Skritter Mobile release update (updated June 13th, 2018)

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to send a quick update. It’s May 30th and we don’t have a new beta ready for you just yet. Based on the testing that I’m doing I think that what we have right now would be considered a good beta, but we’re a few open issues from bringing out an awesome beta and we’re going to go that route. We’ve made you wait so long already (sorry :frowning: ) and a few extra days of work will help make this update even better.

Some new things of note since my last update (here)

  • Single section study is working although a bit buggy (we’re working on it)
  • Strokes are tuned up a lot and we’re offering some level of customization to the animation effects (slow, medium, and fast)
  • Skritter official example sentences are in the app along with the older sentences, too. You can’t make your own (yet) or choose which one to display, but they’re in there and we’re going to continue improving them.

Target release date is June 12th. It’s Josh and my birthday and will be the 5-year anniversary of the first mobile release on iTunes, which is a fun day in Skritter history!

Update (June 11th, 2018). Android beta update will be deployed tomorrow and the iOS app is being submitted to Apple for approval. The second it’s got the green light from Apple for testing we’ll send out TestFlight invites with the codes to everyone on the list.

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I just discovered all this news about a rewritten beta. Incredibly excited!! Two qs: (1) is tomorrow still on for a release?? :smiley: and (2) what do you think of a bug db or better way for hardcore beta users to report bugs other than email/forum posts? It would be neat to get a group of beta testers together to share a common user bug database, file bugs, add steps to reproduce, etc.

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We’re still on for an Android update out tomorrow. The iOS app is getting submitted to Apple for review tomorrow. We wanted to get it sent sooner, but ended up finding two breaking bugs on Friday that required a lot of attention. But we got them both fixed, so yay!

Everything you just said sounds amazing. Let’s see how the first release and a few initial updates go and then go from there. Internally we’ve been pushing daily builds to devices and we expect that behavior to continue :slight_smile:

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Awesome, sounds great. I’m happy to help make some suggestions on a bug reporting setup if you choose to do that. Looking forward to the drop!

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The final round of hacking underway (for today) and then we’re pushing things out. This has been the last month or so of development and testing rounds.


We’re expecting the workflow and release cycle to stay about the same for the time being. Rapid updates and fixes for bugs you all are reporting :slight_smile: Looking forward to having some more people join the tester side of things so we can catch them all!

Thanks for the offer to help! @josh pick his brain if we need to get a more formal public bug reporting setup going

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Android update is out and iOS is being tested by Apple. We’ll send out the latest build to TestFlight as soon as we can and I’ll make a short introduction video using that version of the app to give everyone a quick tour.

The bug reports from Android users have been great so far. We’ve already knocked out some issues and will have them fixed up in tonight’s build. They are:

  • Fixed a grading issue on multi-character tone prompts
  • Added auto advance speed control
  • Improved tone stroke recognition on tone cards

I’ll update this again if we have more daily fixes. Also, once we start rolling out to both iOS and Android I’ll mark this topic as locked and will get new sticky going that just has version updates, known bugs, and the like.

We’re really excited to have you all testing the new beta with us. Sorry in advance if things are a little messed up for you. There are so many users on Skritter with diverse study experiences, it’s just impossible for us to think of and test them all. We’ll do what we can to get things sorted out as quickly as possible, or try our best to offer alternative solutions until it’s working right for you.

Happy studying!
-Jake

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I really like the new beta overall. However, did the back button move or disappear? I can’t seem to go back to the last character in any way on Android.

Sorry, should have mentioned that in my notes. Back button is gone until the end of the day. We were working on some additional gestures for the app, but they didn’t make in to the build. We’ve broken the issue into a few open tickets and we’ll bring the back button back tonight. It won’t be on the canvas, but on the top area of the app.

Until then, might wanna disable auto-advance just to make sure grades are correct. Sorry about not making that clear!

And… glad to hear you’re liking the beta! Can’t wait to give you the video tour of everything once I have the latest internal build :slight_smile:

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Sharing a quick screenshot of our JIRA board so everyone can see where we’re at with mobile updates. Most things in progress should be in the next build that goes out.

Updates will be rolling out quickly!

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@philippboeing sorry, the back button might not be out tonight. But very, very soon! Josh has a lot of things on his plate that he’s fixing. I wasn’t sure on the priority order based on the difficulty, and what not. We just got off a call and it’s on his radar and we’ll be working to get this thing back in over the next few releases.

Argh. After the new update on Android, all my characters have converted to simplified, even though my study settings WERE traditional, and the app shows that it’s traditional. What can I do to get back to where things were?

@paulfeng
Hrm, would you be able to upload a screenshot so we could take a closer look? I’ve checked on your settings and it should be set to traditional. We’ve unfortunately not run into this one and are unable to reproduce it, however hoping we can get to the bottom of this.

I was really excited for the new study feature, but I’ve found it disappointing. If I’m going through my reviews and there’s a character I think I need to write 5 or so times, there’s no way to add it the study section easily to come back to it. Is it possible to add a button or for starred characters to automatically go into the study section?

Also, I added a few characters and they just cycle through them like review. Is it possible to just have a setting where you can just write the character out until you think you’ve got it, un-star it and then move to the next character?

This is really a super basic v1 of this new feature. We have a lot of things planned for it in the future and these suggestions are all great!

Honestly, it started out as an internal use tool for testing strokes and such in the app without needing to find them in the queue and we just kinda left it in for everyone to try out. With the most recent version we’ve changed the name to “Quick Test,” which is exactly what it is for now :slight_smile:

I replied to the email I received. Hope you got the screenshot.

I might have fixed this issue in the latest 3.0.4 beta release. Can you check the version and let me know?

Yes, it seems fixed. Thanks.

Another question - There are still a few really important things I use that are missing from the new beta - (1) the character detail pages no longer have example words, and (2) the writing cards don’t have the ‘eye’ icon that allows me to see the character if I can’t remember it.

Are those coming back?

Yes all of those things will be coming back soon, except for a physical button to reveal the character. We are moving to a gesture based system to keep the screen more clean. You can reveal the character by tap holding on the canvas. You can also enable teaching mode by tap holding with two fingers. You can find a bit more about things we’ve changed here: