Exam Notifier & Colorful Tags Beta Announcement!

Hey everyone,

After last week's Pop-up Dictionary update, it's time for the next big release in this year's  back-to-school add-on extravaganza. This time we're coming in hot with a double-feature: Exam Notifier and Colorful Tags. Two brand new add-ons written in close collaboration  with the AnKing team!

Exam Notifier

Exam Notifier seeks to solve one of the key problems a lot of us face: Adjusting Anki to the needs of exam-driven learning.

With Exam Notifier installed, you will see a pop-up appear on any cards that are going to be scheduled past a specified exam date on the next review. Clicking on the pop-up will draw up Anki's rescheduling window, allowing you to change when you will see the card again:

This allows you to follow a workflow where, on a card-to-card basis, you can make the call whether you want to trust Anki's algorithm or sometimes be on the safe side and schedule in one more review ahead of the exam. You're still following Anki's scheduling, just with slight adjustments based on your own understanding of the difficulty of the material that Anki's algorithm might not be aware of just yet.

Whether this approach suits you or not will of course depend on your personal studying routine, but to give you one example, Nick from the AnKing team has been using this method successfully for all of his medical board exams so far. To get a glimpse of his workflow with an early pre-release of the add-on, make sure to watch his Step 1 exam recap video here. He will also be creating full tutorial on the add-on in the future!

Until then, here are a couple more helpful facts about the add-on to get you started:

• You can set a custom exam date and name in Anki's deck options (gear icon to the right of each deck). These always apply to one deck options group, so to set up different settings for different decks, make sure to create multiple deck options groups.
• Exam Notifier is built from the ground up for modern Anki versions, so to use it you'll need to have Anki 2.1.41 or higher installed
• Anki versions 2.1.45 and up ship with a redesigned deck options menu. As this is still a work-in-progress, for now the add-on's settings reside in the old deck options menu that you're used. To get to them, you can either use the I've added in the "Add-ons" section of the new deck options screen, or draw up the old settings with a trick: If you click on the gear icon next to a deck, and then hold down shift while clicking on "Options", Anki will actually show you the old options screen!

Ready to give the add-on a try? Make sure to head on over to the download post.

Colorful Tags

Don't you just love add-ons that do what they say on the tin? Colorful Tags is one of those and brings all the colorful tagging fun you've grown to love from BetterTags over to Anki 2.1.45 and up:

Developed together with the AnKing team and Rumo, the idea was to give you guys an add-on that works well with Anki's native hierarchical tagging capabilities in recent versions, and bridges the gap until BetterTags' next major feature update later this fall.

Some additional quick facts about the add-on:

• Colorful Tags is fully compatible with your existing BetterTags highlights, so any existing colors and pins that you have applied will carry over.
• Batch actions aren't supported just yet, but will arrive in the next update!
• One of the other major features I'm planning on adding in the future is the ability to share tag colors when sharing decks. This one of the areas where I'm working closely with the AnKing team to make sure this works great with all the amazing shared decks out there
• Colorful Tags will be available to everyone for free via AnkiWeb later this fall, replacing and updating Hierarchical Tags as it currently exists

Ready to give this add-on a try as well? Here is the download post!

----

Alright folks, that's it for this week's add-on extravaganza. Make sure to tune in again next week for the biggest updates to Speed Focus Mode and Progress Bar, yet!

Thanks as always, and please let me know in the comments below if you have any feedback or suggestions!

– Aristotelis (Glutanimate)