Your Very Own List and More

Just made a few changes to the item list in the Vocabulary tab. The left most column now has links to pages giving you various information about that particular character or word, and when you hover over them a tooltip shows the definition. Right now it only works for characters and words, tones will be coming up. Also, for now everything is showing up as simplified in these two pages.

Peep pit

The three of us raised an important issue today at lunch, and it is this: if you had a pit full of marshmallow Peeps, and it was infinitely deep, how would scientists determine its infinitude?

Of course, the pit isn't actually infinitely deep. It's on this planet, so its depth is geologically limited. But this is a pit where, essentially, it's Peeps all the way down. Checking stats about the Earth's crust reveals that, while it could be up to 50 km thick, it'll quickly get hot enough to melt Peeps. So let's say that you have a kilometer of solid-ish Peeps, then a couple kilometers of melted/roasted/plasmogrified Peep.

But it's not a wide pit, maybe 3 meters across. So scientists that wander by will at first guess that it isn't, in fact, Peeps all the way down, but rather more like a ball pit, but with Peeps. After that delicious and playful hypothesis is dashed, how will the scientists go about determining its depth? We figured a drill wouldn't be able to maintain the structural integrity of a shaft were it to drill down. And a scuba exploration would be futile, although hilarious. Would some sort of acoustic measurement work? We have no idea.

What about a laser? Get a sweet laser, and start burning a tiny column through the Peeps. Perhaps you'd have to do it in pulses, so that the heat of the laser didn't cause nearby Peeps to expand and be incinerated, collapsing the shaft. George thought that the vaporized Peep gas would build up and cause problems, so you'd have to vacuum it out. That's getting too complicated. Plus, with the Earth's crust getting too hot and all, you wouldn't be able to get too far before hitting the melted Peep layer. I guess it would be pretty good to get through the solid, compressed Peep layer and realize that there's more than a kilometer of Peeps, using just the laser that every good scientist carries.

It seems, though, that there's got to be a more efficient way. We put the question to you, world. Efficient Peep pit depth measurement techniques? Please, let our cries be answered.

Your Very Own List; Numbers May Be Off

All right, the user item list is up and running on your Vocabulary tab. Check it out to see what you're scheduled to learn, what you last studied, and what you know the least. This is so you can know what you need to work on when you'd like to study your characters outside of our program. I'll be adding some more functionality to it next week, so stay tuned.

Also, just so you know, the numbers shown in your Progress tab are probably off in some way or another. We're still trying out exactly how we're counting and keeping track of everything, like your retention rate, or when something has been 'learned'. Bugs also throw off the numbers (at one point a few of us were learning negative words...). So for the time being, know that your progress page is more a bunch of estimates rather than definite measurements.

Sorry for Kirbies

Several bugs made it through today; apologies if you witnessed them. For brief periods, characters weren't loading; for the length of the movie Logan's Run, tone recognition was whack, with what I thought were impossible-to-occur error messages that included dancing Kirbies. George and Scott were appalled and amused that such a thing could occur. I was trying to find the right escape sequence to grep for <(^-^<) BUG (>^-^)> in the code. What was most amusing was that not only were there Kirbies running amok in our code, unbeknownst to them, and being displayed to our beta testers, but I was mumbling about being unable to find them and forgetting where I had put them.

Sorry guys. The upshot is that you can now press 0-5 to answer tones, if you'd rather than than drawing them (0 and 5 both go for neutral tones). I'm also displaying which vocab list and section a given prompt is from (although sometimes it's a little hard to tell, what with words being duplicated across lists and sections and all).

We've also put up the beginnings of a vocabulary display on the bottom of the Vocabulary page, where you can see some of what you're learning, how long you spent on it, that sort of thing. We're still building this, so expect roughness, but do let us know what you'd like to see there. The Progress page is next, with a statistics revamp.

Large kraken pancake

I've started a user's guide to explain what the buttons do and such, until our demo video can show their tiny glories. Check it out, and please let us know how easy it was for you to figure that stuff out on your own, or if some of the buttons are unintuitive, that sort of thing.

We've also made a fix to the way words with only one character were scheduled, so they should be less redundant. You also won't have to practice tones for characters in words if you're prompted to practice the character and the tone isn't due for review. These two things made my practice feel faster; I hope you see it, too.

