Today I created a mockup of what the option could look like in the Spaced Repetition settings.

I posted the screenshot here as it's much easier for me to do so (alas, this site still has a very rudimentary post editor - on the plus side all those unsavory bots roaming the internet looking to break into a Wordpress backend are out of luck, haha).

In the future, there could be a section with a "live preview" flashcard, so when the user changes options, the card shows what it looks like during review. It makes sense that this "flashcard preview" would be a component, that is also used in the Review page - however the Review area still uses very old code - so this might be part of a larger rewrite that I hinted in earlier posts.

For now, I thought having a simple visual preview would liven up the form. Let me know what you think!

I meant to start at least a couple days earlier. I spent some time resolving FIGMA under linux.

One of the perks of using macOS is that FIGMA has a native application (which then has support for any locally installed fonts, and just a better experience than having to use FIGMA inside the browser). Thankfully there is a "figma-linux" application. Took a bit to set it up. Then I downloaded the "Font Awesome 5 Pro" icon set and was able to use them - which is a BIG relief, since there is an official Font Awesome Icon Component for FIGMA. With this component, you can literally just type eg. "check" and it turns into a "checkmark" icon. Saves a lot of time downloading individual SVG icons, drag-drop, then messing around trying to align them with the text etc.

I also spent an hour or so trying Lunacy. It is VERY similar to FIGMA down to the ux and the shortcuts - and that's not a bad thing. I thought it could make sense since the announcement of Adobe purchasing FIGMA and there's no way I'm going to pay a subscription for the limited use I have of a "wireframing/mockup" tool - and the possiblity of them tightening the grip even more on the free accounts. However, my adventures with Lunacy ended up rather abruptly when I found I could not even use common shortcuts like "Zoom to selection" as they are baked in for qwerty keyboards and there is apparently no way to change them. Even when I switched my keyboard input to English it didn't work. Oh well.

I thought I'd just stop worrying for now - there is a good chance FIGMA will have a free tier for some time - and I can always invest time moving the Koohii prototypes I created in FIGMA to some other tool, when the need comes.

Now you might wonder why even bother using a design tool for such a simple thing as an option added to a form? Well, it's simply like taking pencil and paper and planning before coding. It makes a huge difference. In FIGMA I can already think about the EXACT text, labels I'm going to use. What the spacing will be like. I can immediately see if labels will be too long etc. The end result is a lot better than fiddling with code until it looks ok, and besides FIGMA is really easy to use. It's a really awesome tool since their "Auto Layout" feature behaves closely to some CSS alignment properties like "flex". It also lets me decide the exact colours, etc in advance.

When this simple prototype is made, I can just focus 100% on updating the code. In this case it should be pretty simple. The "kanji to keyword" option logic is already there after all in the "Custom Review" modes - it just isn't handled by the SRS, and is not currently stored in the database.