@SkritterJake Dark mode, dark mode, dark mode, and automatic dark mode.
Did I mention Dark mode? 
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Recently I’ve been using the beta app more than legacy and I’ve become fond of how the Learn a new character works (definition, pinyin, tone, writing in a package, after which it is added to the Review queue).
However
While it is sometimes definitely a must have Te be able to intentionally work through a new deck section to add Multiple new characters to one’s personal review list, it often feels like a chore to me, especially in periods when I’m too busy to study and would like to focus on reviewing.
Wouldn’t it be possible to add an option (!) to enable Learning new characters inside Review mode? New characters/words would appear from time to time, and for each new character/word it could have that complete Learning instance (definition, pinyin, tone, writing for that word) embedded just as in Learn mode. After clickIng “Mark Learned”, the character is added and the review goes on.
This would spice up the review queue with events (“new character!”) and would Give the chance to gradually add new characters to the queue.
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We have something like this planned! 
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OK cool. Would also be nice to be able to customize the learning instance. Sometimes I would like to be able to chip in a second prompt of writing blindly directly after the first one to fortify learning (I’m learning mostly by writing multiple times) or skip the definition prompt if there is a pinyin prompt anyway showing the definition etc.
Dear Skritter Team, I just want to kindly ask you to share some insights about the development of the upcoming betas. It’s been quite a while since we heard something more specific from you guys. I would appreciate some kind of update what (and roughly when) to expect from new promising features to enhance the user experience.
Maybe you can find the time to give us some information
Sure thing!
We’re working through some back-end projects at the moment that need to get finished up before we can get back to app development.
Task 1-- Migration to Stripe billing API for the website.
This is a massive overhaul of our billing system, and requires a lot of testing the checks to deploy. The updates go live on July 31st for our sign up page. After that, we’ll be manually moving all existing users into the new system and wrapping up the project.
Task 2-- Skritter Classroom client updates
Schools are on break, and we’re taking the opportunity to improve the Classroom system for all of our teachers. We’ve got two tasks left to finish up, and then the changes go live.
Mobile next steps-- 3.4.9
Patch update to fix some bugs and improvements that have been reported in previous builds. We’ll be kicking this off in early August.
Beyond 3.4.9
Progress screen on the mobile app, and some other awesome stuff that I’m not quite ready to discuss just yet. Once this billing overhaul is done you can expect us to get back to a more typical release cycle of patch updates and beta builds as we work toward some larger features and improvements.
Thanks for your patience and stay tuned!
-Jake
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Quick feedback and request: Please pre-load mnemonics. Studying on the commute most of the time upon swiping right, mnemonics take ages to load or never do. This is really annoying. In the legacy app, all the info screen information was available instantly. Can this be reproduced in the new app?
This also sometimes happens with the information in the info screen.
Thanks in advance.
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We’ll be looking ways of doing bulk downloading of this stuff. Ticket is open already!
I was away for a while with very poor cell data connection. I found Skritter beta just would not open beyond the black screen, completely stalled.
To get it to work I had to turn my phone onto airplane mode.
However, a bright note: I drove to a spot that had good cell data signals every once in a while to input new words into my list. Was delighted to discover that, unlike legacy Skritter, once I had added the words to the list with a cell data connection, I was both able to review them and edit definitions on airplane mode.
In legacy Skritter, one had to add all the words into the review cue first in order to be able to study them offline. This beta is a big improvement for subway study and other situations with no WiFi or cell data.
In my opinion the idea that these words have similar meanings is the biggest misconception. It’s al because of translating into English. I f you want to know te meaning of a word you should look it up in a Chinese dictionary, the same as you do in your own language when you want to know the real meaning of a word.
I think Skritter should also support the use of some Chinese dictionary’s and not only English ones.
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Hi All,
I am a longtime user of Skritter, but have recently gotten more consistent with how I use the app, and generally making more of an effort to structure my Chinese learning. I have a few questions/suggestions for the iOS app (currently using 3.4.7 (300407)).
Turning off auto-advance for the last card of a Due Cards review
I have auto-advance turned on, which is great, except that whenever I complete the last card due in a review, the progress automatically closes the review and brings me to the summary results screen, so I am unable to modify the last card’s result if it is incorrect. Not a huge deal, but can get to be a pain if I am systematically working through smaller decks.
Different tones accepted for characters within words
I have noticed this occurring a few times where if a character within a multi-character word has different possible tonal declinations, they are all accepted when reviewing the word’s tones. I don’t think this should be the case, as even the tonal version of the word that is revealed will indicate a different tone than the one I will have put in (although the character does have the possible declination that I have entered). Does this make sense? I apologize for the lack of clarity here
Occasionally getting different cards for the same character/word
This one is pretty straightforward. I’m wondering if this is a resolution issue within the app, or if the fault lies with the user importing different decks/cards/etc? To be clear, I see both repeated cards with different definitions, and with the same definition, just worded differently.
Weird empty squares occasionally appearing in character/word definitions
I’ve attached a screenshot to help explain this one. Not a particular bother, but just something I wanted to note.
Difficulty recognizing strokes
When writing in the app, there are two strokes in particular that Skritter has a lot of trouble recognizing: the second stroke of 心, and the first stroke of 尸. These are particularly troublesome when they are an element of a character such as 悉 or 房.
Decks
- This may be my own incompetence, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how to bring in new decks from either the browse tab or the featured tab. In the legacy app, I could just add decks to my collection and decide whether to add from those to my review queue. I’ve read the explainers and watch the video, but they only show how to copy a deck. I don’t want to copy a deck, I just want to add the deck as is, quickly accessible from the My Library tab, with the cover and video link (if available).
- I would like to be able to delete decks from the iOS app, I don’t currently seem to be able to.
