You have talked a little about the stylus pressure but could you go into more detail on the other new features?
- Deck section video support
- Deck section description support
- Improved in-app image support for Skritter official art
Currently these features (deck section video & description, official art) are only available on Skritter-official decks. Weâve got a couple decks weâre working (to be released in the near future) that will take full advantage of all of these features! Basically the first two features you mention just allow displaying more information inside of a deck section. The image support improvement improved the sizing of images, but also makes them more accessible by adding them to the vocab info panel. So a lot of the art thatâs been on Instagram for idioms or words will now be attached to the vocabs themselves.
We want to open up this kind of additional content authoring on user-made decks in the future, but it will require some updates first. Weâre also still figuring out how we want to do moderation and content review along with a couple other details.
@ddapore99 good example of these changes on the Japanese side would be the Learn Japanese Through Music study deck 
@Jeremy took the ten individual study decks and combined it into one master deck. Each section has a video of the song, too.
https://skritter.com/vocablists/view/5650531526246400
The deck can also be found on on the Featured tab of the Skritter: Write Japanese app
Cool, is there a way to try it out so the words arenât added to my general studies?
Test activity from the mobile app will give you all the vocabulary of each individual song without adding them to your review queue.
When looking up the music deck I noticed a few things.
I. The ä¸ç´ăĺŚăźă!, Tobira: Gateway to Advanced Japanese, and Nakama 2, Second edition decks donât seem to be shown quite right.
- The Family, Kanji in Context and Kentaro Monogatari decks donât seem to be displaying the images for those decks.
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There seem to be different Skritter music decks but other than the image that goes with them there isnât too much of a difference in the naming.
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Part 5 says it has video but the one you recommend doesnât show a video tag. I checked it out and it seems like itâs just missing the tag.
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All the music decks and decks for books in a series seem to be in a random order.
I just tried out the music decks and saw the added video. I felt it was nice. I wasnât really into the music selection so much. Recently I have been listening to the Japanese version of Country Roads. Is there any chance that could be added to the list?
P.S. The Puffy AmiYumi video isnât working. BTW I think itâs really cool that you can tell at a glance how much studying youâll need to do to sing a song with Skritter.
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@ddapore99 Jeremy is doing his thing with the music list, so I leave that choice up to him. However, if you make a custom study deck for the song toss us the link weâll embed the video into the deck and you can publish it to share! Currently, this is an admin-only feature while we clean up the entire deck browsing, tagging, and sharing experience. But, weâll happily include it into your video
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I wanted to work on some mnemonics for that list. I could see it in the app but not on the legacy site. I would prefer to edit it on the Legacy site since it is easier to type on a keyboard. Moreover I can dig into the character breakdowns and create mnemonics for them much more easily if need be. Also sometimes I want to look stuff up and find primitives not listed in the breakdown and MyWords on Legacy works much better. In addition to that I was thinking of adding sentence lyrics from the song in the sentence section and that is only possible in legacy as far as I know. Do you think you could get it to appear on the Legacy site as well?
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Ah, itâs the very last section in the first Learning Japanese through Music list (the one that doesnât have a Part listed). Thatâs a bit counter intuitive sorry about that. I should probably clean it up to remove the individual part lists!
Iâm sorry but I canât seem to see the the first Learning Japanese through Music list (the one that doesnât have a Part listed) on the Legacy site. Could you provide a link?
Sure! https://legacy.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=5650531526246400
Itâs actually the first link in the screenshot you posted earlier
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@SkritterJake what is your current focus for the next update? I would appreciate if you can prioritize the navigation throughout the entire UI, since it is really a pain to scroll through huge new textbook decks. Whenever you hit âbackâ it jumps to the very first section again instead of staying at section number X.
PS. The Syncing time before I start my review session has unfortunately got pretty long recently. It sometimes takes up to several minutes to load. I also fresh installed the beta, but it didnât help.
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If I could add +1000 thumbs up to comment of the weird jumping back to the top behavior of manipulating decks, I would!!
Can you explain the pain point a bit more? 3.5.1 did improve the deck scroll experience greatly. If you navigate into a deck section and then press the back button it remembers your location on the deckâs main screen. It does this on the word level as well if you tap into an item and then go back. Are you not seeing this behavior? If that is the case, a screen recording would be helpful in figuring out what is happening.
What the app doesnât do at the moment, is remember your position when youâre moving around in My Library, Browse, or Featured tabs. Unfortunately, there isnât a simple solution to this issue, and rather hacking something together temporarily only to redo it in a few months, weâre going to tackle it all in one go. In the meantime, Iâd recommend using the Search feature to quickly navigate to Decks.
As for what weâre currently working on-- 3.6.0 is a Progress and Goal-oriented release. Learn, Test, and Review activities will all be tracked and saved to the server. Daily Goals will be in the app, and study streaks will start counting beyond a one-month period.
After that, weâre tackling supporting custom entries to the Skritter database, supporting custom example sentences (and the ability to make them in the app), and a few other things that are missing from the Skritter experience.
We feel your pain on the textbook navigation. There is a lot of room for improvement. We took a stab at fixing this issue with the 3.5.0 release but ran into a few roadblocks along the way, and I made the decision to bundle the fix into a larger Browse/Deck/My Library update we have planned for 3.9.0.
Please send team@skritter.com an email so @josh can get a dialogue going. Weâve gotten some reports of this from a few users apart from you, but we havenât been able to reproduce things on our end yet. Weâd love to fix this elusive bug!
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Let me explain:
Letâs say you click on a textbook deck which has 100 sections. Then you scroll down to section 98 (even though there are sections which you havenât completed before, just because the vocabulary wasnât useful to you). Then letâs assume section no. 98 has 100 words in it. Then, You scroll down to word no. 99 because all other words in this section arenât useful. Then you learn/add this word no. 99 to youâre review list. NOW, what Skritter does is, it will not stay at word no.99 in section 98. Although it would make much sense because I likely want to study/add word no.100 from this section 98. Instead, Skritter will not only leave that position inside the section. Moreover, it will bring you out of this section and go back to the top of the section overview of your textbook deck.
What is the consequence? Not only do I have to remember that I was just in section no. 98. No, I also have to scroll all the way down to section no. 98 AND THEN inside that section, AGAIN I have to scroll all the way down to word no. 100 which I maybe want to add.
This process is very annoying. I sometimes like to look through new textbooks if I can find new helpful vocabulary. And in many cases I do; but due to this process it really is a pain and takes up too much time. You should definitely reproduce this.
And what I donât understand is that you mention the improvement in this regard with update 3.5. Skritter will indeed remember your actual position inside a section if you tap on back. However, this is only the case if you do not add the respective word to your review list. This seems not to be the ideal solution.
Okay, I understand your flow.
Sounds like the feature youâre really looking for is a way to quick-add vocabulary from textbooks/decks in the app that you find interesting to a personal deck so you can study them (but not the entire deck) individually. The alternative that youâre describing at the moment is adding countless study decks to your library that youâre not really studying from (apart from a few choice words) and might be a large part of why your review sync is taking so long recently.
Skritter wasnât designed to do the thing youâre doing. So every time you browse a deck like this and study from it, youâre actually saving the entire deck contents onto the app and your account for future study-- just FYI.
If you wanna go this route with the current app, here is a flow that you could try, which might optimize things a bit:
- Scan deck(s) for interesting content
- Use copy to clipboard (new feature in 3.5.2) on the Info screen to grab the vocab item and past it into a notes app quick
- Rinse and repeat without losing your spot in the deck or deck section
- Create a random words deck or deck section for a given month and add them all the stuff into it
- Learn the items