We've heard a lot of feedback from many excellent new users over the past week, since John Pasden mentioned us on Sinosplice, which is very exciting. Many bugs have been quashed, many more have been reported and are due for quashing, and the three of us are being happily quashed under a wave of good ideas for making Skritter better. Here are some that we've been hearing:- A forum - we need to get these discussions public!
- Better tracking of AFKness than 1 minute character timeouts
- Last-seen tracking for individual tones and characters within a prompt
- HSK lists -- we've got them, we're ordering them, and then we'll put them up
- Information on the vocab lists we support
- Minimum spacing between prompts of related parts of a word, so's not to short-circuit recall
- Learning history export, to MySQL/PlecoDict/Anki/Mnemosyne/SuperMemo/XML/etc.
- Neutral tone drawable as a circle
- Record better sounds, and sounds for full words
- Distinction of radicals/components within characters (this is going to be cool)
- Remembering the Hanzi-style character stories, except made social
- More social features: profiles, leaderboards, general learning community stuff
- Chinese language version of the site
- iPhone version: as soon as it makes sense to do it, we're eager to
- Recognition code client-side, so no recognition lag
- Korean: we've heard some interest, but outlook is still dim
We're still busy into our rearchitecturization, the effects of which you won't see directly but which will allow us to support a lot of these features (as well as many more that we're going to surprise you with). It's also one step closer to Japanese support. Meanwhile, we've fixed a lot of bugs this week based on user feedback, including:
- Many character fixes, definitions, tones, typos -- keep 'em coming!
- Reuploaded some strokes, so you should see those stroke orders finally updated (and we'll update more often from now on)
- Drawing on the 3-looking stroke in 阝 should be fixed, now (though not recognition yet)
- Flash will now load corectly on skrit.appspot.com when skritter.com is blocked from where you are in China
- Using the Correct button will now properly override anything Skritter tries to figure out
- Since Skritter counts you as correct until you prove otherwise, prompts all have a green border to start (just hit Next if you really know you know it)
- Multiple character pinyins with the same tone display only one copy before doing the tone
- Green glow adjusted to be smaller, then smaller, then even smaller, then a bit bigger again
A couple bugs you've mentioned that we're still working on include (very incomplete list):
- Keyboard shortcut issues on Macs and some configurations of Ubuntu
- Timezone support isn't working yet
- Occasional repeated prompts every other character due to datastore not updating quickly enough
- Pinyin prompts don't always fit in the space allotted
Your excitement has excited us even more. It's just a whole lot of excitation going on, yes. Thanks for telling your friends about us, and for giving us such great feedback.
