Filmina 2.0

Filmina 2.0 is out today. Version 1.0 came out less than a week ago, and it changed so much in these days that it is no longer the same app with things on top: it is a different one.

Here is where each piece came from, because there was no plan. There was a week of studying with it, and a list of things I needed.

It started as reading it out loud

The first version solved a single problem, mine: a hundred-slide presentation I could never finish. Filmina explained it to me out loud, slide by slide, with a frame pointing at the part it was talking about. I wrote about it here.

That worked. I finished that presentation and the ones after it. But using it every day, I started to notice something else: every so often I had to leave.

Every time I had to leave

I got stuck on a concept and went to a chat to ask about it. I copied the slide, explained what subject it was, waited for the answer and came back. By the time I was back, I had lost the thread.

What the professor had said in class was in my notebook, not in the presentation. Filmina explained the slide without it, and often that was the most important part: the example they gave, what they said would be on the exam.

After listening to a whole class I did not know if I remembered it. Listening feels like understanding, and the only way to know is to try to recall it without looking. For that I had nothing.

And there was something simpler: I did not know how much I was studying. Some days I felt I had studied a ton and it had been an hour. On others I did not notice I had gone a week without opening anything.

What I added along the way

Every new thing came from one of those trips. None of them is very big on its own. What changes is that now they are all in the same place.

• Ask without leaving the slide. You raise your hand, the voice pauses and Mina answers right there, with the slide in front of you and knowing what she was talking about. And every document has its own page with a chat about the whole class, which tells you which slides each answer comes from.
• Your class notes, inside. You can type what you write down, dictate it or take a photo of the notebook page. And Mina takes it into account when she explains, when you ask her something and when she writes the summary. If the professor said something that is not on the slide, now it counts.
• Practice and Review. Practice is a stretch of questions about what you already studied, adjusting to how you are doing. Review is remembering: you get a concept and a hint, you write what you recall, and only then do you see what it was.
• The summary at the end. When you finish the class you get a summary by topic, to read or to listen to.
• Your time. A plant for every day you studied, growing more the more you really studied, and a calendar to see how the week and the month are going. It is the motivation part: an empty day stays bare soil, and that pushes you to open the app.
• Subjects. Folders to keep every class with the others from its subject, because by the third week the loose PDFs were already a pile.

And smaller things that also came from using it: a silent mode to read the class instead of listening to it, for when I am at the library; and a notice that asks if we keep going when you left for another app and did not come back. It is all in What's new.

All in one app, built on your material

That was the idea behind 2.0: not having to leave. If I have a question, I can ask it right there; I can practice, see my progress and have something that makes me want to come back, all in the same place.

And everything comes from the class material. Not from what a model knows in general, but from the slides the professor uploaded, from what I wrote down in class, from the photo of my notebook, from what they said that was not written anywhere. When Mina explains, asks you something or writes you a summary, that is where she starts.

What did not change is the usual: everything runs on your Mac, your material never leaves your machine, there is no account and no credits to spend. Asking a hundred times costs the same as asking nothing.

What comes next

Next up is a study mode with pomodoro: blocks that end with the slide and not halfway through a sentence, with a real break in between. You can vote on the rest in the roadmap, and if something you need is not there, write to me at info@getfilmina.com.

I hope you like it.