First impressions

thank you for the new app!

here are some first impressions of the new Android beta - it’ll take me longer to see how the other behaviors are working

• the old dashboard was a lot more fun
• is there a way to go back to the previous question?
• what happened to Pleco integration on the info screen? no more individual characters in a word? character components? related words? that’s a pretty huge loss to helping me learn - it was a busy screen before but that was okay because all the info was really helpful - maybe collapsible sections by tapping the header so that if you want to have the info you can?
• on the pinyin/definition screen, there’s a lot of whitespace… can you make the hanzi characters bigger (like 2x or 3x) or give us a setting to control the size? (that is after all what I’m trying to learn)
• on the tone screen, the pinyin is displayed much larger than the hanzi… I’d rather see the hanzi at the top and even bigger since that’s what I’m trying to connect to the sound and tone
• on the drawing screen, give more space to the drawing area - maybe 2/3 of the screen instead of only 1/2?
• bug… you can tap the speaker fast enough to play multiple times simultaneously (easier to hear with sentences than characters)

To add my own impressions:

  • The Yellow for marking characters as “so-so” has a too low contrast and is hard to see
  • Bug: It is possible too not be able to write a character in a word. This only happens with multiple character words. The condition seems to be tapping/holding (for too long or too short im not sure) “wrong” or “so-so” if the character was marked correct. The next character in the word will then not register or trace any strokes, tapping will still show the first line to be drawn.
  • Performance is better
  • Question: What is the meaning of “Easing speed” and “Easing type” in Settings? The latter has like 20 options and I have no idea what the difference between “backOut” “bounceIn” etc. is.

What did you like about the dash? We’ll be adding overall stats back into the app on the slide out drawer soon, and heat map will be back on the stats page. We wanted to give users the most amount of control as possible from the dash and still have some things to add in so you can filter more than one lists and do a few other things.

This is one of the highest priority things we’re working on. We hope to have it in the next build or two. Sorry it wasn’t already in there!

They’ll be back. They’re in the list of active development tasks and we should have all this back in the app in the next week or so.

We still need to get example sentences back on the screen, and some definitions and readings can get rather long. Once those are back in there we can look into increasing some font sizes and cleaning things up a bit. As for writing area, we’re kinda restricted to a square space in the app. Generally speaking, most user testing reports from all versions of Skritter is that once the writing area gets too big it actually gets harder to write quickly.

Our current priority is to make sure all the app functions are working as intended. Once that’s done we’ll continue to make UX/UI improvements all over the app.

Thanks for the feedback!

Noted. And I agree! I’ve opened up a UI Improvement ticket to make some changes :slight_smile:

Yeah, we’re seeing this in the app, but we can’t reproduce at will just yet. If/when this comes up be sure to navigate back to the dash and then hit the study button again until we get this fixed. I tried a million combos so far and none of them just make the bug appear. We’ll keep digging. Our best guess right now is that it has to do with some tap event firing out of order and causing some issues.

YAY!

Easing speed is how fast the strokes fall into place when you’re writing them. It is in mileseconds. 250 is fastest, 1000 is slowest. The Easing type is how the strokes fall into place. We just put this in as a fun little thing to test out right now. The plan is to collect some feedback on a few that people actually enjoy and rename them for the official launch down the road. If you don’t wanna mess with anything I’d suggest leaving the style as is and just play with the speed.

Thanks for the feedback!

I liked the big progress indicator which gave focus to what was most important to me… how much had i done and how much remained in my goal. The general font/color/format was also more visually enticing.

also with the drawing panel, it would be better if the buttons did not overlap the drawing - makes the screen feel too cramped

also it looks like the reviews count on the dashboard stops at the daily goal - it reports 100/100 instead of 143/100 - i want to know how many items I studied in the day not just whether I met the goal

Do you mean the circle indicator showing your daily goal? It’s been reworked into a progress bar which represents this!

Real estate can be a tricky thing on mobile devices, however the next build has smaller grading buttons with less overlap

We’re looking into this! I’ll see if I can reproduce this and open an issue. Thanks for the heads up.

