Live from IALLT

Okay, so we're here at the IALLT conference, talking about Skritter and pursuing a few institutional site licenses. IALLT is pretty small, but we've been able to have quality conversations with a number of educators, and spread the word about our baby.

Getting here was totally exhausting. We had to wait for our print materials to arrive via UPS. We were scheduled to set up our exhibiting table on Wednesday between 12-4PM. UPS tracking said that our materials would arrive on Tuesday, but didn't know when. So on Tuesday, Nick and I pack up for Georgia. We finish our packing by about 1PM and then start waiting. "It'll probably be here in a few hours" says Nick, confidently. I am not convinced. So I get a haircut and take a shower, Nick reads hackernews and takes a nap. The truck still hasn't arrived. We eat an early dinner. The truck still hasn't arrived. "The truck will be here by 6:30" says Nick. But the truck didn't come. We all three play some smash brothers. Finally the truck arrives at 7PM on Tuesday. The drive is going to be at least 13 hours since we have to go out of our way en route to get my parent's laptop for the show.

So, we set out from my rent's house at 9PM. The plan was to drive until I got tired and then stop. But, Nick and I realize rather late that due to the UPS delay, we will only have 4 hours of free time if we want to make the 12-4PM time window in Georgia. So, instead of stopping, I just keep driving. Finally, at about 6AM we stop and sleep for 4 hours and then keep going. But we made it on time! Traffic in Atlanta was ridiculous and we were tired, but we forged ahead. Since then we've managed to sleep a little bit, but whoa was it intense getting here.

Scott has been working hard in our absence to create a tasty treat of a feature that everyone should enjoy. More news on that when we release it into the wild.

I'll be back in the command center this Tuesday after visiting my sweetheart in NC, and Nick will be back the following week after visiting his girlfriend in MA. Lots of traveling for the Skritter team!

On the road

George and I are off to the IALLT conference today, where we'll get a chance to show Skritter to educators and get more feedback on it from a teacher's perspective. The conference runs until Saturday, and after some sweetheart visitation, George will return on Tuesday and I on Friday (the 5th).

I've been fixing bugs the past several days, and things are running smoothly. I've even got IE8 rendering all right. Please keep sending comments, suggestions, and bug reports; Scott will handle them, unless they're linguistic or Flash-related; those I'll plow through when I return, like a boulder through miniature bowling pins.

There does seem to persist some problems with the Genius not loading enough words. So words may not load in order of readiness, because some might be skipped. This is mostly harmless, so if your review bar sticks, don't worry. You can refresh the page every once in a while if you want to get to the ones it passed over.

Paypal Up

You can now pay us with Paypal as well as Google Checkout! And soon I'll be adding a monthly auto-billing option, but I recommend simply purchasing the larger time spans instead, since it'll be much more cost effective. And after that, custom lists! Wonder how long that will take?

Oh, and ask Nick about JQuery sometime.

IALLT and Being Pro at Cooking

Since officially launching we've been working on a myriad of small things. Nick fixed some audio playback bugs, Scott has been working to get our Paypal payment system up and working, and I've been producing teacher packets for our attendance at the IALLT (International Association of Language Learning Technology) conference. We'll be attending the conference in Atlanta Georgia from the 26th to the 31st. While there we will be exhibiting Skritter and giving two 45 minute presentations about the pedagogy behind learning Chinese characters. This will be our 3rd professional conference and I think that this time we will actually be ready. The last conference we attended was the ACTFL conference in November of 2008 and we had about 5 days to prepare for that one. We saved money on every aspect of the conference possible which was good in that our cost per contact was low, but we didn't look so professional. My mother's blue kitchen tablecloth might have given us away, or maybe it was the lack of any presentation gear. This time we will be more prepared and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to meet educators and see what they think of Skritter.

On a completely non-work related note, we ran an experiment a few nights ago to determine whether Scott was actually pro at cooking or if his cookbook is just super good. Nick and I, who have about about 4 xp at cooking between the two of us, chose a meal to cook and Scott was allowed to watch us cooking, but could not comment or offer any advise on our methods. All in all, it turned out pretty well. I only ate a little raw shrimp, nothing caught fire, and even more surprisingly, the food actually tasted good. This was in part due to my keen appreciation for the details of the instructions. If Nick had his way, we would have skipped all the steps in the recipe and just made pasta because it's the most efficient food substance. So the conclusion is that Scott is pro at cooking, but his cookbook is also very good.

Over the next two weeks we'll be unveiling a few new features, but you'll have to wait to get the details!

Launch!

