More Improvements and Future Plans

It's time for an update. Since November 2nd, I've accomplished a few important developments in the slow evolution of Academist. In my last update, I gave myself a small to-do which I've now completed. I wanted to utilize the descriptions of Khan Academy topics in the search algorithm, rather than just the topic titles. To recap, I had a chemistry assignment that was about "colligative properties." This would be a great subject to review in Khan Academy, but Academist found nothing. I searched for "colligative properties" in Khan Academy, and sure enough, there was no page with that title; however, it was in a topic description. Integrating the topic descriptions in Academist was a matter of revising the code that downloads information from Khan Academy, and simply adding that information to the index of topics.

With a an even more "slightly-useful product," as that label still applies in this stage, I decided it would be a good time to add Academist to the Chrome Web Store. This proved not too difficult, and because it is not nearly ready for widespread use yet, I made it so only people with the link can access it, which I might as well put here.

I made a to-do list of the most basic tasks I had to complete on October 4th. I've completed the first to-do, which was developing the searching algorithm and automatically displaying the results under an assignment on School Loop. Now I have finally started on the second to-do: Creating spreadsheets of the table of contents of textbooks at Sage Creek. This is a very time consuming task, but I've already completed a good chunk of the table of contents of my AP Chemistry textbook, which is a relatively long one. Once this first textbook is fully integrated in Academist, I will encourage everyone in my chemistry class (who also uses Google Chrome) to download it, and I will finally start gathering feedback.

Speaking of which, I recently decided to to share the primitive version of Academist with a couple of my friends, only to find out that they both use Firefox. This means I'll definitely be looking into converting Academist to a Firefox Extension. It will be more work, but probably less so than convincing everyone who uses Firefox to switch to Chrome. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about those who use Safari and Internet Explorer, but to my knowledge, they are less popular.

Only time will tell if I can accomplish all I want to before the school year ends. That being said, here is a chart of what I plan to do in the coming months: