And ... we're out (for the holidays)

Just to let everyone know, the Skritter team is about to leave the building for our homes, hearths, and eggnog. Nick left for home yesterday, Scott left earlier today, and I'm out of here tomorrow. I'm going to finish up responding to a few more emails and bug reports, but then you're on your own for a week until Nick returns on the 31st. I'll be checking my email sporadically throughout the festivities, but most things will have to wait until after I get back and get into the zone.

So from the Skritter team, thanks a lot for a wonderful 2009, and we look forward to making 2010 even awesome-er-ester.

Tagline Winners!

As promised, we have made our determination for the Skritter tagline, and the winner was actually submitted by two users:

Emily Imhoff
Alex Blackwelder

Both of them receive 2 years of free Skritter time for their submission (how did you guys actually submit the same thing?):

"The Write Way to Learn Chinese/Japanese"

In total, we received 72 suggestions from more than a dozen users, which made the selection pretty difficult. It took more than an hour of arguing to decide on the one we chose, and even then we've decided to mod it slightly. Since the original tagline didn't include a reference to Japanese we're adding that, but it's going to be language specific. Only one language will appear for logged-in users, so if you're studying Chinese, the tagline will read "The Write Way to Learn Chinese/Japanese," if you're studying Japanese, you'll see that instead.

Thanks a lot to everyone for their submissions. We will probably wait to mod the logo to include the tagline until after the holidays since we're so busy right now, but soon everyone will see its glory!

First Newsletter! Thoughts?

We just sent out the first ever Skritter newsletter! In this issue we included a summary of last month's work, coming features, a short interview with one of our first ever involved users, thinkbuddha, news about a Chinese learning challenge we're sponsoring, and site statistics. If you got it and read it, we would be really interested to know your thoughts. Since this is our first attempt, we didn't know if it was too long, too short, if we were missing information, or if people would even read it at all. So please do let us know what you think, and yell at us here. Your feedback will help us improve next month's version.

Yookoso!

Some more textbooks for you Japanese students! I just uploaded Yookoso!: An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese, and Yookoso!: Continuing with Contemporary Japanese. These are beginner textbooks like Genki and Nakama, so we have a fair number of lists for newcomers to the language. These books are also a good source of topical vocabulary, such as vocabulary for hobbies, travel, health, and nature.

On the docket: Adventures in Japanese 1-3, Basic Kanji Books 1 and 2, Kanji Kentei, JLPT, and Minna No Nihongo.

I've been doing so much reading and definition practice for my Japanese. Whoa, isn't it great?

Definition (and Reading) Practice

As many of you have noticed, definition practice has been added! We put it up a few days ago and have been ironing out some of the bugs. It's still in testing but if you're feeling adventurous go to the language settings page or open the settings lightbox in the practice page to turn it on.

Some things to know if you use definition practice:

• The definition practice is not immediately turned on for your existing words. They're only added when you add new words. If you want to study definitions from a list you've already been adding from, you'll have to go to that list and turn it on from where you want definitions added. It works the same as it would if you hadn't been studying tones and now turned them on.


• There's currently no way to view your progress with definitions. We're going to have to redesign the progress page a bit to accommodate all the new data. But don't worry, we're keeping track of it all in the backend.


• Sometimes you'll need to refresh your practice page to study all parts of a word. When a word needs to be studied in multiple parts, such as when you add both the definition and the writing, the part that doesn't get studied immediately will not be studied until the page is refreshed. There's supposed to be space between studying the different parts of the word anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

Also, right now definition practice works like a flashcard; we show you the word and then you click to see the definition and grade yourself. We've been planning to do active definition practice, where you type in the definition of the word and Flash magically grades it taking into account things like synonyms and misspellings, but on first blush this kind of definition practice may turn out to be good enough, or better than what we originally planned. It's faster than typing out the definitions, for sure, and saves us development time. Let us know what you think of its efficacy.

As for reading practice, it's been enabled for Japanese! Everything I said about definition practice applies to reading practice, except that we're still very much intent on making it so that you type in the pinyin or reading eventually. Nick tells me it would take too much time to set up the Chinese with flash card style reading practice, so instead he's going to skip that and go straight to active typing Chinese reading practice. We're aiming to get that up next month.

We're very excited to finally get to this point! We've been doing all sorts of backend work to support reading and definition practice for about the last half year, I'd say, so hope you guys enjoy it. Now that I can study my definitions and readings, I can thoroughly learn my Japanese textbooks... better get started.

New Practice Interface

For the past year, and some odd months, the practice page had remained largely the same. Every time you would go to practice, you would be greeted by the following screen:

It was great, but it quickly became outdated. We kept tacking on features until it became obvious that to accommodate the next few features, we'd have to put menus inside menus and tabs on tabs on tabs. So we created a new one, one with which many of you are now familiar. But today marks a milestone, the old practice page is no longer going to be accessible as of later tonight, so here's the new design, and a few of the things that we changed:

So here are some of the big changes:

The Toolbar




On the old toolbar, the "show" button was represented by the character 示. On the new one, we tried to make it more apparent what the button would do by making the icon a "?." By popular demand, we added a back button so that if you ever accidentally proceed forwards too quickly, you can always go back and complete items.

