Control thy strictness

I've finally created a way for users to control the strictness of the handwriting recognition. Underneath the Ignore button, there's now a Strictness button. You can lower the strictness of recognition if you think it's being too strict, or raise it if it's recognizing random strokes when you write something that's not in the character. This only affects the minimum threshold for strokes being missed/accepted. If a stroke scores very lowly in recognition, but you set strictness very low, it can still be accepted.

You can also control how heavily stroke order is weighted. If you put it to 0%, then the recognizer doesn't take into account stroke order at all. If you set it to 100%, then it'll be very easy to accept the first expected stroke, normal for the second, pretty difficult for the third, and so on. If you change the recognition strictness a lot, you'll probably want to increase the stroke order reliance, or there might not be enough information to recognize anything unless you write very precisely.

The defaults have changed a bit from what they were before, so you may see recognition be worse (or better). Please, play around with the strictness sliders and see what works for you, and we can adjust things from there.

Scott has boldly produced a new date range picker for the progress page, which is glorious to behold. You can also collapse your vocab lists on the practice page, to reduce clutter.

Smarmier feedback

I'm testing out some additional feedback measures, including notification when hooked strokes are missing hooks, a less-harsh blue border for getting things wrong that you don't even know yet, more and smarmier "You win it!" messages, and hints after 3 consecutive unrecognized strokes. Do these please you?

Also, you won't be prompted for the tone on the same character within a word any more (unless it changes tone).

LCCC and Catastrophic Potatoes

About a month ago we completed our application to the Lorain County Community College Innovation Fund. Yesterday we traveled up to Independence Ohio to interview with their selection committee. We thought we did well, and if the feeling is mutual we'll be invited to pitch our startup idea to a board of potential investors on November 11th. We're scheduled to hear back from the selection committee within a few days, so stay tuned. I'll definitely make a blog post about the results when I hear.

In other, less business-y news, our dinner last night was extra-exciting. Trina was over, and Scott had made potato curry. To be fair, I was not present for the shenanigans that followed, but this is a reenactment of how the seeds or gastrointestinal anarchy were sown:

Nick: "The curry taste like watery potatoes."
Scott: "Yeah. Any idea on how to improve it?"
Nick: "Put chocolate chips in."
Scott: "Are you serious?"
Nick: "Yeah!"
Trina: "Yeah!"
Scott: "That didn't help much."
Trina: "Put in some peanut butter. Peanut butter goes well with everything!"

Later on . . .

Scott: "I didn't think you guys were serious, but you said you were."
Trina: "I wasn't serious, I just thought you wouldn't do it."
Nick: "I just thought it would be funny."
George: "My God. My stomach is about to explode."

Manual and Auto Modes, Vocab List Bar

Made a few changes to the vocabulary and study pages recently. Who doesn't love shiny new features?

On the vocabulary options page, I added the ability to choose whether or not you want to move on to the next section manually or automatically. What does that mean? Well, it's been working automatically thus far; every time you finish adding words from one section, it starts giving you new ones from the next one. Now if you switch to manual mode, when you finish a section, the list will be paused until you unpause it. I figure this will be useful for those who want to stay pace with their classes, and keep reviewing what you've already added until it's time to move on to the next lesson.

But how do you unpause a list? Well that's where the other new feature comes in. On the study page, you will find a new bar below the flash window displaying each of your lists you currently have chosen from the vocabulary options page, and it shows how far you've gotten in each of the sections. You can also toggle the mode of each of the lists by clicking the mode. And when a list gets paused, the mode displays paused, and you can just click it to unpause it, no need to go back to the vocabulary page in order to continue to the next section! Convenience, that's the aim.

But going back to the vocabulary page, we've been having some issues making a good interface to demonstrate how our system works to new users. In particular, many users (including George when I first showed it to him!) automatically start adding one line for each section, which would be pretty tedious if that's what we intended. But the idea is you have one line for each list, not each section, and you can only choose one section at a time, and it will automatically (or possibly manually now) move forward, so really you're choosing what section to start study from, not what section to study exclusively.

To fix this problem, I've made it now impossible for a user to choose the same list twice, and it shows a message explaining how the system works if they try. We're also eventually going to make a javascript based drop down menu that will show an arrow downward or highlight the lines, in such a way to show that you're choosing a section and every section after it, not just one section. But do you have an idea of how we could make this interface even better? It's a tricky problem, but we really want it to be clear when a new user comes in how it all works.

