This new update with the strokes and elements staying where they were drawn and then animating their way to the proper position when the character is finished is interesting, and might be helpful to those users who are interested in improving their overall character composition, but personally, I'm not a big fan; at least, not after a couple minutes of using it. I can see it working as a compromise between stroke recognition and limiting visual hints for characters you're sketchy with, but it's pretty disorienting, at least at first.

Then again, this is just my two-minute opinion, I might love it in another half an hour (if my battery lasts that long).

What's everyone else's opinion?

Meh, nevermind. It was back to normal when I navigated back to the practice page. New feature test, Skritter team?

Even though my first impression was a bit negative, I'd be interested to give it some more time, maybe a half-hour of logged study time. Can we unlock it with some combination of keystrokes like the ink ghosting? Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, A, B, Select, Start, maybe?

The magic keystroke is Ctrl-Alt-D

Oh wait, sounds like you're talking about something different, ignore that

Oh yeah; I had it on accidentally for all for a couple minutes, but it should only be like that on Ctrl+Alt+D mode. I'm testing it out in combination with the squig overlay; although they are two different things, perhaps the desire for them springs from a common source of wanting to focus more on handwriting.

Blimey, that is a tad strange, isn't it. Although I do quite like seing what i actually put down, i know full well there are characters I know how to write by hand but am probably picking up bad habbits by quickly hurling a stroke on the right direction any old place...

I'm liking this new mode very much (although not the blue overlay, gets in the way of seeing the character at the end). Realising how many characters I can only write with Skritter's help...

This needs to be made a permanent option :p.

I like it too! Indeed, it's very helpful without hints and other stuff!
Before that my handwriting skills were not that good...

My opinion: Awesome feature!

Finally it's possible/necessary to write, learn and remember the characters all by yourself. It's kind of alarming how many 丿's one cannot recall without skritters help. However, I still experience some problems with 一's close to the top.

Keep the good work up!

Getting tired, I'm sick and my competence in English withers: The word order for the last sentence of the upper post ofc should be

Keep up the good work!

;)

I like the "new" squig-showing mode, as it gives far less of a hint about the character I'm trying to remember.

(Bragging rights: showing squigs was my idea)

I like this mode too. There are a couple of things I would still like to change:

I'd like to see the squig I actually wrote. At the moment it looks like the squig stays in the place I drew it, but is still tidied up into a Skritter stroke.

The overlay at the end is a bit distracting and I don't really get a chance to see the final character I wrote. It's obviously important to how the character is written properly though.

I have an EeePC 701 running Fedora. The usual animate-the-stroke-into-place animations mean that this underpowered box has a lot of trouble with skritter.

One great thing about not having animation is the 701 is now useable!

Mjd, Thanks for suggesting this feature!

My tablet's battery life under Skritter has improved since CPU is no longer constantly used for animations.

The lack of hints is a great boon to stop me from cheating on borderline grading cases. Unfortunately my learned character statistic is plummeting...

I'm also starting to use the erase button for the first time. Once my initial strokes get out of whack with placement, it's virtually impossible to finish the character without drawing a Picasso.

I second the motion to turn this feature into a first class setting.

@klutz14159, LOL, I know what you mean: If I don't start in the right spot, I end up "painting myself into a corner", and I have to erase in order to fit the character into the box. You too huh? :-)

Your learned char stat will pick up again soon, and this time you'll really know them.

Through disabling the animations, I found the other day that I wasn't writing 表 with the top sticking out. Skritter was being too helpful!

Lyon says: "I'd like to see the squig I actually wrote. At the moment it looks like the squig stays in the place I drew it, but is still tidied up into a Skritter stroke." The result you obtain is a hybrid one: neither the character you've written, nor the correct one. Esthetically, an horror (right strokes, together with a double inaccuracy: in the position of the components and in the general proportion of the character). A big problem for me.

I don't like this new (old) mode; I think the incentives are wrong (because you're focusing more on handwriting aesthetics in a medium that isn't aimed at it, and it's slower) and the only good thing about it is that it gives less hints while still keeping recognition working. I'd rather use component decomposition to fix how recognition works to do it in chunks while leaving your raw squigs there. But I'm a ways off from having the time to do that.

So I wish y'all weren't liking it, because then I could turn it off again.

I'll leave it accessible for now until I can figure out what to do with it and with the squig overlay.

Nick: this is better than by components for actual writing, even if it isn't as flashy or pretty. Here, I can start the character in the wrong place without it snapping and thinking I know the character. Or, I write what I think is the whole character, and find that I'm missing a bit at the bottom (eg 刑 ／ 型 ). If I have to start over, then I'll mark the character wrong, whereas previously I'd have marked it right thinking I knew it and been unable to do so in real life.

