I was reading a lot of technical books and kept highlighting things I wanted to remember — but I rarely went back to review them. The notes just sat there, on my Kindle or in the reading app.
So I started building something simple: a tool that lets me turn highlights into flashcards with as little friction as possible.
Just select text on your iPhone, share it with the app, and it creates a flashcard using AI — a Q&A pair and a short summary. You can browse cards in the app, or show them on your Home Screen, Lock Screen, or watchface of your Apple Watch.
This is my first iOS app, and building it has been a great learning experience. I’m using Supabase for the backend which have been mostly great.
I really like this. I'm going to grab some of my kiddos 7th grade biology notes (handwritten), and see what it does. I did notice that's it's a little hard to manage your deck: removing and shuffling are not obvious?
Let me know how it goes! I'm not always very happy with how the cards turn out, will see what I can do with some LLM prompt tuning.
Yeah, it's very barebones at the moment, if you swipe the name of a deck left on the list of decks, you should be able to delete it, and I haven't added the ability to delete individual cards yet. Shuffling is not possible, adding it to the backlog.
Given that it's summer-break and school is not the top of their thoughts, they're actually pretty thrilled. Here's what my youngest did: she took her hand-copied notes (from the book), took a photo with her camera, highlighted her notes, and had it created cards. She did this (rapidly) for a whole page of notes, and then had a card-deck to drill from.
I'm really glad to hear that! Two things I've thought about that would probably make the process even smoother:
- Create cards directly from camera input in the app.
- Create multiple cards from a source text, so that she can just supply a text body and the llm figures out what is important, and then the user can just discard cards they do not find useful.
You could... ? Or, it can just be what it is: addressable from "share". That has the nice property that if she gets a copy of notes from friends, or the internet, it's not "built in": it uses the functionality already in iOS?
So I started building something simple: a tool that lets me turn highlights into flashcards with as little friction as possible.
Just select text on your iPhone, share it with the app, and it creates a flashcard using AI — a Q&A pair and a short summary. You can browse cards in the app, or show them on your Home Screen, Lock Screen, or watchface of your Apple Watch.
This is my first iOS app, and building it has been a great learning experience. I’m using Supabase for the backend which have been mostly great.
Check it out: https://komihag.com