Click to continue

As suggested by Ge Daozhen, Ximeng, and ZachH, you can now click anywhere in the practice window to go to the next character when done, instead of having to go for the "next" button. The "next" cursor deactivates for half a second after you get something wrong so you don't accidentally skip past a mistake without realizing it. This is good for double-clicking on tone buttons, too.

I've been playing around with it and I think it rocks. Way faster! Good design skills, guys! Let us know how you like it. In particular, does the half-second wrong delay suit you?

We've tamed the bug herds that have been trampling us since the rearchitecturization. The doombug yet persists, but it may not be too doomy any more with some of the fixes we've made. Now herds of minor features and fixes will roam across the land, and reckoning will come for a bunch of the irascible recognizers that have polluted our screens for too long.

Vocabulary Lists

This week has been sort of slow. I returned back from a Colorado ski with my father and brother last Saturday. Nick has been taking a much needed rest the past few days, and Scott has been working through Nick and my game of vacation musical chairs. Nick will be back with us again next week.

I've been redesigning the front page (skritter.com) and will be creating a new demo video (I liked the explosions in the old one, so I think I'll keep those, but I'm open to ideas for more demo quirkiness. Suggestions anyone?). Scott and I have also designed a few slight changes to the way vocabulary items are selected on the vocabulary list page and added a delete button to the Queue browser. All of those changes will go live shortly.

Scott has fixed a number of vocabulary loading errors that were causing glitches; there has been one bug that continues to elude us though. Some users have experienced freezing practice screens. We suspect the problem stems from an error on App Engine's side, but we haven't been able to track it down yet. More news on that when we figure it out, and to those affected/afflicted, sorry for the frustration.

This week is Oberlin College's spring break, so we've been visiting more than usual with friends, which has been very nice. Spring comes to Oberlin late due to the cooling effects of lake Eerie so its still chilly, but the spring weather is slowly encroaching. I can't wait for the heat to return.

Some New Faces

You may have noticed your avatar looks a bit different. We got tired of the old default avatar and have replaced it with 18 shiny new ones. Thanks to George for collecting them for us. If you want to use them, or you're upset because you're now a giant teddy bear picking up trees, you can switch on the preferences page.

In other news! We've added tone buttons. You can now either a) draw the tone, b) type the tone or c) press the tone; a major triad of tonal choices!

Some of the new scheduling caused some crazy amount of buildup of useritems for people. This has since been fixed but if you still have useritems in the upper 3 digits or higher, you may want to go to the vocabulary options page and use the save me button. It will spread all your due items over the next however many days you want.

We've fixed a couple other show stopping problems. Looks like China is once again letting appspot through so everyone can enjoy the secure login page once more. We've also been brutally destroying what remains of the bugs still causing people trouble. I'll be working on a system which should catch the last of the corrupt datas haunting users, which should fix most of the remaining problems. We're currently working towards making this thing stable enough to be worth paying for so with any luck the site will from here on out only get less likely to catch on fire.

More China firewalling

Preliminary reports indicate that the Great Firewall has just taken things a step further and blocked skrit.appspot.com as well (all Google App Engine hosting) instead of just www.skritter.com (external App Engine domain). We'd set up our reverse proxy to get around the initial block on the external hosting, but now we're a bit out of luck, because the one thing we can't reverse proxy is the https://skrit.appspot.com/ page we use for secure authentication when you put in your password.

Please help by logging into a Google account and starring this issue. By pressing the star next to the issue, it'll raise Google's priority for doing something about it (and also email you when there's an update). With enough stars, they'll fix it sooner. If you've got friends with Google accounts, please ask them to do the same. This affects access to all App Engine hosted apps from China.

We're reworking some parts of our site so that everything except the authenticated password login page will load. You'll still be able to log in using Clickpass, but not using a secure password. We'll also make a page where China users can log in using an unsecure password (where people could theoretically intercept your password unencrypted on its way from you to our site). If you care about security, you should set up log in via Clickpass on the account page -- either do this before your session expires or use a Recovery Password to get in.

I'll post a comment when we've got those things working again.

Shiny Newness

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.

App Engine downtime

So, we were trying to put the new version up tonight, but we smashed into two brutal crabs. The first: extended App Engine downtime. I say downtime because after the scheduled maintenance was completed, it looks like they're serving on like two machines, one of which is on fire, and nothing's truly back online yet. Not good for uploading new versions, testing, and migrating data.

The second and most brutallic crab is Internet Explorer 6. A glorious hedgehog in its day, I'm sure, but now so long overshadowed by its nobly shining successors that it has twisted up into a dark creature of hate which now hangs out with Gollum just to feel better about itself. We didn't expect the depths of its depravity and it's taking longer than expected to beat it into submission.

But we're getting close and may pull it off by tomorrow, crabs willing!