I fully second what Dusan said.
Specifically, auto-completion is “nice” (I’m glad it exists), but it implies I can get away with A LOT of laziness and guesswork on characters I’m not 100% certain about (is there a cross stroke or another dot?).
Ideally it is toggle-able so some of us can really challenge ourselves.
I often forget if there’s a final stroke on these: 今令…so, the auto-grade does make me “cheat”.
I think the only way to fix this would be to add another button so that people have to confirm when they are finished writing, but that would probably lead to a less than ideal experience in most cases. I think in this situation you can access when you “cheated” and change the grading manually.
Testing checklists are a really good way of making sure you don’t miss things, agreed! That aside, I do think we should expect and accept some level of (non-catastrophic) regression in the betas to ensure that the development team can move as quickly as possible while still getting good feedback. My feeling is that the time to get to a fully functional and solid pre-release should be the priority over eliminating regressions, and it sounds like you want to optimize for increasing development speed as well. I do see some expectations on the forum that the beta should always be fully functional for daily use, which is great ideally, but that comes at a cost of development speed.
The sliding-up panel informing us that a new word has been added covers the grading buttons. Super annoying.
You do not really need the entire panel for few words…
Joseph, if you add a “strict” mode in settings one will be able to choose between being annoyed by an extra button to press every time or receiving unwanted help.
Hey Josh, Jeremy and all Skritter team -again can’t say thank you enough props for the hard and consistent work and feedback you give. I for one also personally agree with @rpetersn on the views of rolling out releases.
Also, I have recently added definition to my study settings. I tried searching the forum for this issue and didn’t see a lot of posts on it so I hope I’m not beating a dead horse here but I have yet to see any definition cards come up? After studying through about 150+ Cards I don’t believe I got even one definition card and only a handful of tone cards. Any thoughts?
Thanks for understanding.
We do have to leapfrog a bit between adding additional stuff and fixing regressions as we make changes. We certainly don’t wanna slow things down if we don’t have to. I think the biggest thing we’d like to avoid is having easy to spot bugs appear out of the blue once the app is in your hands. Rather, we want to be aware of some of the issues that still need to be worked on so we can list them as know bugs and let you all know when they should be fixed. That way everyone is on the same page and get a little less redundant feedback about certain issues.
Our checklist testing should help with that, and very soon we’ll have a clearer idea of what the next few versions should include based on bugs we’re seeing and features we want to get back into the app.
Quick update to all of you following along and sending in feedback. It has been a few days since a new iOS update has come out, and the 3.0.12 version released on Android didn’t include any significant updates to the study experience or features. Josh has been hard at work trying to figure out exactly what the heck is happening with user reported study loops. If you’re thinking to yourself,
“study loops…, this beta has no loops. It’s perfect!”
skip past the next bit down to the Coming Soon section.
Things are a mess. Josh is making progress, and the next few updates are targeted at addressing these issues as aggressively as possible. I’ll be honest, the way we query date from Skritter’s servers isn’t ideal. Usually, it’s okay because you’re studying one style or another. But, accounts currently studying simplified and traditional characters at the same time (or even potentially previously on the account) can run into issues. Classic iOS (I like that name) deals with some of these issues by just not displaying the card. At all. Ever. The API doesn’t know that, so when we summon them bad things happen.
“Rare kanji,” and kana for users toggling “study kana” on in this app for the first time are causing some similar issues on the Japanese side. Josh is still working on it, but expect the next few updates to be targeting these problems as well!
Coming Soon
Over the new few versions, we’ll be working on the following:
which, btw, are saving. Yay! To see them in the app you need to log out and back in so maybe make mental notes and update in batches. Sorry, but at least the app loads a lot faster, right?!
After That
This is a significant overhaul. Expect a new post specifically about it over the next few days
Stay tuned!
-Jake
Hey guys, appreciate your work a lot! One thing drives me crazy in the current iOS beta. Even though I reduced my daily goal to 15 at the website, the beta still shows me 100, and since my study time is limited, my due count already has risen to over 500 with no chance to catch it up. I know it’s just a tiny error, but still I think it’s worth mentioning, since it somehow is frustrating me. Let me know if you need further information on this! Cheers
The daily goal and the SRS scheduling system actually aren’t related. We do have an open issue to improve the goal mode experience to make it more customizable, so stay tuned for that. The due count of 500 just means that items you have previously studied and graded are due for review. It’s just a part of SRS studying.
My advice for now, ignore the due count (tough, I know), and just keep on focusing on hitting your own personal goals for the day. Even two minutes of study is better than none. Skritter will always do its best to make sure that the most due items are presented first.
We are also working on some additional study modes that ignore SRS altogether and just focus on a more linear review style, or various challenges. Stay tuned for updates here. I think they’ll be a lot of fun and they could be perfect for your study needs.
In the end, just remember the app is just displaying the data it has on file. You don’t need to pay it any mind if it is stressing you out. Just focus on doing what you can in a given day, week, month, etc. and you’ll see your Chinese/Japanese improve over time! Ultimately, that should be the real goal!
We will be releasing version 3.0.14 soon which includes several fixed, but most notably adds always visible navigation buttons.
I’m posting a few screenshots of the writing cards below to give you a preview. Let us know how they go. These buttons are subject to change in the future, but this is what we’re using for now.
The buttons seem to be working well for me. Two questions:
How is the card graded (or not) when I skip forward without answering a card? What happens to the queue? I can’t tell from using it.
Is it possible to be able to back more / in more cases? Often there is no back button, and often if there is it only goes back a single question. I run into “I can’t go back” quite a lot.
Can only go back one full item. So, in the case of two or more character worlds you should be able to go back to the start. The SRS system really doesn’t like changes once data is submitted, so we can only allow users to go back one item, otherwise bad things start happening.
As for the other behavior. It sounds like bugs. We didn’t spend a lot of time testing the nav buttons before getting them in. Josh tossed these in to speed up his testing, and we kinda liked them for now. I’ll be spending a little more time testing this weekend and I’ll be sure to pay attention to the behaviors you’re describing so we can get them patched up.
What is the purpose of the fwd navigation button on a not-yet-graded card? How does it affect the score if you navigate past an ungraded card?
Skip feature so you don’t have to grade a prompt that you already know. This is particularly useful for writing multi-character words/expressions and tone prompts. If you’re 100% about a card, just skip it.
If you use the next button the card will automatically be marked as “got it” before moving on. On non-writing cards, it serves the same function and reduces the action to one tap.
Is autoadding new words for study supposed to be working yet?
When will the dashboard show the real number of words studied rather than capping out at the daily goal (i.e. 182/100 rather than 100/100)?
It seems like SRS is settling into a better groove.
Looking better and better every release. Looking forward to the next ones.
It still needs tuning. We have a cap on the backend to make sure it doesn’t go too crazy anymore if you’re in a single list, but we haven’t spent a lot of time focusing on the setting. We’re working on getting the study screen layout down and vocab info drawer done first. Then we’re shifting to other things.
Goal updates still pending. We’re playing around with a few ways to make goals more encouraging in the app, and once we have things fixed up, we’ll make sure that the daily goal is not capped at 100. The current 100 item goal is basically a placeholder for the feature. Lots more coming soon.
This is exactly what we wanna hear 
Big smiles from the team reading this one. We’ll continue to work hard and push updates. Stay tuned!
For the “Daily Goal” on the home screen, can we update the number reviewed even when it goes past the goal? ie. 168/100
