Things around the Skritter base are humming with activity. Blair and Garrett are mauling through assignments like hungry bears looking for kidsnacks in the woods. So here’s what’s new:
Changing the Challenge Reward If you’ve been on the homepage recently you might have noticed that the challenge reward we offered in our newsletter (the custom-made avatars) apparently doesn’t motivate learning as well as other prizes, so we’re going to let the winners of this month’s contest pick their prize from amongst the higher-scoring categories. You can either have a t-shirt, mug, or water bottle (all emblazoned with a cute Skritter of course)! So, work towards your studying goal with the knowledge that if you win, you can pick a prize that you’ll actually want.
New Front Page Video Way back in the day, we had a sort of front page teaser for Skritter. It had explosions, it had footage of writing, and it was phased out with our new front page, but we have created another one. Sadly, this one lacks explosions, but we hope it will interest people none the less. If you’d like to view it you’ll have to check it out on youtube since it’s hooked up the Google A/B testing and so may or may not show up for you. Let us know what you think so that we can improve!
Sign up/Sign in Pages Redesigned The sign up fields in the top right of the screen are just the tip of a bigger sign up interface overhaul. You can check out the new sign up page here. Say thanks to Garrett for that sweet implementation.
Tone Colors in the Flash Blair has fixed readings that appear in the flash during definition practice so that if you have the tone colors enabled, the colors now appear consistently in all instances of the reading. Nice work on that Blair.
Memory Leak Plugged Nick has fixed a large memory leak that caused the flash app to gradually eat up more and more memory and have performance problems. The problem would be most apparent if you left the practice page running for long periods of time or practiced like a maniac for 5 hours straight. So now you addicts will have a much better user experience into the 6th hour!
Language Switcher I just want to point out that I definitely called the controversy over the Chinese/Japanese flag language switcher. The ability to change languages back and forth anywhere on the site is nice, but I said, “Do you think anybody will mind the Chinese flag?” to which everyone just poo-pooed me. Ha! Well, now it’s fixed and you can switch languages, but it did cause a stir. If you don’t like the zh/ja switcher, hit the forums.
We’re currently working on a demo for the front-facing parts of the site, after which we’re starting in on a revamping of the pricing system. So for now, fare thee well, and by all means let us know through comments here and through the feedback system what you think of all these changes.