There is no "offline" capability planned.

There is an export script with which you can grab your flashcards, and do some extra reviews during the day, on your cellphone or other. Some users do that. The export script was broken in the last update and will be back up very soon.

You can not re-import your SRS status though, this is more of a way to do extra reviews outside of the site.

Thank you isharabash. That's a kind offer, but I don't know how that would work out. To be quite blunt, I don't have a SVN setup, and I am not prepared to try to correspond over mail or chat, to try to merge code, discuss and agree on how it should be implemented UI wise. I don't want someone else to be dependent on my roller coaster development cycles, and motivation ups and downs. So I say this out of respect: I would'nt want to engage someone on a project and then let them down.

Making a website offline could also be a lot more work than you may expect. For something like GMail to run offline they must have architectured the code with that in mind right from the beginning. They probably have a layer to abstract the database so that it stores on mysqlLite locally and otherwise with the real servers, all invisible to the main app logic.

What do you think about AIR?

I'm not too keen on the offline system integrated in the browser. It just seems strange to me. You select an option to turn a given page offline right? Or it will go online/offline and synch when needed by itself.

With Google apps this seems natural, because the one page that you're looking at IS the app, the whole thing. GMail is a prime example. But when you have a website with various pages with varying degrees on functionality on those, which page should be offline-able and which not? I find this rather confusing.

You can make the whole site in offline mode, but that seems quite messy to maintain. Everytime you create a new page you have to ask yourself, should this work offline or not, how will the user know?

With a separate AIR app, it seems like you have twice as much development. However you can create a subset of the online functionality. You can reuse also a lot of css, javascript, and html.

And what kind of features would you expect to have offline? Did you have in mind just the flashcard reviews or the story saving as well?

ファブリス, what if you just made a JSON/XML interface for syncing the deck (both ways)? Then someone else can develop an offline application/bookmarklet/Firefox extension/Anki plugin/whatever on their own, without you needing to be involved in it.

Last edited by humpolec (2009 November 17, 3:30 pm)

@humpolec: very interesting idea.

After a night sleep, I realize now that most of the needed api is already in place.
a) We can bulk get all the cards (incl. Box info and next schedules review time) from the export data
b) We can obtain the users story data from the server using a JSON(i think).
So a one way RevTK => Anki Deck should be feasable already. If I find some time tonight I might write up a prototype.
The other way => RevTK, which IMHO is the more interesting and required for syncing. If possible now, though only through a pretty stupid hack and is extremely resource intensive on the server. If we would basically emulate the review process with a webclient library. and kept track on the cards, we could probably make sure the right cards from from box to box. Though this requires some logic on how to deal with cards that should just stay in the box they are, if you proceed with the whole review process. [Though I _guess_ one could force a certain card to be reviewed]

buttom line is this: While it may be possible to *hack* RevTK to be syncable, I'm not in favor for it, and I'm quite certain ファブリス is neither. After all we should, if we do something, do it with his consent and support.

ファブリス wrote:

You can't hack it into the current site without proper API. The flashcard review page uses the principle of "least information": it doesn't know what box a card is in, it doesn't choose what box a card goes to. If you look at the ajax calls in Firebug you will see that all it does is request for card contents with "get" and sends the review answers as flashcard ids and answer (yes/no/easy). It is the server that takes the current card schedule and updates it.

That's pretty much what I ment, from the exported cards I'd know it's (current box), and fail/succeed the item as needed to transfer it to the "updated" box. That would for sure mess up the timestamps. That's for sure.

The above could even be archived without messing with the boxes. if one would just track the F/S/E states, in a sequence. They could be replayed to the server. And one could compute the card's box, based on the sequence and the last known state (export).

The biggest issue would arise if one was to use an external (offline) system to review the cards. Review the cards on RevTK, and sync later in which case there would be a severe race condition and the whole learning process screwed up. So basically the user has to make sure his deck was synced before he starts to review on either the website or his offline app.

Yes, timezones need to be handled with great care, for not screwing the review system.

I suppose the most interesting usecase is the (due and study cards) anyway. E.g. you know your going on the road/train,... and want to review your (todays) due and study cards. If you play your changes back the same day (as described above) that shouldn't pose SUCH a big issue, you'd still mess with the modification timestamps and get artificial timestamps. How much that impacts the review schedule I don't know.


Anyway, these are just my thoughts on how that issue(?) might be tackled. I don't intend to impose anything here.

People have already exported their review status to Anki before, someone made a a script before to translate the review delays where applicable. Search the previous "export" topics. If you want to write another one, you have all the data at your disposal with the two export functions available on the website.

Not yet   Your best bet right now would be to export your stories from "My Stories" and view it comfortably in a spreadsheet program while you're on the go.