I briefly reversed traditional and simplified characters for tone prompting, which Trina enjoyed and understood right away, calmly letting me know, like a scholarly beta tester does, how completely screwed up everything was. Thanks, Trina, and thanks to you other beta testers of uncommon intelligence and stylish affection.

Fixes, Choosing What To Learn

Fixed a few things today. Nick got the demo to work once again, and also removed the red strokes so they shouldn't cause confusion anymore.

Also, the lists you choose now determine what characters you learn, as well as what characters you add. So if you want to stop learning characters or vocab words from a certain list, all you need to do is remove or disable that list in the vocabulary tab. This also means you must have one or more lists enabled in order to practice, so the program knows what you want to keep reviewing. It may not work completely with some characters added before now, but before long it should work completely.

The next thing I want to build is a page for viewing the characters and vocabulary words you're learning ordered in various ways, like how well learned and last reviewed. This will be both for reference and control of what you're learning. Stay tuned!

Thanks again to everyone we met at Western Reserve Academy. We're all working on those issues discovered and ideas generated while we were there, and they should keep us busy for a long time.

Testing at Western Reserve Academy

We spent several hours yesterday beta testing at Western Reserve Academy, courtesy of Ms. Kathryn Mueller, Chen Laoshi, and the Burton D. Morgan Foundation. The students that used Skritter liked it, but had a whole boatload of suggestions and corrections for us. Overall, the trip was highly productive, and we now have a to-do list that should keep up busy for the next few weeks. Below are some of the suggestions:

1) Create a demo that works instead of writing on top of itself. Preferably the demo should respect the back button, so that users can click on the demo, and then exit at any time. Making a completely sweet demo like this will take time, but we're going to start this week.

2) Create a vocabulary removal tool so that students can practice a specific range of characters only, for test prep application and the like.

3) Make the stroke recognition better. We're working hard on this problem, and we'd like to thank everyone for putting up with the finicky strokes. You're input is helping to improve recognition.

4) Create a way to view missed vocabulary words and characters in the progress page.

5) Make the stats on the progress page easier to understand and digest at a glance. This includes explaining several of the key metrics.

We've been asked to return to WRA's campus in the near future to talk to their students about our startup and the possibilities for young entrepreneurs. In sum, thanks a lot WRA, and we look forward to visiting again. This week we're going to introduce the Oberlin 2nd and 3rd year students to Skritter, and we're hoping we can get even more impressions to better guide development.

Ludicrous Speed

We made some significant improvements to the speed of the app today. First we fixed the program so that it no longer slows down over time. Before it would always slow down gradually, especially on slower machines. Between this fix and the freeze fix on Wednesday, the site shouldn't need to be reloaded much anymore, if at all. We're going to continue testing it, and let us know if it does freeze or slow down still, but it should be a lot better now.

Second, we increased the frame rate so that it runs a lot smoother to begin with. We want to balance between a good looking frame rate and not using too much CPU.

It's so fast.

Comcast : Rabbit
Uploaded by Oliv_M

Improves children's attractiveness by up to 20%!

I've uploaded what should be a fix for the intermittent freezes of the Flash app that require a reload, like when it pauses and won't load the next word, or when you write a squig and it just sits there. It should retry the missed request, after a slight delay, and you'll be good to go.

So, I think I've fixed it -- definitely let us know if you see that one again. I think I've also fixed the problem with characters missing strokes, so cry out if it be not so.

I'm also uploading a framerate and memory usage display, to go along with the daily practice timer. If everything's fluffy, you should be at 30 frames per second. Memory should naturally increase over time, as Flash player loads more strokes for the characters you're studying. We're mauling on our code, trying to find the cause of the eventual slowdown.

The feedback is delicious

Thanks for all the feedback, brilliant beta testers! The way you all are catching bugs and thinking of stuff we haven't, well, it warms my heart. 谢谢，你们！

For stroke recognition problems, please, just keep writing how you would normally write. Your squigs will make it through our system in the next week, and then the recognition algorithm will adapt to your handwriting style.

According to Li Laoshi, a person's Chinese handwriting reflects her personality. True or not, her squigwriting measures little but her desire for fiery learning efficiency, since doing it just so with a mouse is more work than it's worth. So try to keep each squig distinct, but write fast! (Unless Flash player is running too slowly, in which case, try refreshing the page.) And by all means, skip any character you know you know -- Skritter counts that as knowing it.

Beta!

