · Hard · Good · Easy, as you choose in the preferences. Under each button is how long the card would wait before it comes back if you choose it.

Pressed the wrong button? Undo last answer (or U) takes your last answer back and shows that card again, as long as the session is open.

A card you answer with 0 — Blackout or 1 — Wrong, or with Again, comes back later in the same session. A card you answer with 2 — Almost does not come back in that session, but it starts over: it is due again the next day you study. Hard, on the four buttons, counts as remembered. The better you remember a card, the longer it waits before it comes back: a day, then a few days, then weeks. That is spaced repetition, and Solid Memo schedules it with the SM-2 method (srs.md). When the session is over it says so; "End session" takes you back to your decks at any time, and nothing you answered is lost.

A deck you study both ways asks each card front to back and back to front, each on its own schedule.

A wrong card in a deck from the library, such as a wrong capital or a bad translation? Report a mistake, under the card, opens a report on the project's issue tracker with the deck and the card already filled in: say what is wrong. A deck added from a link has the link when its creator names a page for reports (deck-library.md).

Adding and editing cards

• Create deck, under the deck list, asks for a name and the language it is in.
• The Browser, from a deck's page, lists every card ten to a page. There you describe the deck, choose which way it is studied (front to back, back to front, or both), add cards, open a card to edit it, and remove one. Under the editor, a card's history shows when it comes back, how long until then, when you first studied it, and every answer you gave it.
• Add card opens a form for the front and the back: text, a picture, or both, and optional notes. It stays open after each card, so you can add many in a row. Check "Format with Markdown" for code, lists or tables (markdown.md).

All of this is described in browsing.md.

The deck library

Deck library, under the deck list, lists ready-made decks (deck-library.md). Search by name, description or keyword, or narrow the list to topics. Many of the decks teach a language: Arabic, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. There are four Arabic decks: Basic Arabic and the most common nouns, verbs and adjectives.

• Click a deck to read about it: what it covers, who made it, its license and sources. From there, Browse cards lists its cards.
• Preview shows its cards at random, to try before you take it. Nothing is recorded.
• Report a mistake, on a deck's page and on each of its cards, reports a wrong card, its deck filled in.
• Copy link, on a deck's page, copies a link to it that anyone can open, without an account: someone not logged in tries it as a guest (guest-mode.md).
• Check several decks and press Import, or import one from its own page. The copy is yours: edit it as you like. A deck you have already imported is marked so.
• Add from a link adds a deck or a course that someone published in their own Pod: paste the link they shared, and Solid Memo shows what it is and where it is published before you add it (deck-library.md).

Courses

A course is started, not imported, from its library page, from a shared link, or from the newcomer offer on an empty deck list (courses.md).

• The course's page lists its chapters, each locked, open or done, and a button to go on where you left off.
• A chapter goes a step at a time. First you read a short piece of theory, sometimes in parts ("Part 2 of 3"). Then "Check your understanding" asks its questions, with the theory hidden: choose an answer (or press its number) and press Check. The app says whether you were right and, when you were not, why. The first time you answer a question, its card is added to your deck.
• The final review comes after a chapter's last step: every question of the chapter again, shuffled. One you get wrong comes back until you get it right. Pass it and the chapter is done, and the next one opens. Finishing the last chapter is celebrated with confetti (none if your device asks for reduced motion).

The cards a course added stay in your deck, and you study them like any other.

Statistics

Statistics, in the instance bar, shows your study over the last three months; pick another range above the figures: the last 30 days, the last 12 months, or all time. Its tabs, each a link of its own:

