We really hope you enjoy your vacations as much as we’ll enjoy ours!.

To celebrate the long days at the beach, the extreme heat, and the amazing sizes of Hong Kong’s mosquitoes, during August 3, 4 and 5, you can get a 50% off of all of our applications.

To get the discount, use this coupon code when purchasing Keep Your Word, Quiet Read Pro or Share in our online store: SUMMERSALE2010

Share is the quick and easy way to transfer files Mac-to-Mac. Share lets you push files to every other Mac in your local network running Share out of the box, without any extra setup or configuration.

Share is only $9,95, and you can download a full featured free trial valid for 14 days.

This update does not bring many exciting new features (unless you are a Quiet Read Pro user and are very excited by the new “Send to delicious”), but fixes some annoying bugs, and makes the app more solid and reliable.

To update Quiet Read, open the app’s preferences, go to the “General” panel, and click the “Check for updates now” button.

What’s new in Quiet Read?

Favicons
This won’t make a huge difference in the way the application behaves, but it makes it a little bit prettier. And prettier is better.

But, if you don’t like pretty things, you can hide them in the application preferences.

Contextual menu
Control+click or right click a link, and you will get a contextual menu that will let you open, edit and delete the link.

Drag and drop to other applications
You can drag links to Safari, Firefox, TextEdit, Adium… to any application that supports it.

What’s new in Quiet Read Pro?

AppleScript
Yay! You can add links to Quiet Read Pro directly through AppleScript. For instance, to add the frontmost page in Safari:

tell application “Safari”
set theWindow to item 1 of windows
set theTab to item 1 of the tabs of theWindow
set theTitle to do JavaScript “document.title” in theTab
set theUrl to do JavaScript “document.location.href” in theTab
end tell

tell application “Quiet Read”
set theLink to make new link with properties {url:theTitle, title:theUrl}
end tell

Export to CSV
You can export all your links to a CSV file. Why would you do that? I don’t know…

Extended sorting options
By default, Quiet Read sorts your links by creation date, ascending. In English, that means, the oldest first, the newest last. You can change the sorting to creation date, descending (newest first), or sort by title or by url.

Email links
A convenient way to send your favourite Youtube cat videos to all your friends. Can you believe this, by the way?

Send links to ReadItLater/Instapaper automatically
Many of you asked for it, so here it is: you can send all incoming links to Read It Later and/or Instapaper automatically. You are welcome.

Multiple selection
This should not be a new feature, it should have been always there, but better late than never, don’t you think? Select multiple links, and perform actions over the selection.

And that’s all (for now). Thank you all for being there. Thank you for downloading Quiet Read, and thank you with cream on top if you purchased Quiet Read Pro. Oh, and add some cherries on top of that cream if you are one of the volunteers who translated the application.

Oh, and if you are not sure about what is that Pro and not Pro thing, check out our better and bigger support centre.

• Send links to Instapaper.
• Send links to Read It Later.
• Shorten links.
• Global shortcut.
• Link list search and filter.

And that’s what I am calling Quiet Read Pro. Quiet Read is still completely free, but Quiet Read Pro is $9.95, and you can purchase a license at our online store.

Quiet Read needs Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), and is available in Traditional Chinese, Polish, Helenic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

Within a limited time (that can be configured in the application preferences), you have to write the translation of the word that unveils, each letter at a time, in front of you.

The result is tracked by Keep Your Word, and you can also configure the number of words that will be part of the test in the application preferences.

Today, we will take a look at one of the new exercise modes: Memory.

This is an implementation of the classic “match the pairs” game. The object of the game is to match the two written representations (original word and translation) of a word.

Keep Your Word does not track the results of the game so far, although it modifies each word’s metadata to add a timestamp that reflects the last time that word was used in an exercise mode. Also, right now there is no limit in the number of times a card can be clicked. That will change in a future update, though, and it will be possible to limit both the time to solve the puzzle, as well as the number of clicks.

The number of words can be selected in the application preferences.

Until now, when you clicked the “Flash Cards” button, Keep Your Word randomly selected a given amount of words (configurable in the app’s preferences).

You can still do that, but now you can also activate another way of selecting words, based on a spaced repetition algorithm. According to Wikipedia, Spaced repetition is a learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material; this exploits the psychological spacing effect.

The actual algorithm implemented in Keep Your Word is the Leitner System. Basically, we separate the cards in five different groups, according to how well we think you know them. These five groups are mapped to the “progress” slider.

That way, you can fine tune the algorithm, and move up or down any word no matter the result of our calculations.

Obviously, you have to help us while you are studying. When you review the flashcards, you can mark a word as “known” or as “not known”. When reviewing any of the other exercise modes, we mark the words are known/unknown automatically.

I am very excited to start off the new decade with this update. With this major upgrade, you can now memorize you vocabulary using the two new exercise modes, or create relationships between words. Oh, and you can also let Keep Your Word decide which words you need to review more often (spaced repetition, yay!)

Along with the functionality enhancements, Keep Your Word 2.0 also sports a more refined user interface and loads of usability improvements.

Download Keep Your Word 2.0

Keep Your Word 2.0 costs $34,95. A five sites license is available for $69,95. Upgrades from earlier versions of Keep Your Word are $13,98, and free to users who purchased Keep Your Word on or after September 1 2009.

The release notes:

Biggest new features in Keep Your Word 2

• New preference to use spaced repetition algorithms in the study sessions.
• New exercise mode: Time Challenge.
• New exercise mode: Memory.
• Related words. One word can be linked to any other, by custom declared links.

Not so big, but also important

• Updated user interface.
• Improved Written Test.
• Dock icon contextual menu.
• New data model.
• Huge performance improvement. Most of the code has been refactored to make KYW dictionaries as light as possible.