Yes. The progress bar functionality is still there. It does not look as interesting or have the same prominence and presence on the screen as the old one. As a software developer myself, I can say it looks like it was designed by a software developer :slight_smile:

It was designed using Material Design, which is great for developers :slight_smile: I think it’ll make more sense to the app overall once the goal mode experience is added to the study screen and stats are back in the app.

Regarding the 1xx/100 stuff, daily goal is in the app, but not working as intended yet (you can’t even set a value other than 100 at the moment) and we’ll be sure to let everyone know when it’s in the final form. After that, we’ll consider making some more aggressive changes based on overall feedback.

Speaking of feedback, we’re loving all of it. Keep it coming! Also, our official thread for all of the updates can be found here. It’s a work in progress and we’ll continue to updated it as we go.

First impressions are generally positive. Or at least they were after I read your release notes so I knew how to navigate.

The extent of the changes to the controls will piss some people off so the splash screens on the new version need this info up front - press and hold to show chars, back button location, no forward button, etc.

You might also think about leaving Chinese only info off the Japanese version. It’s the sort of thing that annoys people and can colour impressions and attitudes.

I know some people love them but personally I hate having to watch video tutorials. One or two well written reference pages with dot points and/or diagrams with callouts can convey information in seconds that take minutes to wade through videos looking for. Keep the videos for those that like or need them but bear in mind that a lot of people won’t watch them and can work most things out if they’re given key info where things are unusual or non standard.

I’ve only scraped the surface with a quick look and with the extent of the rewrite I’m sure you’ve got 99 little bugs in the code that are going to surface over the coming days and weeks but it’s looking good so far. Good luck with it.

One more issue I seem to be having with the app is that I can’t review beyond a certain word.

Yesterday, when I had about 70 words left to review, the word 落ち込む kept coming up again and again (with no other words in between). After waiting a bit, i had 80 words left to review and as I worked through them I eventually hit 落ち込む again and was stuck again). I banned the word to see if this would fix it but now it’s simply the next word that I’m stuck on. Today I have about 150 words left to review and am still stuck on that word.
Has anybody else encountered this?

edit: happened both on 3.0.0 and 3.0.2

edit 2: I used the web version to see if I could reproduce the error. I was able to review the word I was stuck on and progress further, and the app now works as normal again. Will report if it happens again.

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Hey Mike, thanks for the feedback and first impressions comment! We went from two internal testers to, what feels like, a million rolling these updates out. There is so much we still wanna do, and so many things that we missed in our excitement to get something out to everyone after six-months of basically zero beta updates.

We’re moving fast and we’ll keep patching things up as quickly as we can. I think we should have a pretty darn stable version of the app in the next few weeks.

I agree. We’re working on them and will continue to improve the way we convey this info to users. We certainly could have done a better job of making some of that stuff explicit right out of the gate.

Totally. The issue is open for it and we’ll get it all fixed up and have even more Japanese/Chinese variations ready to go for actual release.

Straightforward documents and visual guides are coming out soon. @Jeremy has been working on updating our Docs page for final release and we’ll have some of the info baked into the app as well.

Thanks! As i said, this is a very, very big app change, but it should allow for some serious growth in terms of features, stability, and everything in between. Keep the feedback coming!

-Jake

In general, I like the new design. But the app seems to have a massive memory leak. It goes from smooth to unusable within 20 minutes on a device with a lot of RAM (HTC U11, 6GB version, android 8).

The old version had this problem if you reopened studying without closing the app, but this version just does it no matter what.

In general I follow the opening post.

I often have serious graphics bugs (flickering) and the app freezes sometimes.

(Using Skritter on a Z Play and Android 7.1.)

Edit: The freeze seems to happen faster in my case as the Z Play has less RAM.

Another small bug… on the tone screen, tapping for the 5th tone (neutral) is often not detected and marked wrong. Easy to workaround by overriding and marking correct, just odd.

@kokaku Are you still running into this after the latest update?

Yes the bug is still there.

I know this is a beta and you have a small team so I feel for you. I hope future releases will not break or remove so much functionality in the effort to improve the product.

This should have been fixed in the latest beta version 3.0.4, can you verify which version you’re using?

It’s looking good so far in 3.0.5

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