When I was prepping to take the GREs in 2009, I had to memorize a bunch of longwinded vocabulary words that I knew I’d never use: "sanguine," "enervate," and my personal favorite to mouth quietly, "magnanimous." (Fair warning: I wouldn’t be able to tell you what any of those mean without a right-click.)
To study, I made a batch of a hundred or so flash cards that I’d carry with me on the train every morning, all scrawled on illegibly with a dried-out, purple marker. It was January, so I had to fumble through my weather beaten 4×6 cards—stored in a ziplock!—while removing a revolving cast of clumsy winter gloves covering my already clumsy fingers.
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Cards were dropped, eyebrows were furrowed, and ‘scuse me‘s were offered. Long story short: It wasn’t pretty studying for the GREs in 2009. Or should I say, studying wasn’t "pulchritudinous."
But! If iPad 2s had been invented, and had I so happened to have owned an iPad 2, you can bet the farm that using mnemonic devices to memorize weird words in public would’ve been, at the very least, a little more elegant had I used this brilliant Peek app, which augments your quizzes and study guides created in Evernote with an innovative new feature.
From what I can tell, Peek is the first app to take advantage of the iPad’s Smart Cover by letting users incrementally lift the flap in order to test themselves. Check out the video above. Look at how fun studying looks! The app even lets you document which questions you get wrong with a checkbox to label your answers as incorrect.
It’s a pretty ingenious use of the Smart Cover, and one we’ll likely see duplicated by other developers in the future. The app is available for free, and you can get it here.
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