Go to http://www.skritter.com/practice_new and check out the new practice page design. Let us know what you think! We’ve added a lot of stuff, most of which is ready. There are still a lot of bugs, and it’s pretty slow until we optimize it. We also haven’t yet tested in IE, so it likely won’t look right there. And it will definitely break for Japanese.
We’re most interested in comments on the design and new features. We’ll be debugging it and hooking up a couple other things in the next several days, but what do you think of the big changes we’ve made?
We’ll do a more detailed post later, when we put all of this live. Here’s a short list of novelties:
Buttons
– No more ignore or undo buttons (although you can press ‘z’ for undo still)
– Added back button
– New button icons, bigger buttons
– Buttons are now labeled
1-4 grading
– 1-4 grading is on, with 1 as the old “wrong” and 3 as the old “right”
– There are 1-4 grading buttons available from the settings menu
Menus
– Practice settings now all on practice page menu (buggy on Mac)
– Stroke order animation control
– Active lists control in its own menu
– Comment box lives inside a ‘feedback’ tab at the lower right
Add word control
– You can set adding of new words to “automatic” or “manual” (like “pause all” for active lists)
– Manual add word button (still buggy)
Audio
– Volume control is a slider instead of a click
– There’s a speaker icon to click to play the word, if available (still buggy)
– There are word- and character-level lookup boxes (magnifying glass) for more info, including dictionary lookup from choice of dictionary (trad. chars aren’t done)
Prompt
– Flash on the left, prompt on the right
– Fonts and field ordering for the prompts are different
– You can enable tone colors from settings menu
– Character info is hidden to start off
– Prompt time is hidden until the clock is stopped
– The old “blue is wrong for new word” is gone; blue is now the “too easy” color
– Readiness indicators: only one per word, now “studied 36 min ago: still learning” rather than “36 min 999%”
Flash
– Almost all of it is rewritten since you last saw it. Fixed a bunch of bugs, introduced a lot more. It’s slow right now until optimized. Good news is that it’s almost ready to start letting you practice pinyins and definitions.