News

A new 'family' license has been added that allows families of up to 5 to use Mental Case for just $39.99. Those sharing the license must be immediate family, such as spouses and children, and not extended family, like aunts and nephews.

The new license should encourage more parents to give their children's education a boost by improving their study skills with Mental Case. You can purchase the Mental Case Family Pack in the usual way at the Mental Case store.

We have been having trouble lately with spamming of the forums, so we have taken measures to ensure it won't happen in future. Unfortunately, this means you may occasionally be required to enter a response when posting to prove you are not an automated bot. I hope you all understand that this small inconvenience ultimately makes our lives easier, and the content on the site better.

Drew McCormack
Mental Case Developer

Mental Case 1.5.1 is now available for download from the home page. It includes important bug fixes, particularly for users still on Mac OS X 10.4. Fixes include:

• Fixed stability issues on Mac OS X 10.4 when creating new cases and case collections.
• The slide controls now appear when you press the tab key in a slide show, the way they did before version 1.5.
• Progress panel now appears when you drag-and-drop to export an archive.
• Fixed a bug in slide export where if a note had an image on its prompt slide, but no text, the prompt slide would not be exported.

Mental Case 1.5.1 is a recommended upgrade for all users.

As individuals, we've been on Twitter for some time, but now we have also signed up as a company (user: mentalfaculty). We will use the feed to post interesting happenings around Mental Case and other products, including releases, tips, important bugs, and use cases. If you are into Twitter, start following us now.

The Mental Faculty will be attending the AcademiX conference at MIT on March 26th, 2009. Anyone in attendance is most welcome to come and chat, take a look at our poster on Mental Case in education, and get a demo of the app.

For those not attending, you can download a PDF of the poster. It is targeted at educators, and gives various tips for using Mental Case in the classroom.

I will also be giving a presentation at the conference, in the afternoon. The topic will be how science is being changed by emergent technologies, but a small part will relate to the scientific basis of Mental Case.

Hope to see some of you there!

Drew McCormack
The Mental Faculty

The good news is that Mental Case 1.5 is finally here, and can be downloaded from the main page. It has many new features, which you can read about under "What's New" in the application Help.

Unfortunately, we have discovered in the process of making the release that a new feature of the update software we are using was not correctly configured when we released version 1.4.5, and if you try to update you will receive an error message about code signing. There is nothing we can do about this because the issue is in version 1.4.5, not the new version. So, instead of using the automatic update, please download and install directly from the web site.

In between developing Mental Case for the Mac and iPhone, we have been playing with ideas for introducing online components to Mental Case. One such idea is Mental Drain. Mental Drain allows you to post 'nuggets' of useful information, and tag them. Other users that are following the tags you enter will then receive the message in their 'mental drain'. It's a bit like forming ad hoc online communities, where each tag — or topic — effectively represents a different group of users, or community. Those familiar with the Twitter service will recognize the concept; the difference is that with Twitter you follow people, and with Mental Drain you follow topics.

The full-edition of Mental Case for iPhone has just gone on sale for $4.99 (normally $7.99). If you've been putting off making the purchase, this might be a good time to upgrade from Mental Case Lite.

Version 2.0.2 of Mental Case and Mental Case Lite for iPhone is now available from the iTunes app store. This release fixes bugs related to line breaks and accented characters in card sets downloaded from Flashcard Exchange. Memory requirements have also been reduced, making crashes less likely when using Flashcard Exchange.

Version 2.0.1 of Mental Case and Mental Case Lite is now available from the iTunes App Store. This release fixes a bug which caused the app to crash when deleting notes, and also fixes problems with missing data after downloading from Flashcard Exchange. It is a free update, and recommended for everyone.