thats great! so far the beta review sessions are very stable, other than loosing sync every now and then, a restart of the app fixes the issue.
That’s great. Are there any updates when we can expect the next beta build?
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any update when the next beta is out?
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I downloaded Test Flight app but only see message that reads: “No Apps Available to Test” how do I get access to beta to test out? Would love to have teach stroke order option for my daughter. Thanks!
My account is quite large, and I am having trouble downloading my account. If it fails, it has to start the whole process over again. It stops downloading if I leave the app, so I continuously need my phone to be in the app in order to get through the process. The main slow part of downloading my account information is the high number of decks I have (almost 200), and each deck takes about 10 seconds to download.
We’ve finally submitted it to Apple, and waiting for them to approve it for release. If you’re on Google, then it should be ready now, and for apple, in the next few hours or day hopefully. 
You can read all the release notes here:
https://blog.skritter.com/2019/05/3-2-beta-update/ (more in-depth)
Here are the instructions. A big update for iOS should be live in the next day or two depending on Apple.
The next update (3.2.0) should make the initial sync 10x faster for large accounts and hopefully fix this problem. If you still experience a significant wait after the update, let us know at team@skritter.com.
great job guys! so far after a couple test runs all run smoothly. i will.do more extensive test.runs while commuting on monday.
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Just tried the latest Android betas (3.2.0 300220). Some observations:
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The writing area is still too small.
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I need to be able to review an unlimited amount of stuff. I get you can “test” individual decks to your heart’s content, but I want a way to practice all my knowledge of Chinese, not just once source of vocabulary. (It also makes it hard to beta test the review process
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In a similar vein, de-automating learn is fine with me, but it would be nice to have one learn button I can hit from the main screen. Moreover, it’s not clear to me how I’m supposed to know there’s a list with words available to learn. (It seems to be the case that if you have words to learn, only those decks are shown on the home screen, and if you don’t, all decks are shown. If so, that makes it clear where to learn from, but it’s a pretty unintuitive to make it harder to get to your other decks when one of them has words to learn.)
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On the Decks tab, “My Library” should be the default (especially if the above behavior is intentional).
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I added more words to a list so I could test learn mode more, but the app didn’t see them. I’ve quit and restarted the app to no avail. Only the painfully slow “Refresh Local Data” option had an effect.
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Text sizes can be really small; it is a strain on the eyes to read the prompt. Often times the only visible text is the smallest, which makes no sense.
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Good:
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Bad #1:
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Bad #2:
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Umlauts and tone marks are still at each others’ throats:
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Some cards are a little too hard. (I think this word lacked a definition.)
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I used to like the understated supplemental feedback offered by the sound effects, but it seems like there are more of them now? I had to turn them off. One concrete problem is it is counter-productive to have the sound effects play simultaneously with the spoken word.
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That said, the word sounds are often played really late. Really, really late. On many occasions I will have switched to the next card and be in the midst of answering that question when the previous word’s sound is finally played. That’s very distracting.
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Not working at all for me. I was told this latest patch would sort out the lag issues but the opposite has happened. It now takes anywhere from 4-6 minutes for the app to load and get through the various review sorting processes to actual study. It waa slow before, but now it’s so bad that by the time it’s ready I often no longer have time to grab the few minutes I was planning on.
The worst part though is it’s apparently an absolute memory hog. My phone is old but has 3 GB of memory which is the lower end of what phones come equipped with today, but even though I’ve set the permissions so that the memory manager won’t shut the app down, it often just crashes if I toggle to another app. Just now I did a Pleco lookup from within the app and when I switched back, it started reloading from zero. Horrendously frustrating. Just awful.
In other respects it seems to work OK but there are a number of times it won’t let me correct my scoring if I get auto-marked wrong (often happens trying to skip a card), and I still have to squint to see the tone marks. Also I’m pretty sure I can’t turn off the tone reading. I have to keep my volume cranked all the way down all the time as a consequence of this.
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Thanks for the feedback! I checked your account and it does look like memory issues are causing your account to not benefit from all of the other performance optimizations we implemented in the latest release. Your account size is exceeding the edge cases I tested by about 3x, so I need to figure out a better way of handling all that data.
iOS Skritter Beta 3.2.0 (300220) Feedback
Hi all! Great work on the Learn and Test improvements! I really appreciate them. The release took a lot longer than I expected to come out, but the focus on speed improvements is really smart. Thank you. Here is my feedback on the new version.
I love these improvements!
- Learn/Test fixes
- The Learn/Test portion of the app is way less broken than it was, thank you!
- It doesn’t reload every time. Thank you!
- The sections that are complete are actually marked complete. Thank you!
- Individual words load instantly when you tap Learn!! Thank you!!
- The count of items complete instantly loads. Thanks!
- That voice for the 5 minute banner sounds familiar…
The problems I am experiencing, in order I would fix them for myself:
- App hangs forever if you finish a set of writing reviews and try to do any other reviews (including more writing). Must kill app and restart to fix. To repro: (1) select writing reviews only and 10 reviews (or all, if you have non-writing reviews).(2) finish all writing reviews and go back to dashboard/reviews. Select any other review type and start reviewing. Expected: the review to start. Observed: hangs on Loading Words screen indefinitely.
