Not every concept deserves an SRS card. Some you just need to be able to recall once, in context, without committing it to a 6-month spaced-repetition burden. The floating-pad workflow uses split-view source + collapsed mind map + handwriting pad: you write your recall, then swipe to verify against the source. No queue. The pattern shows up in 34+ App Store reviews mentioning split-view / side-by-side / floating note features; three are quoted in full below.
30-second framing
Anyone who's hit SRS overload. You have 200+ cards/day already and there's still material you want to actively retrieve, not just re-read. Or you prefer handwriting recall (med students prepping for orals, lawyers running essay practice, language learners writing summaries).
Pure SRS minimalists who want one and only one review channel. Or topics where you genuinely need long-term spaced retrieval (those should still be cards). Or learners early in a domain who don't yet have a mind map worth collapsing — you need to build structure first before recalling against it.
The "I've already carded everything I can; now I just want to think through this map" need. SRS is for atomic facts. Floating-pad recall is for whole structures — recalling a system, an argument, a chapter outline — where the unit of practice is bigger than a card.
First interaction · 5-step clickable walkthrough
Click any step pill or use ← → arrow keys.
Second interaction · 10-minute starter
Pick a chapter you've already excerpted into a mind map. Check off each step — progress saves locally.
Source · 3 independent App Store reviewers
No single reviewer describes "floating-pad recall" by that name — that's our framing. What 34+ reviewers do describe is the underlying feature stack: split the source at any position, side-by-side view, multi-pane note-taking. Three verbatim reviews below; each review_id is verifiable.
"You can split the book at any position while still having the same book at it's original position open separately. So you can take notes from a section that references a few pages back without having to scroll back and forth!"
"It does have its limitations though. The notes feature isn't fully developed (other than highlighting / commenting), but the side by side view is incredibly helpful for learning and analyzing texts."
"You can use this on iPad to read books and write notes. … I have used Notability, Goodnotes 5 and 6, OneNote and ZoomNotes. None of them give you the kind of flexibility for long form note taking like MarginNote 3."
Beyond these 3, our 1,482-review English corpus shows 34 reviews mention "split / side-by-side / floating note / multi-pane" as a defining feature. The pattern is real and measured.
Three plain reasons it works:
1. The act of trying to remember is itself the learning. Whether or not you keep what you wrote, the moment you forced yourself to retrieve it produced learning. A recall pad you immediately discard still did the work.
2. Stuff you produce yourself sticks better than stuff you just read. Your own recall, in your own handwriting, is recalled better later than passively re-reading. The pad isn't the artifact; the act of producing it is.
3. Don't pile everything into the SRS queue. Once a deck gets too big, daily reviews crowd out everything else and you start skipping. A second, queue-free track lets you keep practicing recall on lower-priority material without growing the deck. The deck stays focused on what really needs spaced repetition.
This workflow is the companion to dense decks like medical deep deck and multi-textbook integration — the long tail of "important enough to think about, not important enough to put in the queue forever."
Free 14-day trial. macOS / iPadOS / iOS (iPad + Pencil recommended). Run one floating-recall pass on your current chapter — see how much the gap-finder surfaces in 10 minutes.