The spaced repetition software system Anki is the de facto standard for foreign language vocabulary learning. Its algorithm requires lots of performance data to schedule flashcards in the most efficient way. Anki displays these statistics in a group of thorough and informative statistical graphs and descriptive text.
However, they aren’t easily available for the end-user to export. Thus, the reason behind the companion projects AnkiStats and AnkiStatsServer.
The premise is that you can run your own more extensive experiments and statistical tests on the data once you have it in hand.
After waking up this morning with my mouse locked onto the Anki icon in the dock and trying to figure out how to get Activity Monitor up and running so I could force quite my Automator application that I described yesterday I figured it was back-to-the-drawing board.
I’d like to have used the Accessibility Inspector to manipulate the PyQt objects in Anki’s windows, they aren’t exposed in a may that you can script them.
While working on a project to automatically collect statistics on my Anki databases (stay tuned…) I worked out a system for scheduling synchronization from my desktop OS X machine.
Prerequisites LaunchControl is a GUI application that lets you create and manage user services on OS X Anki is a spaced repetition memorization software system The solution relies on Automator. Normally, I don’t care much for Automator. It has too many limits on what tasks I can accomplish and workflows created with it are often fragile.
Speaking of Anki, here’s a Swiss Army knife of database utilities that provides searching, moving and renaming functions from the command line.
On GitHub.
You can do things like this to rename and collect tags:
$ anki_tool mv_tags '(dinosaur|mammal)' animal Looks cool.