- Loading of the Dashboard is slow. No choice but to stare at the spinner for ~10 seconds with no other UI. Same thing every time I go back to the dashboard, not just the first time, so it occurs each time you finish reviews or finish learning and go back.
- Loading of Review page is slow. Every time I go to review I have to wait several seconds while it loads. Worse since I review one card type at a time.
- The Mark as Learned button is very slow for me. It behaves as if it is not woking, then it responds 5 seconds later. This kills the feeling of fast that the Learn section has. I use this button a lot for words that I already know the individual characters for.
- I still really need to be able to get to mnemonics for individual characters from the word cards. I have to keep a laptop and web browser open while studying new words currently.
- This is an interesting one. Opposite to how it should be, the “Return to Dashboard” is the only option available after you finish a set of reviews, unless there are no more reviews available. If there are no more reviews available, then it has the option to continue reviewing. The logic seems swapped here. This was broken in a previous beta release.
- In the word list for a section (Lesson->Section), if you tap into a word to look it, it scrolls the whole section back to the top. This is very frustrating when trying to look at words in a list.
- Audio plays late or not at all sometimes. Doesn’t feel quick and reliable.
- New: sometimes when launching the app, the audio for the intro video plays. It continues until I leave the app and come back in again.
- New (to me): got into a state where it said “0 cards to review” in a grayed-out button on the Dashboard, with no option to study my deck. Not sure how, I just launched the app and then switched to another app while it was loading. Killing and restarting was the only way to recover. Not sure how to repro.
- New: For a word with traditional and simplified versions, once the simplified version was shown in the “Characters” section of the info panel when in traditional mode. The traditional version still showed at the top of the panel. Saw for 積極. Not able to repro this right now (and I didn’t check to see if it was just that word), but I have the screenshot if you’d like it.
Design Feedback
- I don’t find the pinyin and definition questions in the Learn section useful. For pinyin, it literally says the word in audio right before it asks you for the pinyin. And it shows both definition and pinyin one click before it asks for the definition. It feels frustrating to be asked immediately after being told, even if there is any benefit. The writing is different because it is complex enough to take some effort.
- It would be really helpful to me to show how many of each card type are due in the Review screen. Otherwise you don’t know if your review is going to be quick (mostly pinyin cards) or slow (mostly writing cards).
Once we get the above in great shape, we can talk about improving the other tabs, polish, etc. Looking forward to the next beta!! 加油！
3 Likes
Skritter’s audio files have come from a variety of sources over time, and it would appear that some of these files have some severe delays before actually playing the audio in question. While clearing my review queue yesterday, I tried to pay particular attention to this specific issue and take some notes along the way. After analysis, it would appear that many of the files with delay are from the same source, which also happened to be the first source referenced when playing item level audio in the app.
We deprioritized the rank order of this audio source in the latest internal build as a potential temporary solution for this problem while we investigate further. Depending on how things sound during internal testing, this could make its way into the next beta build for feedback, and I’ll be curious if it reduces distraction and makes things more reliable.
We’ll also be doing a more comprehensive audit of app audio in crucial decks in the future, and improving the way bad audio (and other item issues) can be reported in the app in the future so we can record replacement audio.
Hi Team,
First of all, much thanks on this major Skritter update. Have been enjoying even the early betas over the previous app.
I’m having sync issues. I’m not sure if this started with 3.2 or it’s coincidental with increased usage on both my iPhone and my iPad. On my iPad, I had added decks, and learned several words. Was not getting those settings on my iPhone. I logged out on my iPad and re-logged in, this also caused me to lose decks and learned cards, even on the iPad. I’ve logged out of my iPad app, deleted app, and other things, but still having issues. Today I did a clean reset of everything on my iPad, reviewed three cards, added HSK2 deck, learned some words but when logging on to skritter.com web UI, none of this is shown. When I try to ‘sync all data’ in Settings, it usually times out. Retry has worked, but the local data does not seem to be syncing up.
I’ve also noticed that my review cards has gone way down. The last two days, I’ve only had three review cards. I realize the algo for this has changed, so I’m not sure if this is normal or not. (I only have one active deck, HSK1. The deck that is not getting synced is HSK2.)
Thanks for any advice and keep up the good work!
-e
For the test mode, could you add that the statistics from the previous test are remembered, i.e. percentage correct in total and for each type of card?
I looked at my audio problems more closely. It appears that I misspoke and the audio is not playing late but getting cut off early. This is easiest to reproduce when doing tone cards with one second or less auto advance. About 20% of the time or more, the audio doesn’t finish before the next card is shown. This doesn’t seem to happen for my definition and pinyin cards, but may happen for writing - my writing has audio off. Please take a look and let me know if you cannot repro.
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This is a known bug that we’re trying to fix. It only happens if a tone card is up next, so if you just study tone cards, you’ll hear truncated audio each time.
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We’re thinking about how stats will work and will keep this in mind! This might be something that could go into the activity feed in Progress.
