Hear ye, hear ye! For many a week we have spread word throughout the land of a coming update, an overhaul of such magnificent proportions that it will satisfy all your feedback suggestions and all the feedback suggestions you were going to post next week as well. Nick and Scott have strained their programming hands until they rippled with sweaty muscle and their keyboard strokes became like thunder in our office. And now the fruit of our manly efforts has yielded an update to dwarf all updates.
First thing’s first. If you’re anxious to try out the new system, you’ll have to migrate your data. If you’re a power user, this process could take quite a long time. To give you some perspective, I have studied about 550 characters, tones, and words, and it took me about 25 minutes. What could take so long, you might be asking? Well, what we’re doing is transferring every last tone, character, and word you’ve ever studied and making the data readable in the backend’s new architecture. You’ll only need to do this once and if you’re patient, we’ll be slowly migrating everyone ourselves so you may be able to avoid it.
So what exactly have we done that’s taken so long? The short answer: a lot of things. There are a ton of changes.
- Moved stroke recognition to Flash; it goes so fast. [Nick got sick of waiting for App Engine to come back to life, so he accidentally commando’d it.]
- Redesigned the practice, home, vocabulary list, vocabulary options, resources, and account pages.
- Added a stroke order instruction page to the resources section.
- Added timezone support
- Added more than 1300 characters
- Revamped all of our word definitions (some 13,000 now)
- Fixed countless stroke order and traditional variant mistakes.
- Added vocabulary lists, bringing our total to 18, including:
- HSK 1-4, thanks Jake Marble
- David and Helen in China
- New Practical Chinese Reader, thanks Jake Marble
- Practical Chinese Reader
- Short-term Spoken Chinese 1&2, thank you Olle Linge
- Discussing Everything in Chinese, thanks Chloe
- Colloquial Chinese, thanks Johan von Boisman
- You can now learn individual words and characters by adding them to your Queue. Words can be added from our lists or from your own lists of words.
- Finally, scheduling has been significantly improved so that all tones, words, and characters are scheduled more efficiently.
Although we’ve been stress-testing it ourselves for the last few days, there are sure to be a flurry of bugs we’ve overlooked, and we would be really appreciative if you would all keep an eye out let us know what’s breaking and we’ll scurry to fix our mistakes.
Note: if you’re awake and practicing now, the vocab viewer page may not work yet, since some data is still transferring for that. It should be up momentarily.
Whew. That’s a long blog post. Please enjoy the changes we’ve ushered in, and thanks for all of your thoughts which have heavily influenced how we’re building the system.