Yes, great point. Privacy / dark pattern concerns aside, I used to like having a paper pass in case something happened to my device. I wonder what would happen in practice if you printed a screenshot of the app? After all, a screenshot on a phone works fine.
Thanks very much for letting me know. I've just starting blogging again and the old Wordpress instance needs some love (or replacing...) I think I maybe enabled some background Captcha thing back in the day. It obviously doesn't work well as I have thousands of spam comments sitting in the moderate queue.
Today I'm announcing a project that I've been working on for a while:
Langwag: A mega interactive language learning app. It supports more than 30 languages. The idea is that you can copy and paste any news story into it to get a personalised translation and language lesson.
I've found this to be a satisfying way of learning since I spend a lot of time reading the news anyway. It seems to work well because it's driven by your interests – and so it's much more interactive than slot machine Owl-based alternatives. A friend said she understood more than expected because she already knew the “characters” (orange guy, drunk FBI guy, torso rocket guy, you know).
It has a bunch more features, inspired by what I've found I actually need to help me learn French while living in France: look up and practice phrases, hear things read out loud, ask questions. It also has a cute dog logo. I have ideas for improvements, but really it's over now to you, the world: what would you like to see?
There is a hopefully pretty good demo on the public site so you can see how it works. You can add a few of your own news stories for free and, if it clicks for you, Early Adopter access is just $5 / month – less than a lactose free venti iced chai latte with lavender cold foam (a real drink that I learned about yesterday).