I went into a phone shop last week to have a play with skritter on some tablets. The samsung tab asked me to calibrate the screen and then worked fine, but was a bit jerky recognising strokes. The HTC didn't lock on to the flash and just scrolled around when I tried to write. I checked around the faq to see if there was a specific url for the android interface, but couldn't find anything. Is this a usual problem with android and what's the fix? I was thinking of getting a cheaper android device but wasn't overly impressed with the samsungs performance. Is skritter really usable smoothly on a phone or cheap tablet?

Some (especially older) Android phones, like mine, have not and probably will not update to the newer operating system, which enables a fuller version of flash. The latter case you were talking about, with scrolling around, probably had an old operating system. You can study some stuff other than writing, like definitions, on these phones, but definitely no writing.

Look at other Android phones, they might work better. Not sure about that Samsung tab though. I've never actually tried using one that works right.

I'm still kind of working on the device detection for the Android interface. If it didn't let you write, even after tapping the Flash area, then it probably didn't recognize it as an Android device. You can force this by appending ?android=true to the URL

http://www.skritter.com/study/all?android=true

You can also get it to use the small tablet Android layout:

http://www.skritter.com/study/all?android=true&tablet=true

I haven't solved the delay with Android devices sending the input to Flash late, so it does look pretty jerky. If you write quickly but carefully and don't wait for it to catch up, you can get pretty good speeds and recognition--it just doesn't look like it's responding quickly. It takes some getting used to.

I may be able to do something about this, but I haven't tested my hunch yet. Who knows if it will work.

Thanks Nick - I'll test those, though I went back to the shop yesterday and both test tablets were dead! I think it was a HTC Flyer running 2.1 or 2.2. It would be good to have those links in the faq.

Dead tablets! That's worrisome. I'd put the links in the FAQ, but pretty soon, I'm hoping to not need them any more. The Android detection thing is a work in progress. (Should have been done by now, but it's proving more painful than expected.)

The default browser is probably just crappy. Try using Net Fort LIFE 2 Browser. I think I got that name right.

By the way you have to do a strong tap, not a swipe or a touch and hold to get it to lock.

I hope that one day you will provide a real android app. The current solution works reasonably well on my HTC phone but only when I have an excellent connection. Anything less than excellent and using skritter turns into a very frustrating experience.
The main issue is that every time I lose the connection, even for a very short time, or even when the quality deteriorates, skritter just hangs. When this happens, sometimes things are fine after waiting for a minute or so, but often I have to back out. Then when I start again in most cases I have to redo the last few characters. If and when you build the app I hope you can build in some asynchronous way of functioning so that the app can continue to function even when the connection deteriorates for a while.
Marc