Ever since iOS 14 brought us widgets on iPhones I’ve been dreaming of Skritter widget on my iPhone. What I specifically would like to do is a widget that would show me a random word from the list of words that I’ve last failed. There is a cool iOS app “Scriptable” that I used to build myself a “random HSK 3 grammar point” widget.
Now, my question is, could I somehow do similar things with Skritter API, a bit of JavaScript, and Scriptable? More specifically how do I start using the API (that I know exists because of rather old blog posts here) and could one implement something like that with the API? I guess the authentication part is the tricky bit but using the API probably would be easier?
(not sure which sub-forum this belongs, feel free to move it to more appropriate place if you want to)
I think a Skritter widget would be a cool idea, but our priorities are currently in other areas. The documentation for the API is here: http://www.skritter.com/api/v0/docs
The v2 and v3 APIs largely work with the same or similar data, just in different or more optimized formats for certain clients. As they’re in-development moving targets, we currently don’t have plans to document them yet.
We don’t have a lastFailed date on the UserItem, only an updated timestamp and a count of the attempts and successes (you can derive failures through something like failures = attempts - successes), so it’d be a bit tricky to get the sort order you seem to want. Unless you mean you simply have a list you add to of words that you have trouble with or something. Pulling a random word from that should be pretty straightforward.
All that being said, having the ability to re-test only the failed content of a study session is a feature we’ve got planned for a future mobile app release, so it’s coming!
Yes, while I would very much prefer a widget from you at the Skritter, I do realize you probably have more important things on your todo list.
Does the API have convenient access to what is up next for review? Maybe that could be a proxy for ”I failed with this word recently”, close enough to create a widget that picked a random word for to be shown on the widget?
I’ll keep you posted on progress I have with my DIY widget or lack there of
There’s a few ways you can do it, https://www.skritter.com/api/v0/docs/endpoints/items explains a couple options that will get you a somewhat sane ordering of data to work with that I think will be enough for a simple widget.
In the app we do a bunch of extra re-sorting and heuristics to make the reviews “feel” more pleasant while still generally keeping the SRS ordering (e.g. we make sure different reviews for the same vocab don’t appear back-to-back, or that a user doesn’t get 50 writing prompts in a row, etc). But if you’re focused more on just showing a single piece of information, I think that endpoint will give you something meaningful to work with without too much extra work.
