Android app to help organise learning

[timberwo7ves]

Hi! I made an Android app to help organise my CG/VFX learning (I designed it with digitalTutors in mind, but it can be applied with any form of self-learning).

The app does cost money, so if there's an issue with me posting here, sorry, I didn't see any guidelines for this sub-forum prohibiting it.

Here's the guidelines on how to use as posted on the DT forums (along with a link):
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Hi,
I've been a DT subscriber for just over a month now, and one of the things I found most difficult was deciding which videos to watch, in what order, and how to best schedule my time.

I made an app called studyPal (it does cost money so if this is a deterrent, no need to read on) which is available on the Android Market now, to help schedule.

The way it works is you add "paths" which represent areas of study, like a learning path. Inside each path, you can add "steps", which ideally correspond to DT video courses.

e.g. I would have several paths: Camera Tracking, Nuke, Character Modelling etc.
Inside the Camera Tracking path I would add steps: "Intro to MatchMover", "Infiltrator Pipeline with Maya and MatchMover". Similarly for the other two paths, I would add videos/courses which correspond to the path.

Steps can be reordered; the idea being that you spend time/divide your time between paths, not steps. When you work on a path, you start on the first step (read: video course), and only move on to the next step when you've completed the first. Easy/beginner courses should be the first steps, and get harder/advanced as you go on, such that a step is kind of dependent on you having completed the previous step (to get enough experience/knowledge to deal with the more advanced one).

Unlike steps, paths are not dependent on each other. My knowledge of Camera Tracking is not related to my knowledge of Nuke compositing, nor are they related to my ability to model Characters. Because of this, you can switch between paths as you choose, spending as much or as little time on a path as needed.

To help schedule your time between paths, you assign them units per day. A unit (which can be changed) defaults to 15 minutes. So for Camera Tracking, if I assign 3 units to Monday, and 4 to Thursday, this means I have to spend 45 minutes on the Camera Tracking path on Monday and 1 hour on Thursday. There's a view called "Today" which shows you how much time you need to spend on a specific path on any given day. There's one limit of 1440 minutes though; you can't assign more than 1440 minutes worth of units to any day (because there's only 1440 minutes in a day).

If for some reason you want to focus on certain paths, and stop learning a path for a while, you can set it to INACTIVE. Inactive paths won't show up in your "Today" view but the schedule you assign to it will be remembered for when you activate the path again. This lets me, for example, stop working on Nuke and Character modelling, and assign more time to Camera Tracking.

Anyway, the apps I make (this was made with a friend) are things that I personally find useful. I wrote this long description such that you'd have an idea whether you'd find it useful, without having to buy it first.

The regular version is £2.50, and the student version is £0.99 (with auto conversion to local currencies, based on rates when we uploaded the app last night). There's no difference between the student and regular version except price; we just thought that students should get a cheaper version (as we're students too!) though there's no checking and it relies on the buyer's honesty.

Note, it's not available on Tablets (I know, fragmentation right?) nor will it be available on Ice Cream Sandwich when it comes out until we figure out a fix :S So Eclair, Froyo and Gingerbread only for now sorry.

Regular - Link to Android Market website
Student - Link to Android Market website
If these links don't work you can search "studyPal".

If you do buy it and find it useful, it's always great to get feedback, so let us know here. If there's any problems, please use the email as listed on the Market and we'll reply soon (but not this week as we're taking a break from Android!)

thanks