The project is still early in its development. Spaced repetition is something that has been recommended and has already been planed from the beginning.

The current flashcard implementation is not what it is intended to be in its final stage - it’s more of a showcase of initial functionality and a proving ground for building upon what other projects (like Anki) already offer.

Anki web is an option, but the Anki project as a whole can be daunting to new non-technical users with the variety of implementations it has. Scholarsome is intended to be simpler to use for these users while still offering more powerful study tools.

Well said about Anki.

I use it and it’s not for the many, and learning with spaced repetition should be.

If your goal is to be simpler, and also more powerful, could you write down what that means?

If your goal is to just poke around without a plan, or to just copy features without a unifying vision, it seems unlikely it ends up simpler or more powerful than anki.

As far as I can tell, there's no vision written down anywhere, no list of things other systems got wrong but you'll get right, no insight into what needs to be done in this space.

The only selling points / differentiators I see listed right now are: "no paywall/free, open source". Those do not differentiate it from anki.

> no vision written down anywhere

Shouldn't this be a deck of cards?!

I echo your sentiment. I also agree the Anki is a bit of a morass. A streamlined UI for creating Anki cards could be nice.

Wow, that’s an unnecessarily harsh criticism. The OP spent a lot of time coding this up, it’s still in progress, and they should feel proud of it! Anki isn’t for everybody, and maybe this person made a UI that speaks to some people better than others. I count myself among the camp of people who like SRS but dislike Anki.

"Anki isn't for everybody"

But I didn't see a single sentence about how this is different from Anki and why? Why do you want to reinvent the wheel when Anki is good enough?

Haven't yet seen this tool, but here's a quick answer. A few years ago, after skimming through the docs, I gave up on Anki because it seemed too complicated. I was using SuperMemo back when it was a DOS (and later Windows 3) application, I consider myself a fairly sophisticated user (e.g. I have a good expertise on LaTeX, even coauthored a textbook, I know Emacs very well, also authored a textbook), I've been a hobby programmer for over 3 decades and a professional one for 7 years, earlier I did a PhD in maths, etc., etc. And still Anki looked intimidating. That says something about "good enough". There's definitely space for an easy to use SRS out there.

I am using Anki now, btw, although I use it in a very simple way, but I think the point still stands. (Also, I agree that any new SRS should be somehow Anki-compatible.)

This is what the project is intended primarily to address. Tools like Anki are very powerful and accomplish what they set out to do, but they fell prey to feature overload in certain aspects.

All it takes is one quick look at their docs to turn people away to a more mainstream option. Condensing its features into a more bite-sized application can make a world of difference for usability.

Apart from LaTeX, I'm the opposite of you and while initially I found Anki to be a little "overcrowded", within a few days I became proficient in using its features and understanding its spaced repetition algorithm. I'm genuinely curious about the factors that contribute to the difference in our experiences.

As I said elsewhere – the manual gave the impression of a very complicated tool. (Also, I lack some things I had in SM back in the day, but that's not a big deal.)

Ugh, Anki is complicated? I would say it's powerful not complicated. It was really easy to start with existing decks and make my own.

I'm just going to assume that this attitude is a symptom of an entire generation having been raised on software that wastes 80% of the screen real estate on white space, and dumbs everything down to an insane degree.

Rule 1 of Anki, is make good flashcards, and review every day. That's all you need to get started. The defaults are good enough to get started. You don't need fancy image occlusion, add-ons, machine learning tuned custom parameters, etc.

"Make good flashcards" is indeed a difficult problem, but not one that is mitigated by a different tool.

"Review every day" is a question of habit formation, which is difficult, but also not a problem that a different tool will do better.

So the default Anki settings are good enough to get started, and allows itself to be customized as the user gets more familiar and better knows their need.

Without Anki import and export, a new tool simply seems to be a dead end to me, even if it slightly simplifies getting started.

I understand all that (as a long time SuperMemo user). What was intimidating in Anki was the manual. Perhaps if I had tried to use it first there would be no problem...

I can relate to this. I had fond memory of SuperMemo on DOS and wrote a little terminal tool “lrn” inspired by it: https://github.com/krychu/lrn

I acknowledge it’s simple, runs on terminal only and lacks bells and whistles. But this is also probably why I use it so much.

Does it allow you to use Anki decks?

Unfortunately not, “lrn” uses a very simple file format where each entry consists of three lines: question, answer, empty line. But I think it’d be a good idea to look into supporting Anki decks. I should do it some time. It’d be probably limited to decks that use text only.

Yeah, I looked into a little bit. An Anki to Markdown converter would be ideal.

