The Anki menu entry on macOS 25.07.3 is populated with two About sections (“Über Anki” in my translation). The first entry however relates to AJT add-ons (@tatsumoto) while the second entry provides information on Anki as expected.
I’d like to ask to fix this and return to standard macOS behaviour (= there is only one such entry providing information about the current application).
The add-on needs to get fixed. They probably didn’t set QAction::MenuRole for their menu entry correctly and macOS therefore moves it to the leftmost menu and renames it. It needs to be set to QAction::NoRole.
I looked into one of their add-ons to see if I can fix this. All it took was adding this line: action.setMenuRole(QAction.MenuRole.NoRole) at the appropriate place to the method create_about_action inside of the about_menu.py file. Then the menus look good again.
If any contributor to these add-ons sees this, feel free to use that fix.
Thanks!
For those running the add-on AJT Media Converter ・ WebP, AVIF, Opus (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1151815987): locate the file mentioned by @giragira by switching to the Anki user data folder (Managing Files - Anki Manual) and then /addons21/1151815987/ajt_common/about_menu.py. Then change
def create_about_action(parent: QWidget) -> QAction:
def open_about_dialog():
dialog = AboutDialog(mw)
return dialog.exec()
action = QAction(f"{DIALOG_NAME}...", parent)
qconnect(action.triggered, open_about_dialog)
return action
to
def create_about_action(parent: QWidget) -> QAction:
def open_about_dialog():
dialog = AboutDialog(mw)
return dialog.exec()
action = QAction(f"{DIALOG_NAME}...", parent)
action.setMenuRole(QAction.MenuRole.NoRole)
qconnect(action.triggered, open_about_dialog)
return action
@ferophila I just found this topic by accident. Why didn’t you report the problem using the “Contact author” button on the add‑on page?
It’s odd that Anki moves the menu action into a different menu. That menu action has been part of the add‑on for years. If you only noticed the problem recently, it’s likely a new Anki bug.
I can’t confirm if it works because I don’t use macOS. Could you open a PR on GitHub?
@dae is setMenuRole() a valid way to prevent Anki from repositioning menus added by add-ons? I grepped Anki’s source and didn’t find any usage examples of this method.
This is a known issue that occasionally occurs with some add-ons and MacOS. MacOS seems to automatically add an app’s options or About to the menu, so if an add-on uses options or About, Anki’s menu gets mistakenly overwritten. Normal apps typically only have one options or About so this problem does not occur. Also this only occurs with advanced add-ons because many add-ons do not have their own options or menus in the first place.
I see that for other add-ons people have also suggested using setMenuRole(QAction.MenuRole.NoRole), so I guess we can go with that.
Though I do not oppose the promotion of the GNU operating system, IMO the official Anki depends on revenue from AnkiMobile on iOS and the typical iPhone users are MacOS users so I think any opposition movement concerning Apple devices should be in a different community not the official Anki community. If there are no longer any Apple users on Anki the official Anki goes bankrupt and Android loses access to servers and resources, this is detrimental for all Anki volunteers and Anki users.
I’m not particularly fond of the idea of milking gullible people and having them run proprietary malware at the same time. It would be better to educate everyone and help people upgrade to the GNU system.
The Anki sync server can be self-hosted if needed.
As an example, the Ajatt-Tools project relies on donations and support from its community to stay alive.
I guess AnkiDroid might eventually become that, they are purely volunteers and do not use Apple products and preferring free alternatives.
If the scale of volunteer developers like them were to expand tenfold or a hundredfold they could maintain all necessary servers through donations and development speed might even surpass the official Anki. In that case they would not need to depend on the business official Anki and their development goals might diverge. (e.g. they will develop a complete web app to enable all users to use Anki free.)
However this would conflict with the official Anki and Anki is a trademark of the official Anki so I think it would be reasonable for them to separate and work under different names as a learning app. So such an Apple independent project is technically possible to develop but it should be a learning app with a different name.
One possibility is that in the future, the official Anki may open source its iOS app and make it free. e.g. If they introduce paid options to enhance the server and the revenue from these is sufficient they may no longer need to sell the iOS app. If so it probably doesn’t matter whether Anki users use Apple devices or not so I think it’s fine to boycott.
But these are all merely my speculations and so far there has been no such activity, so even if it were possible I think it would be at least ten or twenty years away. So far AnkiDroid seems to be lacking in developers and donations and Official Anki sells nothing other than its iOS app, so it seems to me that recommending the iPhone is essential to maintaining the current Anki ecosystem.
Unfortunately, there’s no real benefit to freeing the iOS app while the OS remains proprietary. Since iOS doesn’t respect the users’ freedoms, the users will not be able to exercise their freedoms fully even if all third-party apps are free.
Because I pinged you here and using this platform brought a quick solution for myself and others eager to fix this.
Anki runs perfectly on Mac. Linux desktops lack the variety of high-quality applications that I use for creating Anki notes and automating parts of Anki. macOS works out of the box, my current installation dates back to 2007. The high number of support requests here for Anki on Linux compared with those for more widespread operation systems is telling.
The add‑on is part of the Ajatt‑Tools project, not an official Anki add‑on, so it makes sense to contact the authors directly. If I weren’t registered here, I wouldn’t have seen this at all. I visit this forum maybe once every two months at best. It was a miracle I noticed this topic. It’s great that you’ve found a fix, but without me uploading a new version on Ankiweb, other users wouldn’t have got it. If you had messaged me in September, I would already have updated all Ajatt‑Tools add‑ons. It’s really unfortunate you handled it this way. Thank you for the solution though, I’ll make sure to apply it.
Yes, good to know. It also runs fine on GNU. However, many little add‑on-related issues are more likely on macOS because it’s a different system with its own unexpected quirks, and none of the Ajatt‑Tools members use macOS.
That aside, the main point isn’t whether software runs perfectly. macOS is proprietary software that restricts the users’ freedoms. You can’t run it however you want, study its code, modify it, or freely redistribute it. There’s no way to find out what the program is doing while it’s running. Sometimes we can detect malicious functionalities by observing their consequences, but it’s also possible that a program does something malicious without leaving traces. If you run a proprietary program, you put its developer in a position of power over you and your computer. You give them powers to abuse you. Don’t allow them to commit injustice. Tempted by the power to do anything they want on the users’ computers, developers of proprietary programs tend to include malicious functionalities. In practice almost all proprietary software is malware.
The iPhone has a market share of about 60% in my country and is still popular today, domestic phone manufacturers were nearly destroyed by the iPhone and even now 18 years later they still can’t compete with Apple (they resisted desperately but it was in vain) so I think to do this we need someone among Anki users to develop a time machine and assassinate Steve Jobs.
Apple isn’t the only phone manufacturer that forces proprietary software on users. Most Android distributions are also proprietary and include Google’s spyware. The only way to run a mostly free phone OS is to install a de‑googled ROM such as GrapheneOS or LineageOS.
So even without Steve Jobs, the world is still far from free.
I have updated the following add-ons:
If you face any issues with them, let me know.