Yes, there’s AnkiWeb, but it’s designed to be used primarily as a sync backend. Anki doesn’t really have anything in the same league.
That brings us to my problem: most kinds of content have a “natural” online destination for sharing: Flickr and Instagram for photos, YouTube for video, Slideshare for slide decks, and Scribd for office documents. There are quite a few addons already available online. Sweet! You can do everything from GUI alterations to enhancing internal data structures or the scheduling algorithm. That means: no compiling, everything lives in one text file, and live objects can be debugged in a console. Since the desktop app is written in Python with bindings to Qt for the GUI, not only is it cross-platform, but it supports writing plugins as Python scripts, called “addons”. (And now it’s moving to the cloud with Office 365, where you will have even less control over preserving your content.)Īs it turns out, Anki is exceptionally customizable. In case you didn’t know, Office still has no complete specifications for its legacy file formats, and probably never will.
ANKIONLINE SOFTWARE
For these reasons, data in open source software is inherently much more future-proof than something like Microsoft Office. It’s literally impossible for the developers to shut you out, and even if they tried, somebody could fork Anki and fix it. Also, because it is open source, your data will always be retrievable, even if that means some tooling around with some Python libraries or firing up an SQLite console. With Anki, not only is the desktop program free, but all notes are stored permanently on your own computer. These situations are terrifying-especially if you have a test, much less a career licensing exam, right around the corner.
Maybe the company decides to disable support for exporting content unless you pay a huge fee. Or, your computer breaks, and the app doesn’t work on your new one. Then the company goes out of business, and the website shuts down.
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Imagine taking a semester’s worth of notes on a shiny new website or app that you tried because it was free or had some killer feature that you couldn’t resist. It can be disastrous when those apps become unsupported, stop working on your new device, or worse, lose data.
Students are already reliant on so much software, from office programs to course management systems, much of it proprietary. Most people think using open source software is an ideological consideration, but as a student, it can be just as much a practical benefit.
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This post, rather, is about something that I thought was missing from Anki-namely, publishing the content to the web-and how I wrote some code to fix it, all thanks to Anki being open source and extensible. I’d say that Anki is almost perfect for medical students and the reasons why deserve a post all to themselves. I’ve been using Anki to generate flashcards for just about every class in medical school since the second semester, and it’s been clutch for trying to memorize the insane amounts of material that we’re given. Read how I did it below, or get the source code. I’ve started putting all my medical school flashcards on this website using some Python and Ruby.
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