Genius organizes your information and carefully chooses questions using an intelligent "spaced repetition" method that's based on your past performance.

It performs fuzzy answer checking and even highlights errors visually.

Use Genius to study foreign language phrases, vocabulary words, historical events, legal definitions, formal speeches, marketing points, religious texts - anything you need to memorize!

– https://genius.sourceforge.net/

Copyright ® 2003–06 John R Chang.
Copyright ® 2007–08 Chris Miner.

Genius was is a flashcard-style memorisation app for Mac OS:

I used to use Genius religiously to get through my secondary school French and Irish exams, and since then it has always been the flashcard app I've held others up against. It really is just a neat little app.

Since then, the MacOS ecosystem has obviously changed quite a fair bit, and so none of the builds available online work anymore. It seems the last straw was Apple enforcing 64-bit only binaries.

As it turns out though, the entire project is GPL, and the whole project is still hosted on SourceForge! With some helpful hinting from Claude, I have managed to get the app built and running on arm64 macOS. I have also taken the liberty to upscale the icons now we're in the age of retina displays:

Incredibly the only barriers to getting a fully-working build were:

• Updating the settings to use the latest macOS SDKs
• Fixing a return type (NSComparisonResult vs int; I suspect the compiler got stricter since 2008?)
• Turning off sandboxing, for building the DMG - I was getting permission errors, and I presume modern ways of building DMGs don't attempt to just write directly to the Xcode build directory

I wrote a longer form post about this on my blog which you might find interesting.

At the moment this repo is a git mirror of the above SVN repo, with the bare minium getting it to work. The main code repository is in Genius1†. Note that the original code is licensed under the GPL, thus so is this. See COPYING.txt.

I have forked the history as of the SVN revision #250, which referenced updates to the release notes.

This seems to align with the last release 1.7.250.

You can find three branches:

• main: default branch for post-2025 development
• feat/build-250: feature branch to get the app running
• master: the SVN 'trunk'

You should be able to build a binary/DMG by opening this in XCode, then just pressing build.

Given the likelihood of breaking changes (good luck runnning this on Tiger), and in deference to the old history, I've given this branch the 1.8.x version number.

†: Genius2 on master is an interesting piece of archaeology - it looks like there was an attempt to bring the app up to date with 'modern' OS X APIs, as well as introduce new features like images, rich text, and a different spaced repetition algorithm. It was eventually abandoned. See the TODO.txt.

If I had to guess, I reckon develoment stalled right around the time Anki was starting to take off, and the developer just picked that up instead.

Everyone loves a Roadmap, but ultimately I'd consider the app 'finished', or at least feature complete. It serves it's purpose as-is.

All I can really think of that's missing is to put up a DMG on Github for others to use more easily, and reach out to the various lost souls on Sourceforge looking for new builds.