• Overview: how many answers and study days, how many cards you know now (mature), your current and longest streak and how many of the last 30 days you studied, a calendar of your activity and each deck's figures. The streaks and the calendar look back a year whatever the range, as do this week and month on the Activity tab. Over all time, also how many cards you have started, how many have grown mature and about how long you have studied. "Download my answers (CSV)" saves the range's answers on your device, as a file a spreadsheet opens; nothing is sent anywhere.
• Activity: what each recent day held and which weekdays you study, this week and month beside the last, about how much time you spend studying (as your answers recorded it, in courses too, since the app began to record it; before, an estimate from when you answered, course time not counted) and, folded away, the hours of the day you study in, in your current time zone, how many cards you have started, how many were young and mature week by week and how long their intervals were, how many you knew the first time and how long cards took to grow mature, and the new cards you take on beside the reviews you do each week.
• Memory: how well you remembered your cards in reviews (each card's first review of the day, always with how many reviews that is), which answer buttons you pressed, your recall week by week (month by month over a longer stretch), by how long a card had been away and by how late you reviewed it, how you answered course questions, counted apart, and your leeches: the cards you forgot 4 times or more in their reviews, each a link to the card, whose page shows every answer you gave it. What is worked out from your answers alone, such as how late a review was before the app recorded the day it was due, is approximate, and says so: changes made in the Studio are not in your answers.
• Cards: where your cards stand: how many are new, relearning (forgotten last time), young (reviewed at intervals under 21 days) and mature, how many reviews are overdue and when your daily review limit lets you catch up, how many reviews are coming in the next 30 days beside those your limit lets through, how long until your cards come back and how easy they feel, and when each deck's new cards run out. With a course, how far along each course you are, chapter by chapter, and how you answered each chapter's questions.

A deck's page sums up its own figures, with "More statistics" for the same tabs of that deck alone. Above the deck list, today's strip also says how many cards are left to study today, and about how many minutes they will take. Point at a bar or a day to see what it holds, or reach a chart with Tab and step along it with the arrow keys. Every chart can also be read as a table (statistics.md). A guest has statistics too.

Each answer you give, in study or in a course, also keeps how long you took to recall it, and in study to grade it (not the time the app was hidden), the day the card was due, and your device's offset from UTC. They stay in your Pod with the rest of your answers, and nothing turns them off (privacy.md).

Preferences

Preferences, in the instance bar:

Press Save. A deck's own preferences can set different daily limits for that deck; an empty field there follows these.

Under the settings (not for a guest), Findable by other apps shows whether other Solid apps can find your decks and study through the type indexes in your Pod, and registers what is missing when you ask (data-model.md).

Languages

Solid Memo speaks English, Swedish, Korean, German, Spanish and French. It starts in your browser's language when it speaks it, else English. Choose another with the globe at the top of any screen, or under Language in the preferences (i18n.md).

Your cards are shown as you wrote them. Each text says which language it is in, so a screen reader reads it in that language. A deck's name, its description and a card can have translations, and you see the one in your language when there is one. A deck's page says when some of its text does not say its language, with a link to settle it.

Text in a language written right to left, such as Arabic, runs right to left: on a card, in a deck's name, and inside a sentence in English too, where it keeps its own direction and the sentence keeps its punctuation in place. A card's text in Arabic starts at the right. The screens themselves stay left to right, since none of the app's own languages is written right to left.

Theme

The sun and moon button at the top switches between light and dark. Under Appearance in the preferences, "As my browser" follows your device's setting (theme.md). For example: switch to dark, then press Save in the preferences. Log in on another device, and Solid Memo opens in dark there too, since the choice is kept in your Pod.

More than one instance

"Switch instance", in the instance bar, lists your instances: open one, create a new one, attach one by its address, or delete one.

For example, to keep your language decks apart from your work decks: press "Switch instance", create a new instance in another folder of your Pod, and add decks to it. It starts empty, with its own decks and its own study. "Switch instance" takes you back to the first one, and with two instances, Solid Memo asks which to open when you come back.

Solid Memo Studio

"Open in Studio", in the instance bar, on a deck's page or in a deck's menu, opens Solid Memo Studio: a second app, for managing many decks and cards at once and for writing decks and courses to publish (studio.md). Its search finds an Arabic word with or without its vowel marks: كتاب finds كِتَاب.

Its Import and export saves decks as files and makes decks of files (studio.md). For example: check a deck, choose Turtle, check "Include my progress" and press "Export 1 deck": your browser saves the deck as a file. Later, or in another instance, "Choose a file…" under Import reads that file and says what it holds. Leave "Import the progress too" checked and press "Import into", and the file becomes a new deck, with your progress.

The journeys

Each user journey is a test that clicks through the app as a learner would. Its numbered steps are the ones in the online report, with a screenshot of each.