We're now in beta! We're telling our friends, you can tell your friends--they'll probably kiss a baby, they'll be so happy.

There's a lot of Skritter yet to come, but it works now and we think it's better than anything else out there for learning Chinese characters, so it's time to open it up. We'd appreciate your feedback, feature requests, and bug reports. Most importantly, just use it! Your handwriting will help make our recognition algorithms better, and your study will help make the kitten's spaced repetition more efficient.

If you're new to Skritter -- welcome. Try it out, and sign up. It's easy and free, and we won't spam you or anything. You don't even have to make a password for us, thanks to Clickpass.

Today we get to go eat Indian food at Jaipur Junction, instead of raw garbanzo beans. I drool...

Internet Explorer fixed

I fixed Internet Explorer 7. Scott "fixed" IE 6 -- it isn't pretty, but it works. Other browsers should all be golden, too, and you can finally use keyboard shortcuts in IE, Linux, and Mac Safari. (If keyboard shortcuts aren't working on your browser, let us know.)

Scott extracted a large bug from the kitten, where it mewed out pitifully short review intervals. It should wait longer before giving you ones you know, now.

Oh man, I guess I need lunch now

There, there's the Oberlin first-year vocabulary. I've also fixed the way a lot of strokes draw, so things should be prettier. Please, send feedback if there are strokes still being drawn uglily.

New Everything

Lots of changes! The site's been redesigned and there are new front and home pages.

The site's new look, 'Bluey', was designed by George, as have been all our designs. The old styles Inkblot and Teatree remain, though they were changed with the reorganization of the site.

A couple key pages have been added: a front page for unauthenticated users and a home page for authenticated users. The front page allows new visitors to instantly try Skritter and see what it's like. The user home page gives users an overview of the things they can find and do on the site. Let us know what you think of these pages, and how well they do their jobs.

We're almost at beta!

New Lists

I grunt happily, producing new vocab lists! We now have the first level of the 汉语水平考试 (HSK) characters, which is a general-purpose character list you can study if you're not using a specific textbook, or even if you are. There are 4 levels, with 2858 characters in all; this is the first 799. They correspond to official proficiency tests you can take to get ultimate Chinese mastery certifications and such.

Squigged out

We mauled on the new strokes today, generating enough squigs so that the burritos can swarm again; the kitten is back. Thanks, everyone!

Up

Well, I didn't get any extra reading before Google fixed their end, and we got back online early. The new burritos need squigs on which to swarm, so we've turned squigging back on for now. Hopefully, we'll drudge with speed and grace, and get the kitten frolicking in a couple days.

I also made the demo a little bit more respectable as a placeholder for our real demo video, which will come sometime before release. 'Twill be a glory.

Down today

I went to take the practice page down today because I'm uploading about 1800 new characters and many new strokes, recognizer updates, and stroke order fixes...

...only to discover that Google, always eager to help, had already taken most of the site down for me. Thanks, Google App Engine!

I love App Engine and am almost totally satisfied with it. There's no way that three guys like us could have so boldly and swiftly developed Skritter without it. As long as they continue to fix bugs like this as quickly as they have been doing, we'll be prettily sitting on the ninth cloud, far into the sunset.

I'll inhale some more books while I wait.

I hope the site will be back up tonight or tomorrow.

Kitten Upgrade

The system for choosing words and characters to study (aka Kitten) has had some needed tweaks done to it, now that it's gone through a bit of testing since it went live a couple weeks ago. It should work a lot better now at choosing which words to study. It is also fully automated, in that you can start and stop whenever you like, and the more you study, the more words it will give you to study.

I deleted everyone's histories and vocab lists, since so many changes were made recently to the kitten, and it's time to start thoroughly testing the kitten and tweaking it. But by and large I believe the kitten is not going to change much for now, at least for the next few weeks while we address other parts of the site and program and start beta testing (two weeks away!). Please send us comments, thoughts and critiques on the kitten.

We also have in place the beginnings of a vocab list selection system. You can go to your 'Method' tab and choose a list and section to study. We only have one vocab list uploaded at the moment, but more are coming, as Nick described on an earlier post. The check marks on the page are for enabling or disabling your study list. If you don't have a list, you're automatically put at the beginning of the only list we have.

The method page is pretty user unfriendly right now, but my next task is to rebuild that page and indeed the entire website with a shiny new user interface. Hope you like it.