Hey Skrittizens,
It’s been a bit since we last teased you about our newest mobile app releases (which you can currently try for Japanese on iOS as a standalone app and on Android as a beta you need to opt-in to). We’ve been itching to get the Chinese versions of it into your hands, really, but wanted to make sure it worked well first. Our Chinese apps are necessarily more complex than our Japanese–that whole traditional vs simplified thing, a larger Skritter user base to please, additional settings and items to track, and other reasons all contributed to us releasing/beta-ing Japanese first. But we are near the end of the tunnel and I wanted to give you all a status update before the Chinese New Year.
This is by far the largest conceptual update to Skritter we’ve ever done. The tried and true SRS review queue is still here just as we all expect, but joining it are two new study modes–learn and test. These two modes exist to help users learn new material, not just review. And because of this new learn path to add material to the review queue, we’ve made a decision to remove auto-adding. Auto-adding was always a source of frustration for many people that never worked as well as we had hoped. Really it was a half-measure to cover up what former Skritter never had–a way to learn new material. You know best when you want to see new material and where you want it to come from. So now you just tell Skritter when you want to learn something new and it’ll teach it to you.
We’ve been internally testing the Chinese version of the app for nearly a month on various accounts and devices. I’ve been consistently using it as my primary client for my daily studies, and as a die-hard website user, I can say the new mobile app is now my favorite client to study on. Regarding its stability and release, just today I can finally say it has reached a point where I was satisfied enough with the experience to say it’s ready to share. The finer details of a well-used account are working properly, from banned items to review syncing to studying while on the subway.
I won’t promise an exact release date, but I will say it’s a matter of days rather than weeks. We’re currently polishing up some rough edges and evaluating daily whether what we have will work on day one for our users so they can sync, study, and discover the new features quickly and easily. Of course no matter how much we test internally, we can’t catch everything before release, so we definitely want and encourage your feedback. Bug reports, critiques, and feature requests will all help us to shape this into your favorite Skritter experience too. So please be vocal, we’ll try our best to listen to you. I’ll post another update for you all as soon as the app is submitted for release.
Stay tuned!
tl;dr: S O O N.
