Wednesday 20 June 2012

Mnemosyne 2 finally released

Just noticed there was a new release of Mnemosyne, the spaced repetition flashcard program I use which also happens to be written in Python.  It's ten times larger than the previous version, but at 20 megabytes that's not a big deal.  A quick look suggests that this is due to the inclusion of mplayer and the updated version of QT being used.


There was no information I could locate about the repercussions of installing 2.0 over an existing 1.x installation, so I went ahead and installed it under a different menu and installation directory name.  Either as part of the installation process, or when first run, it located my existing cards and imported them.


The revision interface looks pretty much the same.  The card browsing interface which I didn't screenshot, is much improved however.


There's also new support for synchronisation with mobile devices built in, and a whole range of other more standard features used in the implementation of the new version.  I haven't had a chance to explore these yet, but am looking forward to it.

The older version had support for user authored plug-ins written in Python, which I only used to convert Chinese pinyin numbers to tone marks.  Unfortunately, there's no matching support in the new version yet.  For a long time, it seemed like this was one of those projects where the author had given up on it and was effectively distracted by a never-ending "rewrite".  Glad to see it's not the case.