You might notice that the "undo" button no longer exists although you can still press "z" to use it. The undo button has actually been obsolete since about this time last year. We attended the ACTFL last year when Skritter was new and the strokes didn't auto-snap. The undo button was built mainly to allow users to correct their mis-recognized strokes and remove out-of-order strokes. Through UX testing and the addition of stroke level snapping, the undo became obsolete, which is good, because we needed the room on the toolbar for the new "Back" button!

Better Lookup and Vocabulary Controls

Many people have requested that we let make it easy for people to look up vocabulary on external sites. Well, now you can choose from six Chinese or five Japanese dictionaries. This window also gives you the ability to see from where items come.

You can also delete individual words without going to the vocabulary page for that list. Finally, if a prompt has an item not currently in your review list, you can add that item from within this menu by clicking on the "+" button. In this example, I had added the word, but not its component characters.

Improved List Management

The removal of the active list area at the bottom of the old practice page made it necessary to relocate the active list display. But we didn't just move it, we consolidated the practice settings page, making it easier to figure out where you need to go to change your vocabulary options.

We've also changed how you let Skritter add items for you to study. Now you can choose to either let Skritter manage the adding itself (Automatic), or you can pause all lists and add words manually (Manual) using the green "+" button.

You'll notice that there's also a link to the vocabulary page. When we were UX testing, a lot of people thought they should control vocabulary from the practice page. Since it's currently infeasible for that to occur, we thought we'd try and point new Skritter users in the right direction.

Succinct Settings

We wanted the options for the practice page to be accessible on the same page as the functions they affect. On the old practice page, to change your flash window size, you had to navigate to account>practice settings, save, and navigate back. Now the same change requires three clicks and one page load as opposed to five clicks and two page loads.

The new settings menu also lets you activate tone colors, grading buttons, and allows you specify how quickly characters are animated. The tone colors option is new, and serves as just another way to aid memory. It changes the color of the pinyin in the prompt to correspond to a color so that you can remember that shāngdiàn is red, then blue.

The grading buttons give you greater control over how Skritter schedules reviews for you. The buttons are based on the Anki self-grading system. If you want to make sure Skritter knows exactly how well you know a prompt, turn this option on and never over-review an item again.

Finally, setting the animation speed governs how quickly characters are revealed when you hold down the show button. If you only want to know the next two strokes of a character, but don't want to see the entire thing, set the speed low and hold down the "show" button for a second. This will force yourself to remember more with less prompting.

The settings menu is going to be expanding in the future as we complete more features, so look for this one to grow with time.

Cram and Scratchpad

Both the cram mode and the scratchpad have been made into options that are accessible through the all-powerful practice page. Because Cram mode was essentially just practicing a small subset of your items to review, and the scratchpad did the same thing but didn't record progress, we decided the two modes were more conducive to existing side by side with the regular practice page. As such, you can simply change the behavior of the practice page to act like the cram and scratchpad now.

Dfor now you can still get to the old scratchpad by going to www.skritter.com/scratchpad.

Conclusion

This update has been a long time in coming, and we're very excited to finally make the transition to our shiny new interface. Let us know if you find anything wrong with it, or you would like to suggest improvements!

Super Simple Custom Search

I just uploaded a very straightforward search engine for the custom lists. I've been unable to coax Google Custom Search to index our custom lists properly, so I made this to hold us over until a better search can be built or installed or finish indexing. It searches the list names, their descriptions, the user who created it, and the section names, but not the words in the list. Try it out here:

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/customlists

Let us know if it does the trick for now! As there's so much to do, I wanted to see if something quick and dirty would cover at least most people's needs for the time being.

Help us Pick a Tagline!

So for the past few weeks we have been trying unsuccessfully to come up with a tagline for Skritter. We were wondering if our users might have some more shiny brain nuggets. So we propose a challenge: we will give a 2 year subscription to the best tag line submission.

We have already come up with a few examples which are as follows:

Forget Flashcards, Not Characters.
Developing the best Asian language writing tool.
Characters don't have to be hard.
Helping you rock the characters.
Write to learn.
Learning characters has never been this much fun.
Helping you procrastinate efficiently since 2008.
Making learning easier than forgetting since 2008.

Obviously nobody can win by submitting these, but we thought we would provide them to get your creative juices flowing. The tag line has to be equally applicable to Japanese and Chinese, shorter is better, and we want it to be entirely in English. The tag line will appear on the site, on our emails, business cards, and print materials.

If you would like to enter the contest, send us your suggestions via the contact page or the feedback form on the practice page along with your user name. We will keep track of what people submit. We will select a winner before December 18th. If we don't get very many submissions, we'll just contact all the submitters and call it off.

Betcha can't make our head's do this:

Brushing dirt off

In the past couple days, we've fixed many bugs with adding words, the space bar, review scheduling, audio clipping, session time when left on overnight, multiple pinyin display, Linux text alignment, and a bunch of little things. The new practice page is nearing graduation! A couple little features, a couple more bugs, an updated scratchpad/cram, and your approval later, and we'll be there. (And then I'll start turning on the basic versions of the reading and definition practice.)

So tell us: what's still not done, good, or satisfactory about the new practice page? Anything holding you back to the new page?

There have been some speed complaints, but we've since done a lot of optimization. If it's still running slower than the old practice page, please let us know what parts are slow, what kind of computer you're on, and what browser you're using. Thanks!