Increasing shininess

A few more updates to the way things are drawn. Squigs fade out evenly, instead of with circular blotches. They should also be a bit more even when drawing. Completed characters have a 3D look, to emphasize their finishedness even more. How does it suit you? Let me know if you see any slowdown from this.

You can now click on the character pinyin to hear it pronounced. I've fixed a bug with volume preference saving -- it should stay muted now.

Shouldn't have left me alone

I've changed the way strokes animate, so that they start snapping into place as you write them, rather than all at the end. This should help with writing more complex characters, because you won't run out of space or have strokes all jumbled together when writing quickly. But, I'm not sure whether it's as pedagogically effective. I need your feedback! Try it and tell me what you think. Does it help you write faster, is it too distracting, does it give better feedback that you're writing the wrong character earlier, does it give you too much of a hint, is it shiny or just over the top?

George and Scott aren't here to critique it, so it gets put up without them, oh yes. Scott had the idea at the conference, and I was too excited about it to fix bugs, so I just made it. Apparently, when there aren't other people around, I just work all day, eat spaghetti with rice, and do pull-ups. George will be back this afternoon to save me from scurvy, overtraining, and repetitive strain injuries. I can't tell if the house is dirty or not, but he can and will probably get me to help clean it.

I've also put up the old contact page, getting rid of the Get Satisfaction feedback widget, based on a small number of negative opinions. We'll probably make our own forums at some point, instead.

Back and hungry

The two days of conference were more of a blast than the two days of 17-hour driving were a drag. Almost immediately after getting back and suiting up to accept the Innovation Fund award, we disassembled our corporate magicrobot into its component powers and headed off to Syracuse, NY (Nick), Middletown, RI (Scott), and Logan's Run, OH (George), for some human-family interaction.

I'm back and catching up. I warmed up some spaghetti that Scott cooked ten days ago and carried to Orlando and back. Since it's leftovers, it's like, free, right? That is cheap! (We were looking at Yelp in Orlando to find food and were intrigued by this review:

"I didn't eat here. I wanted to but never got a chance to. But they have all you can eat for $4.79. That is cheap!!!"

So now we oft repeat, "That is cheap!!!")

Anyway, so I'm not really hungry, not with a huge tupper brimming with spag sitting right there. But I'm hungry for fixing bugs and responding to feedback! And soon we will resume the continuous production of glittering features. George will be back on Sunday, and Scott on Tuesday.

Live from CLTA!

We're here in Florida conferencing it up. Things are going very well and we're enjoying the lack of snow. We'll be back next week, with a long drive back on Sunday. Too bad we'll have to miss the last day of the conference.

We've received a lot of interest, and think many professors will pass it on to their students. That'll be most excellent, because the more people use Skritter, the better it will recognize handwriting and schedule review. And, more people will learn to write Chinese characters like elite warrior-poets. Awesome.

Up, up, and away to Florida

We're ready and rearin' to head out tomorrow for Orlando Florida and the Chinese Language Teachers Association conference. We'll be gone until next Monday, but I'll try to keep everyone up to date with regular blog posts about our exploits in the warmer regions of the country.

Our primary reason for attending is to get more beta users and see what Chinese professors think of our darling. We've borrowed enough electronic equipment to rival an AV rental depot, and we set out on our 17 hour continuous car ride at 6AM.

And with that, I'm going to bed.

Kittens For All

Up until now, how things have been scheduled has been pretty simple. No longer! I've set up the beginnings of a dynamic scheduling algorithm that adjusts based on your own abilities. I'm going to see how it goes over the next week or so and then do tweaks, changes and overhauls periodically as I see how things go. And hopefully the more data I have to play with, the better I can make the algorithm.

Downtime tonight

We're taking the site down tonight from 1am - 3am EST (GMT-5). (That's Monday morning). This is for a bit of maintenance work and stroke order corrections.

[Update] The maintenance is taking longer than expected. I'll post again when we're back up.

[Update] Skritter is quite operational once more.

The Infant

I've put up the first version of the Infant, which is the audio prompt system. When you do the tone on a character, the Infant will pronounce it. If you're not scheduled to practice the tone, the Infant will say it when you're prompted. You can mute it if you don't want the wailing.

This is the first version, using some sounds donated by David Lancashire of Adso project fame. There are a bunch of missing syllables, but we'll be filling those out. We will rerecord the entire set at some point, to make it sound really good.

Maybe some day, we'll create a system for pronouncing the words, and not just the characters (or we'll find such a system that we can adopt). That'll be swell.

Some downtime tonight

App Engine got some upgrades tonight, which broke several parts of Skritter, since 9:00 p.m. EDT. We've patched it up locally, but there's still some troubles over there preventing us from uploading the fixes. I'll update when we're back online.

[Update] We're back online now, 11:14. Sorry about that, dear learning commandos.

More Funding

Well, for the past week I've been working on putting together a funding presentation for Lorain County Community College's Innovation Fund. Today we went up and gave the presentation and it went generally pretty well although there were a few things I needed to improve (note to self: don't make jokes about older people in a room full of people older than yourself). But our dreams were realized and we've been awarded a $25,000 grant from Innovation Fund to continue developing Skritter. This means a lot to us, and we're looking forward to working with the Innovation Fund staff to keep improving Skritter.

Most of the capital we raised will be spent on fundamentals: a Google Adwords campaign, print advertising, rent to give us more development time, and money to hire an intern. We had to cut the Ferrari and Malibu beach house for sustainability reasons, but hopefully we can afford those minor expenditures later on. :)

We're pretty excited about this whole getting more money thing, and maybe Scott and I will even be able to convince Nick to go out to the Indian celebration restaurant as a victory reward tomorrow.

Get Satisfaction

I'm mauling on bugs, adding tiny featurettes, and making things faster. Meanwhile, I've added a new feedback widget from Get Satisfaction, which you may or may not like better than the old contact page. Give it a shot, eh? Use it to tell us whether you like it or not, even. That'll show it.

Eccentricity optional

As one user points out, some of the crazy messages you get when you get something right can be pretty... crazy. They're now opt-in, incarnate as the "Eccentric Flavor" option in the preferences page.

I've added a "Last Seen" line to the status bar, so you can tell if a word is new or when you last practiced it. Future information there might include the overall difficulty of the word, its usage frequency, how much time you've spent on it, what breed of dog it would prefer sudden transmogrification into, etc. If you've ideas for what info should adorn that throne, let us know.

I'm still working on the strictness control, having found many of the values to produce wonktrillic results. It'll make more sense and work better, soon.

Improved stroke distance calculations

I've made a small fix that should make it easier to write components of radicals further away from the standard (for example, if you're writing smaller or larger). So instead of becoming harder to recognize the further offset your strokes get, they'll stay easy as long as they stay correct relative to the last few you've written near them. I am unclear? It'll just work better, I think. Combine this improvement with setting the stroke order reliance higher and you should see better recognition and faster writing. Try it! Yes.