Shouldn't Have Left Me Alone 2

I arrived back in the command center on Saturday the 27th and have been cleaning and organizing with grandmotherly fury. All of the cups have been washed, I dusted, I vacuumed, I did laundry, and just generally tidied up. If I had any frilly lace I'd probably tie bows around everything just to "spruce things up." All I need now is an apron and some knitting needles and I pretty much be the quintessential grand matron.

I've been working to respond to some of the feedback that has accumulated, like so many snow drifts, but I'm leaving some of it for Nick, as he'll be better able to contend with character-specific fixes and definition inaccuracies. Nick will be getting back this Wednesday and Scott arrives late on Thursday, so it's likely we won't really be full time here again until next Monday.

Until then, enjoy your new years celebrations, whatever they may be, and if you have non-character specific feedback, I'm here to answer questions.

Goalie joins the offensive

I'm flying to Massachusetts in the morning to see my sweetheart, and I shall be the last: George and Scott have already reached their ancestral homes. The Skritter development complex is unmanned until George returns (on Friday); Scott and I will be back on New Year's.

We'll have email and Scott may be able to fix critical issues that come up, but we'll save responding to general feedback until vacation's over. Keep the suggestions and character fixes coming, O handsome users!

I've been mauling on this Flash rewrite harder than three bears maul on one PB&J, and it is coming along, oh yes.

There is a Baby in our Command Center

Trina has brought upon us a harbinger of baby-ness. Miles, the baby infant, is super effective at distracting George and Scott. He also stops crying when you play the soothing lullaby of "vacuum cleaner," as long as you increase the volume by vacuuming your own hand. I'm over here practicing my ocarina and can't hear my own virtuoso jam. So I started working, which incensed G&S, 'cause I'm over here getting stuff done, and they're using their three-foot-long spoons and forks to poke at the mysterious tyke.

The baby looks very harried, like a debt-ridden salesman. He moved his leg, once. Usually, Trina has to move his legs for him. I am fascinated.

That is all.

The Rearchitecturization is Underway

We're heavy into rearchitecturization right now, almost completely reworking most of how data is stored, how characters, words, and tones are differentiated, how vocab lists work, the vocab list page, how loading words is done, and how all of the Flash is written. Some of the changes will make things way better on our end, killing bugs and improving flexibility and performance. Others, like the vocab lists part, will be made awesome on the user end. Some changes are just laying the foundations for Japanese and pinyin/definition practice.

We'll finally be able to correctly support characters with multiple traditional variants. Many old UI bugs will be replaced by new UI bugs. Scheduling will get a good boost in flexibility. We'll be able to add new features more easily, because all the code will be oh so nice. It's going to be awesome.

So, when? We started a week ago, and the data storage part is done. If it's another three weeks' worth of work, then (including a week of visiting family for holidays) we're shooting for about a month from now, or about halfway through January.

Note that while we're working on this, we won't be fixing minor bugs that crop up (although we'll still fix things preventing you from happily practicing).

After this happens, immediately next on our list are pinyin/definition practice, improving the forums, adding more vocab lists, tweaking the recognition and scheduling, and a throng of overdue minor features and fixes.

I hope you'll keep sending in bugs, sharing ideas, and thinking up features you'd like. Hang in there, grow fond of the current bugs, if you can -- the wait will be worth it!

Chagrin Falls and Refactoring

Last Friday we visited Chagrin Fall's Gurney Elementary School to get some younger users trying Skritter. It turns out that their elementary school students don't learn characters, which we might have predicted. Apparently the focus in younger age groups at Gurney is all on the speaking and listening and not so much the writing. Despite the strikeout with younger students, Ms. Jones, the principle of Gurney Elementary and our contact, Mr. Kristensen of Cleveland's Techlift were gracious enough to offer several more educational contacts in the area, so we may be on the road in the near future bringing Skritter to more Cleveland-area students!

