An advanced user’s review of the latest release

[SkritterJake]

@Therebackagain

Cramped writing area. I’m on a iPhone 8+ and miss the somewhat more roomy space of legacy Skritter. Cramps my writing style, especially for very complex characters.

Screenshot of the app currently would be great as a reference point. There is certainly some room for further improvements in spacing and layout. A bit tricky when supporting lots of different devices, but I think we have some more room to play with.

@Therebackagain

Silence of new Skritter. Legacy app kept me company chattering each character’s pronunciation.

We have an improvement issue open for this to allow for single character readings (similar to legacy iOS app) in the future!

@Therebackagain

I liked the blazing blue laser writing in legacy Skritter, but that was because it was a reward.

We just improved the logic a bit more in prep for the 3.4.1 patch. It should feel more rewarding to have and keep a streak on writing/tone cards moving forward!

@Therebackagain

I am trying to discipline myself to work through the “learn” mode, instead of just adding cards at will and launching into practicing them. But it consumes a lot of time, adding many precious minutes to daily study, and I’m not sure it is really speeding up the subsequent review. Even as an advanced user, I do appreciate the ability to trace new characters and practice them for a bit.

Noted! We’re having some good internal conversations about ways to bridge the gap between the old system and the new system for precisely the reasons you’ve stated. We don’t have everything sorted just yet, but when we do, we’ll be sure to post ideas and mockups on the forum before going into active development!

@Therebackagain

Curious about speed at which new words are added to the audio database. I personally add at least a dozen or more new words to Skritter’s word database each week, and of course these are completely silent when they come up for review. How many words a month/week are added to the audio database and how frequently is this done?

Items that are missing audio get added to a queue for recording, and they’re sorted based on priority. The more people studying an item, the higher up on the list it goes. We had to put the word-level recording on pause while wrapping up our single-syllable audio project, but we’re back at it again, and working our way through the queue. Adding single-syllable reading support (see above) should help reduce the amount of silence you hear in the app if you’re studying lots of custom entries.

@Therebackagain

Where have the eccentric time encouragements gone in that deep male Beijing accent? Miss those!

Eccentric time encouragements will be back in a future release. We might have to get a poll going about the “deep male Beijing accent” vs. Fiona’s words of encouragement (fun fact… those are my audio recordings!)

@Therebackagain

Have to go to legacy website now to get detailed performance stats. These were an essential daily encouragement ritual. Why are they missing from the new app?

We need to make a v3 API endpoint for Progress before we can begin the overhaul. We have this planned for 3.6.0 of the application, and can’t wait to get more advanced Progress in the app!

@Therebackagain

So far there seems to be no way to enter new words into Skritter’s word database without returning to the mobile legacy app. Why is this? I enter multiple new words a week!

This was covered over here for anyone looking to read more. Tl;Dr-- We will be adding the ability to enter new items into the database, but need to ensure that we have some checks in place to catch and fix input errors before items go live to all users on Skritter.

@Therebackagain

The deck list has monstrous icons. While pretty, if you’re an advanced user, it now takes ages to scroll through one’s own study decks. It’s not a problem when choosing a list for review in due cards mode, because the icons are absent. But in deck lists, wow is it tedious to get to the bottom. Especially when browsing other people’s decks, it stalls frequently each time it opens a new batch. Can the icons not shrink substantially?

They can! Improvements to decks (loading, filters, art, etc.) are also currently slated for the 3.6.0 update.

@Therebackagain

Send correction” window doesn’t automatically close after submit button is pressed. Have a little pop up note that disappears saying “successfully submitted” as in legacy Skritter

Correction’s window should now automatically close when the feedback has been sent. There was a bug with some vocabulary causing it to fail sometimes, which we’ve fixed up in 3.4.0 release.

@Therebackagain

The new Skritter seems a little judgementally easy on us. I think if one taps on the (chosen to be hidden) pinyin, or peeks at the mnemonic, then the card should be marked wrong by default. I have to mark it wrong myself.

We don’t get much feedback on this (you’re the first that I can recall), so I tend to think that most people prefer a bit more relaxed when it comes to grading. We do grade auto-grade incorrect if you open Info, or use any hint buttons.

@Therebackagain

It also seems overly lenient about stroke angles on writing cards. Sometimes I have written several strokes for a completely different character before it recognises the mistake and stops me.

Tuning strokes is on our agenda, and is a massive project that requires lots of user data to do appropriately. There is a very fine line between being too strict and too lenient, so we need to proceed with caution. In the meantime, we do have the “rawest squigs” option now for the ultimate challenge!

@Therebackagain

Close button Xs replaced by back button arrows where appropriate. To distinguish between actually exiting something as opposed to going back a step within a session of something.

We improved this in the 3.4.0 release for the Info screen and character drill-downs. Please do let us know if there if you find instances where “back” and “close” seem to be an issue, and we can look into it further.

@Therebackagain

Rewards. Something to relieve the boredom of Skritter.

Totally! We look forward to adding more fun in the future

@Therebackagain

The option to learn traditional characters first before simplified. So that they appear first in learn mode and first in review. This is sound from a pedagogical point of view. Strange as it sounds, it is much easier to learn simplified characters if you already have learned complex characters. Skritter does this backwards. It should be an option in settings.

Agree. I’ve made a note to open an improvement.

@Therebackagain

Example sentences: can see why we can’t have these individualised, or lose the new audio. But it would be nice to have a way to submit example sentences from which the Skritter team could pick model sentences for everybody.

Custom example sentence support will be coming to the app in the future. Community voting on example sentences has been done in the past with some mixed results. We also have to be careful about copyright infringements if people submit sentences found from other sources. So, while it would be super cool to do, the best course of action for the immediate future is to create our own (in batches), while also allowing you and others to add any sentence you want (from any source) as a private, custom sentence.

@Therebackagain

More of a visual distinction between tone cards and writing cards. In legacy Skritter this was clear. In beta they are so similar that reviewing or learning at speed I often write when I am supposed to tone.

Noted! And, I do have some mockups of ways to improve the card distinction in the future. This is currently slated for 3.7.0 release.

Thank you for your patience, and again for all the feedback. I’ve taken some personal notes on some things, and I’m happy to report that a lot of the stuff you’re bringing up is certainly on our list for future improvements to the app!

-Jake