Any chance for an option to have a small, 4 quadrant grid in the writing window? There've been a number of times I've repeatedly screwed up a stroke because it wasn't long enough or didn't cross over in the right place. 像 really had me swearing earlier with that long, curved, downward stroke.

Ok! Back to winning at Chinese.

The grid lines are in, although for whatever reason I had defaulted to making octants instead of quadrants. They're just waiting to be uploaded with the rest of the featurecopia.

Probably, the strokes that have been getting you are just instances of poorly tuned recognizers for certain strokes. I'm planning on thoroughly tweaking them to get them all working as well as the rest, when I get some time after finishing this big rearchitecturization.

Will we have an option to turn the grid lines off? I'd like that...but I'm probably the only one :p

If you're putting in grid lines, it would be great to have the option to show a 米-grid (not just a square one) which is what my classmates and I are used to.

I hadn't made an option, but I could, if you guys wanted. The grid lines will be faint. When it goes live, I'll ask again whether people would like an additional preference to turn it off.

The more preferences the better, but if that in any way slows down the process of getting our own vocab's list up set it aside ^_^

Kaer, I'll note that opinion, but in general, among our development philosophies ranks highly the idea that "less preferences is better." (The highest is "speed!")

Every time we create a preference, we're saying that each user knows how to design that feature for herself better than we know how to do it for her. This is often the case: some users know they want sound, and others don't. Some users will study traditional, others simplified. Great.

But take another example: the phantom fading out as you start writing. A few people have asked that this not happen, as they want to trace the phantom when first learning the character. Indeed, we initially had it this way. But what we noticed was that you really couldn't learn the character that way, and that recalling it from memory, even half a second after you just saw it, worked way better. It may actually work better when it doesn't fade for 1% of users, but I'll bet that more than 5% of users would choose it not to fade.

So then not only are those users getting a less efficient tool, but now there's an extra preference cluttering up the prefs page and there's a bit of extra code complexity to support it. And there are thousands of decisions like that. If we didn't try to design it for simplicity over configurability, it'd end up like SuperMemo.

We'll often make the wrong decision, and you should tell us. Often, we won't know what users want, so we'll ask. If 90% of users kept the grid lines on, we'd assume that the other 10% probably didn't dislike them horrendously, and we'd simplify by removing the preference. Then again, if it was more evenly split, we'd keep the preference.

Instead of adding a preference initially for these little features and potentially removing them later, we're going to create a tiny poll widget on the home page, to more conveniently suss out user opinion on things like this. I think it'll be a succulent bean.