Mind Vault has been chosen as GeekWire’s App of the Week. They wrote a great article and talked about it on their podcast/radio show . I am very honored that they have chosen Mind Vault and hope that it will arrive in the hands of more users who will find it useful.
We just wrapped up the gifting season here in the United States but there’s a new type of gift that is possible throughout the year, Apps. It has been possible for a while to gift an App through iTunes on your Mac or PC, but with iOS 6 that capability is now done very easily from your iPhone or iPad. Let’s see how.
Find the app you want to gift and open the drop down menu next to the Buy button. Select Gift this App and you’re off to the races.
Find the app you want to gift and then tap the Share button in the upper right. From there you can tap the Gift this App and you’re good to go.
This is a great opportunity to give apps that you think would be particularly useful to specific people. Mind Vault would be great for any student or book worm in your life. You can find it on the App Store to buy or gift to anyone that would find it useful.
Mind Vault 1.5 is available in the App Store . The biggest feature in this release is that Mind Vault is now a Universal app, optimized for the iPad. It also now requires iOS 6. I am very excited about this and can’t wait for iPad users to try it out. You can buy it now on the App Store or gift it someone you know from iTunes. Don’t forget to leave a review on the App Store as well.
Mind Vault was recently updated to 1.2. This update is all about updating the design. It is by no means finished but it is getting more polished all the time. So enjoy the updated look while I keep working on a the next update. It’s going to be a big one. In the meantime here are a couple quotes about iteration that you might like:
Systems with unknown behavioral properties require the implementation of iterations which are intrinsic to the design process but which are normally hidden from view. Certainly when a solution to a well-understood problem is synthesized, weak designs are mentally rejected by a competent designer in a matter of moments. On larger or more complicated efforts, alternative designs must be explicitly and iteratively implemented. The designers perhaps out of vanity, often are at pains to hide the many versions which were abandoned and if absolute failure occurs, of course one hears nothing. Thus the topic of design iteration is rarely discussed. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see this phenomenon with software, for it is a rare author indeed who publicizes the amount of editing or the number of drafts he took to produce a manuscript.
Fernando J. Corbató, A Managerial View of the Multics System Development
Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won’t be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.
Mind Vault is in the Manual Apps Back to School Sale. Mind Vault was made with students in mind so I think it is appropriate to give them a leg up on any memorization they might do as they start the school year. So if you’re starting classes give Mind Vault a shot, or if you know a student who might benefit you can gift it to them (it’s easy to do right from iTunes). The sale is for $1 and lasts until September 15th. Go pick it up and get memorizing!
The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust; to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives.
In the northern hemisphere we are enjoying summer right now. Summer is lovely here in Seattle, not too hot or cold. I also know that the heat is oppressive elsewhere. I thought it would be a good time to memorize some summer verses. I turned to a great source for things to memorize, the always helpful WikiQuote:
That beautiful season
the Summer of All-Saints!
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), Part I, Stanza 2.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Summer, summer, summertime
time to sit back and unwind.
In winter I get up at night,
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way
I have to go to bed by day.
Enjoy your summer, and stay cool.
I am happy to let you know that Mind Vault 1.1 is now available on the App Store . The update is a small, but significant, one. First off, the parsing for one word lines has been fixed (it was a tokenization problem if you codeheads are interested). If you have any items with one word lines simply open them in the edit screen and save to make them work correctly. In addition, I have added an app info screen with capabilities to contact me via email and Twitter. You can reach it by tapping on the Mind Vault logo. I have also added a fun vault animation when you tap the vault button in order to give you more visual feedback.
I hope you like the new features. There are more on the way. If you think Mind Vault could be helpful for you, pick it up on the App Store . If you already have Mind Vault and enjoy it, please be a peach and leave a review
As those of who downloaded Mind Vault will know the Greek Alphabet sample I included is not working properly. Turns out that Mind Vault never learned to parse single word lines. Who do you think forgot to tell it to do that? I’m whistling nervously … Anyway, I will be fixing this in the next update and if you really want to memorize the Greek Alphabet, or anything else with single word lines, just add a comma to the end of the lines and it will magically fix itself.
I hope you are enjoying Mind Vault and if you are I hope you will leave a review in the App Store . Happy memorizing!
Today Mind Vault goes on sale! I have been working on Mind Vault for the past 9 months and I’m very excited for people to try it out and let me know what they think. The idea came when I wanted to start memorizing things to help improve my recall. I have small children, a busy wife, a full time job, church responsibilities and more. So things tend to slip my mind. This situation is not unique and I think almost everyone has a similar range of things tugging at their attention. Memorizing things can be a good way to focus the mind and improve your ability to retain important things. So I set out to create Mind Vault, using a memorizing technique I had been taught previously to memorize written passages.
The road was long. In addition to learning to program, which I had never done before, I needed to design it, use it and refine it. The results are now up on the App Store, available for purchase. I hope that Mind Vault can help you memorize whatever you want to retain. Here are some ideas of things you could memorize:
Words are powerful things, so fill your head with good ones. Give Mind Vault a try today and keep checking back for updates. There are new features coming that I know you’ll enjoy. Stay tuned.