MWALLT and Cone-Guy

So this last weekend we attended the MWALLT (MidWest Association for Language Learning Technology ) conference in Cleveland. Presentation topics ranged from a review of video conferencing software to the potential language learning opportunities of Second Life. On Saturday we presented Skritter and received valuable feedback not only about the software, but also about our business model. We were invited to do some controlled Beta testing at one or two nearby Universities!

Right now we're planning to attend both the CALICO and IALLT conferences in March and June 2009 respectively. So in summary, thanks to everyone that attended MWALLT and we look forward to seeing you again over the coming 8 months!

As an aside, we had a pretty humorous encounter getting to Cleveland for the conference. We were driving east on Euclid avenue and we'd just pulled up to a stop light on the Case Western University circle. A construction worker, carrying a large stack of orange cones steps into the intersection amid the traffic and begins to lay them down the right in the center of the intersection. As he's doing that, he signals a construction pickup truck into the intersection and then has the truck stop, so that the truck is now perpendicularly blocking traffic from our direction. The cone-laying dude just keeps laying down his namesake, seemingly oblivious to confused drivers. At this point we're all pretty much baffled as to what's going on.

The light turns green for us, but of course we can't go anywhere because our lane of traffic is now blocked. The truck driver gets out and looks at us with a "what the heck is this cone-guy doing?" sort of grin. Cone-guy for his part cannot be bothered and intently placing those miniature orange obelisks about the road in a seemingly random pattern. Truck driver gets his attention, but is unable to understand his purpose, so he turns to us smiling awkwardly and instructs us to drive around his vehicle and the cones. As we pass, all of us are laughing uproariously in our car and truck driver smiling, red in the face, looking sort of perplexed. Cone-guy keeps on laying cones, seemingly oblivious to all that has transpired. Jolly good show Cleveland Department of Transportation, jolly good!

Synaesthetes, to the fore!

We're looking at adding "theme" colors to traditional and simplified characters, both to help with prompting and in other planned features in the site. So we're asking you: do you have color associations for those? Are traditional characters just red, or do simplified have to be green? Or does it not matter? Let us know what you think.

We've fixed a lot of bugs, and tweaked a lot of things. There's a cooler way to select between words, characters, and tones in the vocabulary viewer, which is also now on its own page. You can now choose to not practice tones in your vocabulary options, if you just want to learn characters (and already know spoken Chinese, perhaps). I've made a lot of hacks to the recognition, especially on strokes with the 女, ⺄, 乙, 辶, and 西 radicals. The drawing has been updated somewhat, too. Let me know how that's working for you, yes.

I was bothered by Skritter thinking that I didn't know a tone when I'd put the normal tone in and it'd be different in a vocab word, so it now accepts either as correct. In a similar fashion, to prevent you from missing a character just because you didn't know it was that character in that word, you can now hover over where the character's definition would be, and it shall be revealed.

I've also made the stroke order pulses brighter. Do you like them? Would you rather preserve the ancient tradition of dimmer pulses? Please, you will comment upon it.

All Mixed Up

You know how before it would go through all the words, then all the characters, then all the tones to review? No more! They're all mixed together now; you get whatever item is next on the list to review, no matter what kind of item it is.

Other than that, I've mostly been working on little things here and there, fixing some issues. The vocabulary system for choosing which lists to study in particular has been patched up in a few ways. I'll keep working on it, and then I'll continue adding more features.

MWALLT Trick or Treating

Things are ambling forward here at Skritter headquarters. We are all three attending MWALLT (MidWest Association for Language Learning Technology) tomorrow and delivering a presentation about our software on Saturday. The intrepid Nick will be delivering the talk. All hail his regal blond hair! The conference presentations are going to be streamed on the interwebs for open viewing, and you can check us out here. I'm not entirely sure how Adobe Connect works, but hopefully when there's content to be seen at the site, navigating will be more intuitive.

In other news, we are scheduled to meet with LCCC's Innovation Fund committee on the 27th for review of our funding application. And after that is the the big one: Halloween! Scott and I purchased some candy to give to the kids. However, we are secretly hoping the younglings forget about the pagan holiday and we'll have the candy all to ourselves . . .

Status Bar

Just added a status bar to the top of the study page. This shows you what list the item you're learning is from, how much time you've studied today so far, and how many words, characters and tones you have ready to study. Hope you find it useful!

Fixen

I've uploaded some hacks to make recognition better for problem strokes. The "walk" radical 辶 (in 这, for example) was being difficult. It should be very accepting, now. Let us know what other strokes are still gumming things up for you.