    Question: ...
    Answer: ...

----

Anki is badly designed and inefficient, largely I think because it was the first project for its author. It's also become venerable and battle-tested, and features have been developed through the needs of a very large userbase.

I don't think that anyone denies that Anki could be a lot better if it were completely rewritten with the experience of having had Anki for years and knowing its pain points. You just have to have a plan, best based in analysis of Anki (and SuperMemo) to do that.

> There's definitely space for an easy to use SRS out there.

I think there's definitely even space for a hard to use SRS that's easier to deal with. But it's got to start by covering at least 80% of what Anki does already or it's not worth switching.

> Anki is badly designed

yes

> and inefficient

no. You can tweak every aspect of srs for each deck as you wish, if it’s inefficient for you - adjust the settings.

"inefficient" in what way? (not really used it myself)

> But I didn't see a single sentence about how this is different from Anki and why? Why do you want to reinvent the wheel when Anki is good enough?

Well, sometimes "good enough" isn't really the point. People have different tastes and different motivations.

Why did people use Windows before v3.0 when Mac at the time was objectively better? Why did people bother using OS X when Windows at the time was objectively better? Right now, why are people using Mac OS when UI and UX on Windows is objectively better?

Why use Linux circa 1995 when FreeBSD was objectively better? Why use netBSD now when everything else is objectively better?

you keep using the word objective and i'm not sure you know what that word means. these are subjective comparisons that you are making. and different people have different subjective tastes.

> you keep using the word objective and i'm not sure you know what that word means.

I don't know if maybe English is your first language or not, but objective means "based on established fact".

In other words, you don't know the criteria I've used to rank one above the other in all my comparisons, you only know that it is something based on fact.[1]

> these are subjective comparisons that you are making.

No, they aren't.

The reasons a person may choose one option over another can be subjective. The fact that one performs better than another on a certain criteria is objective.

> and different people have different subjective tastes.

But I already said that:

>> People have different tastes and different motivations.

See?

My entire point was that, even if something is objectively better than something else, people may still want the something else due to reasons of taste and motivation.

[1] And, in fact, you could switch almost all of my comparisons around (except for the poor UI/UX on Macs - that comparison was restricted to only the UI/UX) just by using different criteria in the objective comparisons.

No. Your assessment is obviously subjective because you say that UI/UX is better on Windows than on macOS which is objectively wrong.

> No. Your assessment is obviously subjective because you say that UI/UX is better on Windows than on macOS which is objectively wrong.

UI and UX is not subjective.

That Mac, in 2023, doesn't even have snapping Windows is not an inaccurate observation. No window groups. Barely visible and hard to hit Window titlebar buttons. Fails to remember Window placement for some tools (tkdiff) but not for others.

Without 3rd party addons, Mac window management is unusually poor (compared to various other Window managers, including Windows). Window management is a major component of a UI based on application windows.

None of those things are subjective.

Even with 3rd party add-ons, I eventually gave up and stopped using the MB M1 as soon as I could.

Because options is good for consumers and drives healthy competition leading to more innovations.

At a minimum I would say any new SRS app or site needs to be Anki-compatible. It just has such a big lead in terms of mindshare in the space - though I agree with other comments that it definitely has some seriously dated features. Any interest is the space is good imo.

It has a lead but is no where near mainstream where the maximum amount of people could improve their opportunities to improve their lives.

I’ve been looking into adding the ability to import sets from Anki, especially with how widespread it is. We already have it for Quizlet, but Anki will certainly be next to be able to be imported from.

Release early and often, or release when it’s all done.

Shipping isn’t easy.

Anki is definitely nice and full of features but also a victim of design by committee and kind of consulted at times.

Lots of space out there for options and alternatives.

Anki also has an independent FOSS reimplementation for Android called AnkiDroid.

They can exchange data. Years ago I used Anki to prepare some decks which I then used with AnkiDroid.

I think AnkiDroid is mostly written in Kotlin now.

I've never managed to make pronunciation work on ankimobile personally, I'm using another app

That's nice, but AnkiDroid and AnkiMobile are different things. The former is a complete FOSS implementation of Anki for Android, whereas AnkiMobile is a proprietary companion app to Anki from the Anki author (I think, iOS only).

I didn't know that, I only use android so I did not notice you had another app on iOS. Maybe the one I tried was called AnkiDroid then? I can't remember.

I'm using a completely non-Anki based flashcard app just because of the lack of this feature.

Anki is really not that great. All the implementations I’ve tried are ugly as hell and have crappy UX.

It’s also over complicated for something as simple as flash cards.