In other news, Nick and Scott are continuing their refactoring, right after Nick gets done fixing some of the errors that sprung up over the weekend. So that means there won't be too many new features for a little while as they shore up the code and solidify the new system that will handle all the awesome features that are to come.

As a final note, several of our dedicated users have tipped us off to some really cool blogs about China and learning the Chinese language (I just read Uln's blog, which is pretty neat) so thanks for those. Nick spent a large portion of this weekend going through and reading them and I'm lagging behind him.

Forum is up!

I've mauled most of yesterday and today on the forum, which is now up (if not completely done). Check it out and let's start some discussion!

Bugpocalypse

We've heard a lot of feedback from many excellent new users over the past week, since John Pasden mentioned us on Sinosplice, which is very exciting. Many bugs have been quashed, many more have been reported and are due for quashing, and the three of us are being happily quashed under a wave of good ideas for making Skritter better. Here are some that we've been hearing:

• A forum - we need to get these discussions public!


• Better tracking of AFKness than 1 minute character timeouts


• Last-seen tracking for individual tones and characters within a prompt


• HSK lists -- we've got them, we're ordering them, and then we'll put them up


• Information on the vocab lists we support


• Minimum spacing between prompts of related parts of a word, so's not to short-circuit recall


• Learning history export, to MySQL/PlecoDict/Anki/Mnemosyne/SuperMemo/XML/etc.


• Neutral tone drawable as a circle


• Record better sounds, and sounds for full words


• Distinction of radicals/components within characters (this is going to be cool)


• Remembering the Hanzi-style character stories, except made social


• More social features: profiles, leaderboards, general learning community stuff


• Chinese language version of the site


• iPhone version: as soon as it makes sense to do it, we're eager to


• Recognition code client-side, so no recognition lag


• Korean: we've heard some interest, but outlook is still dim

We're still busy into our rearchitecturization, the effects of which you won't see directly but which will allow us to support a lot of these features (as well as many more that we're going to surprise you with). It's also one step closer to Japanese support. Meanwhile, we've fixed a lot of bugs this week based on user feedback, including:

• Many character fixes, definitions, tones, typos -- keep 'em coming!


• Reuploaded some strokes, so you should see those stroke orders finally updated (and we'll update more often from now on)


• Drawing on the 3-looking stroke in 阝 should be fixed, now (though not recognition yet)


• Flash will now load corectly on skrit.appspot.com when skritter.com is blocked from where you are in China


• Using the Correct button will now properly override anything Skritter tries to figure out


• Since Skritter counts you as correct until you prove otherwise, prompts all have a green border to start (just hit Next if you really know you know it)


• Multiple character pinyins with the same tone display only one copy before doing the tone


• Green glow adjusted to be smaller, then smaller, then even smaller, then a bit bigger again

A couple bugs you've mentioned that we're still working on include (very incomplete list):

• Keyboard shortcut issues on Macs and some configurations of Ubuntu


• Timezone support isn't working yet


• Occasional repeated prompts every other character due to datastore not updating quickly enough


• Pinyin prompts don't always fit in the space allotted

Your excitement has excited us even more. It's just a whole lot of excitation going on, yes. Thanks for telling your friends about us, and for giving us such great feedback.

New Login System

Just finished building a new authentication system; you can now sign into Skritter with a password instead of through Clickpass. You can also create an account with a password from the login page and if you cannot get into your existing account, you can get sent a temporary password sent to your email address. If you made an account with Clickpass, you can create a password for your account from your preferences page.

This standard system was built for a few of reasons. It serves as a backup in case Clickpass isn't working or it can't be used. It might also be a better idea to use a password rather than Clickpass if you're not on your own computer, since it's easy to forget to sign out of Clickpass and whichever other account you signed into.

Next up: I will create the beginning of an account page where you can manage your password and OpenIDs. Eventually, this will also be where payments are managed, but all in good time. We've got so much yet to build before we're ready to launch!