Hi,

I know this might not be the best place to ask this question, but does anyone know of sites that offer a similar functionality to Skritter? I've seen one or two places that have character recognition thingies, but no-one who offers the whole progress tracking and so on. (It's for a language learning blog that I'm working on). Anyone have any experiences and able to comment on their strengths/weaknesses relative to Skritter?

Love Skritter by the way guys, keep up the good work!

I have not come across anything like skritter yet, do you mean http://www.nciku.com/ for the character input and recognition?

忘恩负义，反戈一击，呸！

(开玩笑）

Oh! could it be that such a miracle exists: an alternative to Skritter. Skritter, without the interferences, perturbations, disruptions and disturbances (silly quotations, glowing effects, rococo pictures, all that bad taste jumble...), Skritter allowing to concentrate exclusively on learning Chinese? I should immediately drop the original Skritter for such a perfect double of it. Alas! I fear I must still wait some time before it happens.

poor skritter programmers:)
it was of course to be expected....the more people you need to satisfy, the more difficult it gets.
I can imagine how some people would prefer skritter without certain gadgets and quirks. A "basic" version option to practice in for those people perhaps?

Not sure what you mean by rococo pictures... a Google images search for rococo pictures is not particularly reminiscent of Skritter. Silly quotations - blocking the div with the id original_recipe will do that. In Chrome with adblock plus you can use Ctrl+Shift+K, click the quotes, and select block it and they will go. Other browsers should be able to do this too.

As for glowing, I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but if the effect on characters when you get them right, I can't say I personally find it too distracting. That said with this and the other "bad taste jumble" - the Skritter team tend to be pretty responsive to feedback, so if you like Skritter then it's worth making suggestions.

Here's some from a year ago...

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=513489

Some of these have gone in, some have not, but the ones that tend to come up more will probably arrive quicker.

Alternatives to Skritter online I've seen are:

http://popupchinese.com/chinese/writing - but it doesn't seem to work on my browser

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/games/characters.shtml - but it's nowhere near as sophisticated as Skritter

Nobody's close as far as I can tell.

Btw Skritter team, an option to show the user-interface in Chinese would be cool!

Hey guys, actually, the quotes on the bottom of the pages was just mentioned by someone else as a source of irritation, so I've posted a poll about it on the home page. If people don't like it, we'll get rid of 'em. It's been a while since we've asked, so I'll be curious to see the results! I am regrettably a little attached to them (I collect quotes and put them all in there), but if it's distracting we can certainly exterminate(!).

I'm not entirely sure what the Rococo images are either. loupdessteppes would you mind expanding on that? Are you talking about avatar images?

Do people dislike the glowing in general by the way? Ximeng, you mentioned that you didn't mind it that much, but loupdessteppes seems perturbed by it. Any other thoughts on that?

We've actually tried Popup Chinese's version, which is okay, I don't think I'd heartily recommend it as a regular practice tool, but it's fine for reference. The BBC tool is pretty brutal in my opinion though.

I haven't seen anyone else that is close at the moment. That said, there are a lot of people innovating, so we may well have some really intense competition tomorrow!

If you're looking for good dictionaries, mobile apps, or comprehensive solutions I could help you there though. We try to keep a careful eye on our surroundings!

George,

As you get more and more users, I'd suggest that you be careful about being too responsive to a single individual with complaints. If the same thing comes up a lot, that's one thing, but one squeaky wheel shouldn't drive interface changes.

Also with the quotes - I liked them to begin with, but after a while you start seeing the same ones again and again.

Maybe it's just me, but the quotes seem so easy to ignore. I figure leave them for the people that enjoy them.

It's not like the quotes are in your face or anything, so I would just leave them there. And what's wrong with glowing characters? It is just one way to indicate how I did so I rather like it.

Keep up the good work!

I think the quotes put a nice touch to the site and they are useful. If my mind wonders of I rather read one of the quotes. Hopefully then get back to studying rather than opening other pages or getting into all sorts of other distractions.

I guess you can always chuck in an option to turn them off. Same goes for the glowing effects, which I personally quite like.

No too long ago, there was a thread about skirtting during office hour. I suppose those people that do it would prefer an extremely serious, solemn looking, quiet interface. Nothing that gives the slightest hint of not doing serious business should appear. So, is this the reason behind this thread? And can Skritter wear different skins to suit different usages?

One possibility is to add a custom css to Chrome for instance and overwrite existing css classes. That way you can hide whatever you want and redesign completely if that's what you want.

Personally, I like the quotes, although there should be more of them and from more different sources (seems like someone in the Skritter team really likes Wizard People Dear Readers ;)

We had a few different themes back in the day, but they were more hassle to maintain than they were worth. The personalized CSS recommendation is a good one.

We kind of slowed down on the quote adding, yeah. I saw one I hadn't seen before the other day though, somehow! Wizard People Dear Readers is the funniest movie we've ever seen.

I am in the camp that finds the quotes extremely irritating. We're apparently a minority, but we're not just a single user as was suggested above. I have installed the Greasemonkey script to remove them, so now I don't particularly care if they're removed or not.

However, some people seem not to understand *why* they might be annoying. Here's the thing: humor and interestingness are very specific to individuals and to their culture, and by "culture" I don't just mean nationality, I also mean things like age, the kind of movies seen, the kind of music listened to, etc. Maybe I'm already an old man in my mid-thirties, maybe I haven't seen the movies in question, maybe it's due to some other cultural differences, but I find the quotes nonsensical at best and painful at worst. And those who say "it's not like the quotes are in your face or anything" are fortunate; for me the quotes stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise very nice user interface.

James

I love the quotations. So, maybe they appeal to middleaged (50+) European women like me. :-)

Tove, you look like a young fresh fridge to me :)

Plecodict's flashcard app does more or less the same thing as skritter - it's a bit different in execution and the srs isn't quite as slick but it's much more versatile and customisable. Of course the killer feature is that it's on the iPhone.