Sorry for the bad news, but no Chinese beta just yet
We’ve learned our lesson trying to release large updates to both Chinese and Japanese at the same time and on two platforms. As much as we’d love to Chinese user feedback, we also want to avoid being bogged by Chinese specific issues while we finish up the Japanese app. Once the app is released we’ll work on fine-tuning the Chinese app and get it into your hands as soon as we can.
The current TestFlight beta (version 3.0.20) expires in 64 days and I really, really hope that we can get you all using 3.1 before then. I’m mindful of the timeline we’re doing what we can to beat it.
Could it be possible to fix the current sound bug? Without breaking anything else, of course…
I believe the last beta build was already good enough for most of us, specially the improved SRS that made me review words that hadn’t pop in for months.
But now… Having to revert to use the non-beta app is kinda demoralizing as I feel the learning quality is not as good.
@Ferran@Farham
Josh and I will discuss next week and look into patching it up. If we can fix it quickly and not break stuff, we’ll certainly go that route!
It’s possible that it isn’t a quick fix. In the event of that, I think our time is probably better spent getting Skritter 3.1 into your hands as quickly as we can. The changes we’ve made are significant and pretty darn awesome for learning on Skritter. We’re really excited to bring these changes your way. @SkritterMichael’s rogue build of Chinese is already quite promising. I’m trying to avoid making any promise we can’t keep, but I do think we’re very close to getting the new stuff in your hands shortly.
Today we’re working on wrapping up our 117th internal build for Skritter: Write Japanese and sending it off to Apple for approval. More on that on Monday! I’m hoping that we can start the pivot back to Chinese apps in general relatively soon!
As always, we appreciate all of your patience during this phase, and we look forward to updating all of our apps as quickly as we can so you all can just focus on learning to read and write Chinese and Japanese in as stress-free a way as possible.
Skritter: Write Japanese has been approved by Apple and will be live in the store today. The release has been scaled back a lot to focus on generating feedback on the new study modes without compromising user data along the way. We’re still working on improving the review experience for the new version of the app and also optimizing deck caching and loading, two things that’ll greatly improve functionality of the application for you and other existing Skritter users. I’ll be opening up a new thread for the live version of the app today to talk about what’s included in the released version and what’s on our hit list for the rest of the month. We’ll be moving fast now that the app is in the store.
On the agenda for discussion with Josh tomorrow (Thursday) at some point during the day. Making a note now to post an actual update for you after we’re done with the meeting!
@Farham I talked with Jake about it and am going to take another pass at fixing it tomorrow. I’ve been able to somewhat consistently reproduce it and have a few new ideas on what might be causing the issue. It doesn’t happen in the big new version we’re working on so hopefully I can compare some code and come up with something useful.
Not directly related to Josh’s comment above, but when I opened my account for some testing this morning I had the “hide reading” button enabled in the review filters menu before I turned it off to dig into the bug a bit more. Having “hide reading” toggled on is certainly a bit more of a study challenge, but it does keep audio from playing when cards transition.
Not an ideal solution to the problem, but a potential workaround for those looking to give it a try.
Hmm, I always use the latest Skritter beta with Hide Reading on iOS but it still plays the audio after each character of tone cards. In addition it often plays the wrong audio for the given word if there are multiple pronunciations for that character.
I just submitted version 3.0.22 (Chinese only) to Apple for review for beta users. It should become available for install in the next day or so if they approve it. It contains several improvements to audio.
It sounds like the app is working as intended with the audio playing after a card is completed. I was mentioning the setting from the perspective of the creepy audio bug, as the transition from card to card will not auto-play any of the audio. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. But, that issue will now be fixed with the new update rolling out on TestFlight and Android soon!
As for wrong audio on the word level, that sounds like an issue we certainly wanna get fixed up. We still need to spend some time improving a more comprehensive solution for not only reporting issues, but also fixing them and rolling them out to the apps in a way that doesn’t require clearing all local data or needing to push a full app update when things get fixed or updated. The basic framework for that process is already built into the new applications, but we’ve still got some work to do so that things are working smoothly on both sides of the experience.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I sometimes do hear choppy or missing audio after a card is completed. It sounds like that is being improved.
What I was attempting to report was, after each individual character card for tone questions, the pronunciation is often (programmatically) wrong. When it repeats the full word after all of the characters are answered, it is correct. Examples: for “貼上” it says “tie1” after the first card, “shang4” after the second, then “tie1shang5”. For 一般, it says “yi1” then “ban1” then “yi4ban1”. For 首都, it says “shou3” then “dou1” then “shou3du1”. I could go on and on as it happens for a large number of words that have multiple pronunciations, but it seems that whenever there are multiple pronunciations for a character, it is not necessarily picking the one that applaud for the given word.
I also sometimes encounter some cards that don’t have any sound at all, but then they regain their sound when I jump into the beta. So definitely someone put the voice on them, just seems not to be interpreted and available in certains iterations of the app.
So, @Josh, can we expect the beta patch on Android today or tomorrow 13th?
Right now it’s in review and that usually means 1-2 days before getting approved. I say usually because it’s 100% in the hands of Apple and they don’t guarantee any specific timeframe.
I really hope the Android version beta patch is not in the hands of Apple 哈哈哈
I take it that what @SkritterJake mentioned as “tesflight and android soon” actually means the Android patch will follow the iOS one, but hasn’t been yet submitted to the Play Store?
