Android Beta 3.05

I’m impressed how much has been fixed in the last 24 hours! I’ve only worked with it for a short time, but I haven’t seen some of the reported issues I found before. And I realized the back button actually does work!

  1. I don’t understand the queue. In 3.04 I had about 400 items in my queue. This morning, after updating to 3.05, I’m now over 1000. This brings me back to a central complaint about Skritter: I cannot see my queue. When I click how well I know something, I don’t know what that means in terms of when the word will show up again. The spaced repetition element is a vital part of the learning process, and I simply don’t understand why you insist on keeping that secret. I truly believe you do this because you don’t trust your own algorithms and making it transparent would make the flaw obvious to all. No matter how good-looking, smooth, and efficient the program will become, if I can’t be confident that the program is helping me to retain what I’m learning, I’ll never fully benefit from the money I’ve spent on it.

  2. A small request: Is there anyway I can manually control when to move to the next item? I have auto advance off, but if I change the automatic answer of how well I know the answer, the program leaps forward whether I want it to or not. Sometimes when I’m drawing a character, I happen to make some good guesses, and the programs says I know it. But I really don’t, so I change to “Forgot.” And then I want to study it a bit. But by then I’ve been whisked off to the next item. It’s just frustrating when even with autoadvance off, I still can’t predict exactly when it’s going to advance and when it isn’t. I just want some way of making it advance only when I tap the right side of the keyboard. Or I want an advance arrow up by the back arrow. Something to give me control. (I guess this is a smaller issue of the struggle between Skritter wanting to be in control and me wanting to be in control. Mostly Skritter wants to tell me what words I should do, when I should move forward, etc., when I actually want to have more control over all these elements.)

Thanks.

Glad to hear things have been improved from previous versions and thanks for the feedback! We have been working hard to try to prioritize and address issues as quickly as possible.

  1. I understand the frustration and I am working on trying to get this ironed out. In general the due count number we’re trying to target is that of what the website displays as it draws it’s value directly from the server. The client calculate the value on the fly since they have the benefit of having all the data cached offline. In theory it should be easy, but matching the due count calculation to some of the 10 year old legacy server code is a bit challenging. Rest assured that the actual data being stored is correct and the specific update and I did patch a rather embarrassing but between 3.0.4 and 3.0.5. I just checked your account and the over 1000 number is correct.

  2. I will bring this up with the team, but I remember we used to have it so that after selected a grading you had to do an additional tap to confirm. If I recall correctly we got a lot of user feedback saying it was inconvenient to have to tap again after manually selecting a grade. But I am personally on your side, I like controlling things and don’t mind the extra click.

On item 2, it doesn’t have to be a binary. You could offer various layers of auto-advance. For me it’s the inconsistency. When the automatic grading is correct, I have to tap the screen to move forward. Then I get into a rhythm. So after I change a grade, I automatically tap the screen, but that moves me forward from the next question, so I’ve skipped one accidentally. And then I get frustrated and automatically tap the left side of the screen hoping to move backwards (a habit I’m hoping to soon change). That, of course, doesn’t work and registers an incorrect answer no matter what the question is. At this point, my hand, my mind, and Skritter are all hopelessly out of sync. I don’t want to have to think so hard about when I tap and when I don’t tap.

We’ve made a lot of changes that you might not be used to yet, and we’ll continue to improve things, but I do think a bit of usage will help sort a lot of the usage updates out.

I’m on build 30 internally and I find going back to previous versions now feels strange.

Can you clarify what you mean here? A complete prompt should not require any tapping. Once the prompt is finished it’ll start counting down to the next prompt. If you need to change the grade you can tap anywhere on the screen to pause the auto-advance from happening and apply the grade, and then tap once more to continue.