I love the feature of Skritter where if you tap the information button for a word you will see a breakdown of the component characters and their meanings, HOWEVER, this only works if you have already added that particular character to your study pool.

At the moment I'm studying words that have characters I haven't yet added, and I don't wish to add them yet, but I still would occasionally like to see the breakdown. Is there a way to have Skritter always display this component information in the information section?

So far the only way I've been able to do it is to go into Pleco and get the information there but that takes extra time.

It's a noticeable performance hit on the download of new items if we include the component characters' decomps alongside their words like that, so I'm hesitant to put them in there. How often do you want to do this?

That makes sense. The problem for me is that I don't want to fully commit to adding them to my study pool but I still would like to check them in the information section - I would probably do this fairly regularly. The character/radical breakdown is a very strong feature of Skritter IMHO.

What if there were another similar option to the "always add component characters" that downloaded the component data for the information section, but didn't actually add the characters to your study pool. I would make use of that, and others could as well, but it would mitigate the performance hit on your servers (because not everyone would turn it on) and it would allow people to weigh the benefits against the download-performance issue you mentioned.

I wondered why the decomposition was missing for some characters- I would really like to see the decomposition there for all characters. I stopped using it as it was missing for most of my words. If the option Arian suggested were there I would leave it switched on all the time.

On an unrelated note, it would be great (and surely not too much work?) if Skritter iOS could show a list of the words in my queue which contain the character when I look at its details- I find it really valuable to see how these things connect up.

I'm not sure I understand the issue, but is it true that all the times I saw the "missing component" message it was because Skritter was "withholding" it on the assumption that I had not yet learned that component? If so that seems to presume that we don't have any exposure to Chinese outside Skritter. I always thought it was a deficiency or a bug within Skritter. It never occurred to me that it was deliberate filtering.

I agree with Aroam that the character/radical breakdown is a key feature of Skritter, and I agree with podster that it should be always there completely. However, I never actually noticed any "missing component" message when I hit the information button to look up the info on any particular character. Is that because I started Skritter with adding the list of Wieger's characters and a crazy amount of other lists which supposedly contain most elements and radicals?

I've not seen the problem with missing character information either (on the iPhone app).

However, one related feature I feel is missing is to be able to drill down, i.e. tap on sub-components of characters to see their meaning.

As an additional work-around, consider the Sunrise Method app for iOS http://sunrisemethod.com
I typically have it open most of the time and use it a lot for exactly the purpose of breaking up a character into components.

Unfortunately this doesn't let you connect all characters in your study list that have a certain component in common - a feature I'd highly appreciate in Skritter.

BTW, an Android version is in the works, and no I'm not affiliated.

I personally would use the character decomps all the time and would love to have that feature.