It's been 11 months since we started working full-time on the Skritter web app (after 9 months of my part-time development on the handwriting recognition), and launch is here. But we've had users learning with Skritter for 9 months, so launch is less like a rocket, where you build build build and then it does something cool, and more like a kid in your martial arts school, where under the grudging training of seasoned warriors his prowess grows until you have to admit he's actually pretty good and start feeding him.

Most of the details were posted two weeks ago, in the blog post, comic, and pricing page. Now you also get a billing page when you're logged in, which you can use to extend your subscription. We've got Google Checkout hooked up now, with Paypal coming soon.

I couldn't let launch creep by without at least a little feature, so I spent yesterday hooking up word-level audio from ChinesePod's hoard. We won't have audio for all words, but we'll have a lot of them once the linking job is finished later today, and they sound great. What do you think? Thanks again to ChinesePod for their chivalrous audio-recording skills. [You may have to update your Flash Player for sound to work smoothly.]

Thank you for your support of Skritter. We hope to see you signing up and continuing to help us grow this into the most powerful Chinese practice tool that ever lived.

Vocab Lists: Take 4

The vocabulary list page has had a long and storied life. First it was just a set of drop downs; you chose what lists you wanted to start with and that was pretty much it. Then as part of the migration we built a new page that allowed you to browse the list. Then we decided it needed work and made the last version, which ended up confusing more than it cleared up. But now! We've got an even more brand new version just uploaded.

The main problem with the last one was it wasn't clear how users were intended to add from lists. Many used the browsing and selection features to add, when there was a system in place already to automatically add from lists. Now the auto add feature is much more prominent, being the first thing you see when you view a list, with an arrow system to better indicate what it will do when you choose a section. Let us know how you like this new system, if it feels more intuitive than the last (I sure hope it is!).

We added a couple other features when we built this better viewer. You can see when was the last time you studied each section of each list. You can also select sections to skip, which should be useful if your school decides not to study from a given section or two. And deleting sections and lists is now in its own separate tab, with better indication of your progress as you go. We weren't keeping that data before, so I'm afraid it will only tell you what sections you've completed from today onward.

While George and I have been designing/implementing that, Nick has also been busy. He has been improving stroke recognizers, though keep letting him know about ones that are still problematic. Styling and bugs have been fixed for IE6, IE7 and IE8. He also worked on the Genius (scheduling client side) and it now indicates % readiness in the prompt, and you can hover your mouse over them for more detailed info. The % readiness should generally be going down as you practice, and if you're getting items that are less than 100% ready but the review bar still shows plenty left to work on, let us know so we can keep debugging it. And lastly, incorrect stroke pulses appear blue, instead of green. How do you like them changes?

Oh geez launch is in three days! Scramble all developers!

Confusion Is A Mighty Foe

Today George and I were graciously given some lab time with Oberlin students studying their first year of Chinese. We went and threw waves of them at our software to see what they could defeat and what defeated them. The vocabulary lists page defeated them handily and without mercy. It's just not intuitive! We had just redesigned it with the hopes it would be better, but looks like we have some more work to do. Many users used the select and add buttons to add large swaths of words the slow and inefficient way, rather than using the play/pause/stop buttons above to add from a section. We had our suspicions beforehand but this confirmed our fears.

Nick's away for the weekend, so George and I have been throwing around ideas to improve the new user experience. The quickstart guide turned out to be a pretty successful way to help new users get their bearings, but not everyone is going to read through that so we can't count on it. One idea we had was make it so that on the first page new users see, they can set Simplified/Traditional (something else that was a common trip up) and also have them choose one section from one list to start studying from, so they can go straight to the practice page and make more extensive choices later. We'll also be looking for more ways to improve the design of the vocabulary list page. This will not end until users experience zero frustration and confusion on entering our site! What are your guys' thoughts on how to improve the transition from new user to Skritter master?

A couple other things. Access to the ChinesePod lists are up and have been up for a few days! It's not quite finished yet still; only some of the lessons are available at the moment as a teaser, though labels are available. We'll be tweaking it so that users have access to all lessons, but that's above 1100 lessons so it's a lot to sift through so we'll be adding search functionality. ChinesePod will also be tweaking it at some point so that the lessons fetched through the API only return those that you've marked as studying, so that will be the end result. You can access ChinesePod lists through the vocabulary lists page and clicking ChinesePod. I'll be working on it some more tomorrow so keep checking to see further improvements on that page.

Also, new feature: you can now delete your own data! It's on the vocabulary options page. Now you don't have to email me and wait for me to get around to clearing your account for you. Use it wisely though! Are you sure you want to erase all that progress? The choice is yours.