I am having an additional issue on top of the missing characters.

I normally use Skritter un-muted with automatic word pronunciation on, because I like hearing it after every card.

If I put my phone on mute, however, it would mute it. After the latest update, even if the phone is muted, the application emits the sound.

Yeah, I have to turn the volume down in the app settings itself to get it to be quiet.

The change to play sounds independently of the mute switch was suggested by many users with audio problems with Skritter, so we're trying it out to see if it makes more sense this way. You do have access to the volume control within Skritter, plus the device master volume switches to quiet it in a pinch.

Oh I see.

If you manage to sort out the bug for those users, here's my 2c: I do believe that the most sensible setting is that mute phone == mute Skritter.

I can't imagine a situation where I'd want my phone to be quiet regarding texts and alarms, but speaking at me in Japanese.

Thanks for the quick reply!

It doesn't matter much to me either way - I'll adjust to whatever. I personally think it makes more sense to work the same as other iphone sounds, but if other users are running into trouble in some situations this doesn't bother me.

Just to add my voice: When I flip the mute switch on my phone, I absolutely expect that no sound comes out of it.

I often sneak in some skrittering while sitting in boring meetings, and this put me in a really awkward situation when another app (either Anki or Memrise, I don't remember which) did this.

Just my 2p

Lots of apps that play music or videos still sound when the phone's silent switch is flipped. I like being able to hear skritter now and adjust the volume in the app. Otherwise I insolence my phone for skritter, then forget and end up with loud alerts and typing noises later. :) guess you have both preferences!

It's always been frustrating to me at times, but here's Apple's take on it for the iPad. I assume it's similar for the iPhone too.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4085

iPad: Understanding the side switch

....

Mute

When you mute your iPad, only certain sounds are muted.

Sounds such as alerts, notifications, sound effects, and game audio are muted.
Media playback (such as music, podcasts, movies, videos, and TV shows) are not muted.

Thanks for posting this in the forum. I was going crazy trying to find a way to mute it without touching to the skritter's settings. It was really embarrassing when during class (even though my phone was on mute) skritter said the words out loud when it hadn't happened before. I would prefer if I could just change from mute to not mute instead of having to go to the settings to change. Just my opinion

Continuing to use the new updates asiduously over the week, I'd like to change my position a bit.

I think this setting should definitely go back to the way it was. I don't think the sound effects constitute "playback", like a YouTube video or song.

Perhaps the setting should be that if the user deliberately clicks the megaphone button, the sound is emitted regardless of mute settings.

The default, though, should be to not play the sound if mute is on.

Agreed- please revert this back to the old behavior.

Another vote here for the previous behavior. Between this and the characters not appearing, the most recent version of Skritter has been unusable. At least I have my iPhone 3gs around to Skritter on.

Now that 2.6.1 is finally approved, I can submit another fix that will revert the audio behavior. It'll probably take Apple a similarly long amount of time to approve it; I bet they are still backlogged.