I also reuploaded all the strokes at 3:00 am this morning, so you should see a lot of the stroke order fixes you all have been reporting finally take effect, including the ability to write slanted 女 radicals (like in 好) with the horizontal stroke last.

There was a bug with the vocabulary list addition tonight, which has been fixed. There may also be another that hasn't; let us know if you are having troubles adding lists, and tell us which browser you're on. Thanks!

Control Your Destiny, Part 2: Reviewing and Tones

A couple new control themed features: you can now stop adding from lists while still reviewing from them, and you can withhold from studying tones. Both of these settings are, once again, in the Vocabulary Tab.

Normally when you study from a list, it gives you whatever vocabulary there is to review, then if there's nothing left, it takes some more vocab from that list. This is the 'Review and Add' mode. Now you can set a list to the 'Review' mode, and then when studying you get whatever is next to review, whether it's time to study it or not. One thing to keep in mind, though, is if there are multiple lists, some in each mode, and there's nothing left to review, more will simply be added from the 'Review and Add' lists, instead of skipping ahead to study the words from the 'Review' lists ahead of schedule.

As for the study tones option, this is mainly for people who know how to speak Chinese better than they can write it, and don't want to practice the tones. Pretty simple.

I'll be fixing some minor bugs and working on internal things for a little bit, but this is by no means to the end of control features being added! Stay tuned for more, and for now, see what you think of what's been added so far.

Much prettier

I just uploaded a ton of tweaks to the drawing system, which I've been working on all week. The strokes you draw will look much prettier and match what you wrote better, even when you draw quickly. Ohhh, is it ever nice! Let me know what you think, especially if you find any strokes that still aren't drawing well.

I've also uploaded a week's worth of tuning on the handwriting recognition system. A lot of the problem strokes are fixed, but some are still bizarro. I'll be working on hand-tuning those next. We plan many more improvements to the recognition; it will delight and astonish, soon.

Control Your Destiny, Part 1: Cramming Time

New feature: Cram mode, select in your Vocabulary tab. This allows you to study a single section of a single list exclusively. When you want to focus on just a handful of characters, say for a quiz or test, you use this mode. When using this you will be given every vocab word, character and tone in that section, with ones you need to study more coming up more frequently, but with all of them showing up periodically.

This is the first of several features I'm building right now to give you more control of what you are studying. This has been frequently asked for by beta testers, so please let us know what you think of these features as they come out, and if there's anything in particular you would like to see let us know by email or blog comment. The vocabulary page then will be seeing some new features and additions for a little while. Stay tuned to see what's coming up next!

Cohen Brothers = Awesome

So last night Nick, Trina and I went to go see the new Cohen Brothers film "Burn After Reading" at the Apollo. It was awesome to the max bone stock. We were laughing really hard the entire way through the film, and at the end, we noticed most of the other people in the theater weren't laughing. When the lights came up we discovered that we were the only young people in the theater. As we walked home, we heard a middle aged woman turn to her husband and say "I thought that was supposed to be a comedy!" Perhaps it's a movie for younger folks, but I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys dark humor. It's brutal, but funny.

In other news, more people are signing up and more feedback is rolling in, and we've been getting a lot of bug reports and feedback. Huzzah! We wanted to thank everyone that's been pointing us to the glitches, we've been fixing them as fast as we can, and we encourage everyone to keep contacting us with problems.

On the near horizon, we are attending the MWALLT (MidWest Association for Language Learning Technology) conference in Cleveland next week and we just applied to two more funds for more capital. We procedeth onwards.

Radical list up!

I've finished the radical list and put it online. You can add it from your Vocabulary tab, in addition to your other lists. Knowing the radicals makes everything so much easier. Excellent.

New Progress Page

The progress page has undergone a major overhaul. Before I kind of threw everything I could think of that could be displayed onto a single page. It's been pared down to the most important information and reorganized to be a bit more presentable. Currently in the works is the ability to view your progress by month and by year, and also the ability to choose what date you want to view from.

Down yesterday

Our DNS provider was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack yesterday. Skritter was inaccessible. I hope the inconvenience was small. I doubt it will happen again; our provider is normally great, and it's not their fault that they were DDoS'd. They've said that they've taken many precautions to be able to defend against similar attacks in the future, so we're not switching.

Okay. So. A list of radicals is in the works and should be up soon. It'll follow the Kangxi list, with some variants, but it'll be ordered in terms of importance, rather than strokes. I recommend it to everyone; there's a lot of radicals that I didn't know, and it really helps when learning characters to understand what all the pieces mean (or sometimes what they sound like, for everyone's favorite phono-semantic compounds). I'll post again when it's up there.