Instant.fm is not done yet, but check out what I whipped up in 3 hours using jQuery 1.5 deferreds, jQuery templates, and the Google Translate API!

Automatic foreign language flashcards!

Nothing is running server side, except for the text-to-speech which is actually scraped from Google Translate using a simple Tornado AsyncHTTPClient. It is not possible to fetch the audio from Google on the client-side, since Google blocks all requests that have a non-Google referer header (though empty referer headers are allowed). Interestingly, Firefox doesn't send a referer header on mp3 file requests embedded with flash or HTML5 audio, while Chrome and Safari do. So, if I only cared about Firefox, I could really get everything working client side by including the mp3 directly in the page.

Since supporting Chrome and Safari is important, we fetch the mp3s from Google's text-to-speech (tts) service (the one that powers the audio on Google Translate) and cache the files server-side.

I used a bunch of CSS3. It's pretty self-explanatory, just look at the source.

• Tornado Web Server - https://www.tornadoweb.org/
• Supervisor - https://supervisord.org/ (used to daemonize the Tornado process)

• SoundManager2 - https://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
• JavaScript SHA1 - https://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/
• jQuery - https://jquery.com/
• Modernizr - https://www.modernizr.com/
• HTML5 Boilerplate - https://html5boilerplate.com/

• jQuery Hotkeys - https://github.com/jeresig/jquery.hotkeys
• jQuery QuickFlip - https://jonraasch.com/blog/quickflip-2-jquery-plugin (used as a fallback when CSS3 translation is unavailable)
• jQuery Templates - https://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/
• jQuery TouchWipe - https://plugins.jquery.com/project/Touchwipe-iPhone-iPad-wipe-gesture

• save decks
• edit current deck (more obvious)
• pronunciation guide
• add opengraph tags
• shuffle cards button
• image for each card
• repeat sound button