- I don’t seem to be able to import vocab’ lists from Pleco like I used to on the legacy app, has this feature been terminated?
- I would love to see a feature where users are able to better categorize their decks of cards. For instance, by creating sub-groups.
Progress (BETA)
I do no understand this page, and far preferred what was available on the legacy app.
- I don’t understand why Characters Learned and Words Learned under the All Time tab keep going up and down. Shouldn’t it only go up?
- The up and down movement of Characters Learned & Words Learned in the Today tab is even more significant and also perplexing.
- Activity Feed, is, in my humble opinion, completely useless in this current state, and brings me nothing as a user.
- I won’t beat a dead horse on progress stats, as I’ve seen this discussed elsewhere on the forum, but boy do we need those words/character progress charts on the app. In my mind, this is one of the biggest problems the app currently has.
Advanced SRS Grading
This one is my fault because I just went ahead and turned on Advanced Grading when I switched to the new app, but is there guidance on what each of the grades actually mean? How does the algorithm interpret “hard”? I’ve noticed I can enter something as “Hard,” and the Review Report will show a 100% success rate. I ask because I want to make sure I’m using the app correctly instead of generating false positives or negatives in my learning by tinkering with it too much. For example, I’ve recently cut way back on the my use of “easy,” because I was being too generous with it, and that has completely changed how much I’m seeing certain cards. (This feels dumb reading back on it, but at scale the result is staggering).
- On the UI front, I would love to have word-level grading be a little larger. It is difficult to reach and tap in time when moving with a quick auto-advance speed.
Too Many Due Cards
This is again a problem of my own making, but from a stack of 1300 characters and 1500 words, I’m seeing some 500-800 due cards being added per night. How can I work through this? I have seen Skritter staff respond to a similar question in numerous instances elsewhere and watched the video, but these only address how to get to zero Due Cards. Even once I get to zero, which should be soon, I won’t always have multiple (Skritter) hours per day to zero an 800-count daily stack.
So my question is this: if I zero the stack enough, will the rate of added characters/words slow? In other words, do I just not know my current cards (which have been added in very irregular fashion throughout an extended period of time) well enough to slow the rate of addition?
Gamification?
I’ve seen this elsewhere on the forum in threads from 2015 and 2018, but I would love to see some gamification incorporated in coming releases. Particularly enjoy the ability to compare stats with friends, issue challenges (ie: time attack on a particular list, cards learned over a set time, etc), earn badges for regular use…
Four Body Problem
Ultimately, this has been mentioned in this thread and elsewhere, but I would really like to see standardization of the functionality along both the legacy-beta axis, and the website-app axis. I would never use the website if I could do everything from my phone, and it’s frustrating to look for features through different platforms AND versions.
Anyway, that’s all for now, thank you for making it this far. I appreciate all the hard work I’m seeing done on the app, and also that the team at Skritter is very responsive to user feedback! I hope none of this feedback comes off as nasty, I’m only harsh because I care.
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Holy feedback, Batman. Love it!
Any examples? We do support full-tone pronunciation for some multi-character words since Taiwanese Mandarin uses way less neutral tone final syllables, but without an actual example I’m having a bit of a hard time understand what ya mean.
Email us with an example. Sounds like a deck issue, but hard to say without some actual data.
Likely a blank for some kind of image. We do have some strange entries in our database. We’ll have to dig into this further an open an issue. Thanks for bringing it up!
Complete a learning activity, and it’ll be added to your Library. I do have an issue open to allow you to add something without studying from it, but we don’t have that in the app yet.
Hmm… you should be able to. Select a deck in My Library, tap the top-right options button, and “Delete” should be the very bottom option.
Not sure I follow. We never had any import vocab list support on mobile apps, but maybe I’m missing something?
Progress overhaul using v3 API is the next big thing we’re working on for the app. Stay tuned!
We hear ya. We can’t wait for unification day, whenever that is 
Really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing! I know I didn’t address everything in your post, but I did want to hit on the big things that we’re either taking action on already or have plans to focus on in the near future.
Best,
Jake
艰难
Nan4 is also accepted by Skritter, even though it should be nan2. However, I don’t know whether the first version is accepted in Taiwan.
Thanks! Seeing the issue and investigating now.
I wanted to follow-up on this report. It is certainly an issue, but we don’t have a quick fix at the moment. The character 难 does have two tones depending on context and meaning, and can also be a neutral tone when it appears at the end of some phrases.
The issue stems from how the “WIMPS” (internal use name) are handled on the code level. Although the only correct reading for this word is jian1nan2, the system is still accepting nan4 because of how it is currently mapped in our “toneWIMPStrings” file. Ugh.
@SkritterMichael and I have had a discussion about it, and we probably need to come up with a more elegant way to handle these kinds of issues that overrides this logic when there is clearly only one correct reading on the word level. It would be super helpful if you could report this kind of tone mistake via the corrections inbox if/when you see them. That way, we can flag them on our backend and make sure to patch it all up proper.
In the meantime, you’ll have to manually mark incorrect if you happen to submit a 4th tone for this particular word. Sorry for the trouble, and awesome find!
I’m using the latest beta (300414), and there is a prompt that is failing on the tone test.
For 打开窗户, everything works until the last character. For 户， No matter what tone I try to draw, nothing registers. I try all 5 possibilities, but can only draw temporarily on the card. I have to skip the card to move on.
@SkritterJake just saw there is a new beta update 3.5.
Could you kindly give us a short introduction to the new stylus function and supported devices?
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Hey everyone, this thread is super old at this point (60 builds at the time of writing this) so I’m shutting it down.
Please feel free to start a new thread for 3.5.1 (300340) and keep the conversation going with some fresh ideas, and feedback if you’re interested.
Happy studying!