Vocabify 0.2, now on Google Code

Vocabify 0.2 is here! In other words, the little vocabulary notify script I posted two weeks ago has been improved by Chris Hatch. The updates are:

• Script remembers words popped up so next popup is random within the unseen words, not all words.
• You can pass in the file name as an argument.
• There are now nciku and a Tatoeba links on the popup (commented out by default though, as they don’t work in GNOME).

So the script is now run with:

python txt_file_notifier.py [vocab file] [interval]

Name and logo: Vocabify / V!

I’m going with the name Vocabify for the time being. It’s suitably daft and short, and contains some idea of what the script is supposed to do. I’ve put together a provisional logo as well, although it’s come out looking like something from a 1980’s anti-drugs video:

Google Code & GPL license

Vocabify is now hosted on Google Code here,  and is officially open source under GPL v3. I’m really hoping that as it’s open source it’ll improve more rapidly, and be useful to more people.

Meiqi pointed out that Popling does exactly the same thing as Vocabify. However, Popling is commercial and uses the pop-ups to display adverts as well as vocabulary items, unless you pay for a premium version. This is unacceptable to me, so hopefully Vocabify can provide the same functionality for free and without adverts.

More development ideas

There are still a lot of features I’d like to add to Vocabify (I’m currently learning Python towards this aim). The main ones:

• Option to play a sound with each flashcard
• Show images with each flashcard
• More customisation with the interval etc.
• Customise what the pop-up shows from the text file
• Use Anki deck as input (it’s just an SQL database, which shouldn’t be tricky with Python).
• GUI

More ideas / suggestions are welcome in the comments.

Link: Vocabify on Google Code