Index Card Board for iPad Review

There are all kinds of apps to help organize thoughts. Index Card Board is one of the most unique and natural I’ve used. Index Card Board creates cork boards with highly editable and moveable index cards.

Index Card Board has a variety of features to make organizing thoughts an easy experience. Using two fingers to resize and move around the board is incredible. Index Card Board feels like a limitless, gigantic cork board that I can do anything I want with. Creating stacks of index cards works naturally. Dragging a card on top of another card locks it into position to create a neat and organized stack. Cards can even be flipped over by double tapping.

Images can be added to the index cards. But I’d like to be able to resize the images to fill up entire index cards. For example, a medical student may want to create a card with a full-size image or diagram. It would even be acceptable to be able zoom close enough to a card to see an almost fullscreen image. But the app limits zooming in to fit about 12 cards at once.

It’s definitely not the snappiest app. Bringing up the editing options has a bit of a lag to it. While editing takes a while, I’m impressed with the fact that cards don’t need to be tapped and held to move them. Simply dragging them around works immediately. From experience with other apps, I feel like most apps would ask users to tap and hold to rearrange these cards.

The exporting features work beautifully. Boards can be exported via iTunes, email, and Dropbox and in either plain text, an image, or as a Index Card Board file. The Index Card Board files can be opened in the same app on another device. The picture on the right is an exported image of the tutorial board.

There are some features this app absolutely needs to be perfect. One is the ability to zoom in to see less than about 12 cards. I’d like to be able to see as zoomed in as one card per screen. I’m not sure if I would ever use that ability, but I know that I need the capability.

Second, I need to be able to change the size of the text (or the lines per index card). Considering how small the cards are even at the most zoomed in, either the text needs to be enlarged or the index cards need to be set to have less lines (and therefore bigger text).

Index Card Board is going to be the biggest asset to studying students or writers organizing their thoughts. But at $4.99, the app absolutely needs polished up with my suggestions to make for a better viewing experience.

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