New Year's Update: Cloze Overlapper, Pop-up Dictionary & More! (Patreon)

tl;dr:

• Updates for Cloze Overlapper & Pop-up Dictionary are here!
• Lots of amazing things happening in the background, some of which you might have already seen (e.g. native image occlusion) while other things are still en route (e.g. next-gen image occlusion add-on)
• Surprise new add-on release coming up this week!

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Hey all, Glutanimate here!

As per usual, it's been a minute since my last post, but with 2023 drawing to a close, I thought it was high time for a quick status update. There's been a lot of cool stuff happening in the background in terms of existing and new Anki projects I'm working on, so let's dive right in!

(and make sure to stick around until the end as there's a surprise waiting 👀)

Add-on & Rhodopsin Updates

On the add-ons and tools side, I've been continuing to work on major updates for Cloze Overlapper, Rhodopsin, and one other Patreon project. More news on these will follow soon!

I have also been working on smaller patches for add-ons broken by Anki 23.10+: Hotfixes for Puppy Reinforcement, Mini Format Pack, and most of my other popular add-ons are now available on AnkiWeb.

Updates for Cloze Overlapper and Pop-up Dictionary will be going live on Patreon today right after this post, so keep a lookout for them in your inbox (or click on the links to head to them directly)!

Anki Contributions

The most exciting project for me this year has been collaborating with Mani, Damien and other Anki contributors on introducing native Image Occlusion to Anki. In case you weren't aware of this change: Starting with Anki 23.10 you can now create image occlusion cards directly within Anki and AnkiMobile (AnkiDroid soon to follow)! This is a pretty momentous milestone for the Anki ecosystem and I'm very glad we managed to get there.

Native IO was a clean start if you will,  and so we were able to work towards – what I hope – is a better and friendlier user experience than what came before. If you are curious to dive more into the design decisions that went into native image occlusion, check out my post here.

A Next Generation Image Occlusion Add-on

One really important aspect of native IO is that it is extensible. This was key for me to ensure because I see native IO as a foundation for the future – a new framework to build on top of and rethink what Image Occlusion can be.

That's exactly what I have been doing over the past few months, using almost a decade's worth of experience with IOE to build a completely new Image Occlusion add-on on top of the native implementation. Bringing Rhodopsin AI to native image occlusions will of course be part of that, but there's so much more here. It truly is a generational leap in utility and usability and I simply can't wait to share more about it with you soon!

One more thing...

I did promise a surprise, so here we go! Meet our newest member of the Patreon add-on roster: Due Cards Badge

Due Cards Badge does exactly what you'd think: It adds a notification badge to Anki's app icon, showing you exactly how many cards you have due for the day:

Having to switch a lot between different contexts lately, I found that I needed a better reminder to properly keep up with my Anki reviews, and Due Cards Badge has been doing exactly that for me. So I'm hoping you'll find it just as useful and that it perhaps will help you with any Anki-related New Year's resolutions 🤓

Due Cards Badge is compatible with macOS, Windows, and Linux on Anki 23.10 Qt6 and up, and will be available on Patreon starting later this week.

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Alright, that was it for this quick pre-2024 update. I hope it helped shed some light on what I've been keeping busy with and gave you a couple of Anki goodies to look forward to for next year.

Thanks again so much for your support, your patience, and for your trust in my work!

🎆 Happy New Year to you all, may your 2024 Anki streaks be long and heatmaps filled aplenty!

– Aristotelis (Glutanimate)