By components will solve things like writing 口 instead of 曰, but not the examples above. The current ctrl-alt-d implementation solves both. I'd rather have a not quite so pretty interface, since it's giving me real improvements in my actual character writing.

(And incidentally, I'm not focusing on handwriting at all, just ability to write and remember characters. The only handwriting part that comes into it, is giving proper spacing, so you don't run out. And this just means you have to be vaguely aware what the whole character is, and not randomly throw strokes in).

I have to agree with Byzanti. I feel like this new (old) mode is great for really testing the character. I only find it slows me down significantly if I don't actually know the character that well. I don't feel like I'm worrying about it being pretty or the handwriting aspect. If I know it, it seems pretty quick and smooth to me. If not, it makes it obvious.

I have found that starting a character in just the right spot in the 米 grid really helps me get a nice character shape. So squig mode gives me feedback about where to start next time.

My squigs are very similar in shape to Skritter's stylised strokes, which I think is mostly because I am using a home-made touchscreen 55mm x 47mm in shape, and which maps strokes right onto the Skritter writing area (I will send you pictures soon).

@nick I would really hate to see this new mode go.

This mode has really shown me which characters I know and which I can half-ass. I've worked with this mode for about an hour and have become much more confident in the few hundred characters I've worked with in that time.

I agree with those above. This mode, as it is, is a huge improvement from before. Please keep an option to have no stroke snapping until all the strokes have been written.

@Nick - for what it's worth, I still don't really like it. I appreciate the theory, but it just doesn't work in practice for me, I have too many problems with the wrong stroke being recorded, for one, so my spacing gets way off, and the snap into place animation at the end looks like one of Kongming's military formations adjusting to a new situation, with squigs moving all over the place.

Here are a couple ideas for tweaks that might help, though they might not be feasible: First, retaining the squig on a recognized stroke, rather than replacing it with the stroke. This would give the writing process a more natural feel while still eliminating the hints that the current default gives us. The other suggestion might be harder to implement - tying later stroke recognition to the placement of the first stroke - if done properly (and there may not be a proper way to do it...), this would prevent a lot of misconstrued strokes if we start a character out-of-whack in this mode, since it would recognize following strokes by their placement in relation to the strokes that come before them, rather than their placement on the overall writing surface.

Anyway, even though the current implementation of this feature doesn't really do it for me, I'm thrilled that you guys take improving Skritter so seriously. That's definitely incentive to stick around and recommend the site to friends.

I was thinking about retaining the squig instead, but I dismissed it because I figured that if your squig got recognized as an entirely different type of stroke, then you'd think you were on the right track and be frustrated when the recognition wasn't doing what you'd expect with the later strokes.

But now that I think about it again, I have no idea how often this would actually present a problem. So I think I will try that.

The stroke recognition currently does factor in both relative and absolute squig displacement, so if you manage to get the character started in a weird position, it should be just as easy to get it to recognize relative to where you started. This is forgiving, though, because it'll grade either by relative or absolute displacement, whichever is closest.

I know the component-based recognition wouldn't solve all those problems, but the code I would write for it would likely be able to let you delay all recognition until the end of the character, which is what many have asked for, while being a lot smarter about recognition of intervening squigs. It would just be a toggle whether to apply it at the stroke level, the component level, or the character level.

Okay, I'm altering the experiment to keep squigs instead of strokes. Let me know what you think. If you do try out this mode, I'd recommend setting your stroke order strictness to max, because the order corrections are pretty unintelligible when it's just your squigs.

Woah!!! That is soo cool, you have to keep it. It tests you can actually write the word rather than coaches you into it.

How do I keep it turned on by default (:

Wanted to share a perfect example of why this is good. While trying to write the character 相. I forgot the "box" contains 3 lines instead of 2.

When writing in the old mode, the lines move to the right spot, showing you that there is an extra line you need to draw, you dont have to remember how many lines there are.

In the new mode, I wrote it with 2 lines and got the end of the character and then realised it was wrong.

I doubt I would ever have noticed/corrected that mistake in the old mode.

Yeah, good isn't it!

Nick, this is something I have been hoping you would do for some time and it's really wonderful. Thank you thank you thank you.

I actually much prefer it when the strokes change shape into squigs -- the raw input from my wacom is far too incomplete, it looks a mess, and I'm finding myself pressing hard and exaggerating strokes to make the character look like the character.

Of course, learning wise it's still much superior to the default.

Now its truely amazing! I can't stop skrittering any more ;)

However, as one thing leads to another: Is it possible - like in nciku - to create an undo button? If you mess up characters like 警 on the last strokes deleting all of them is pretty annoying.

Keep going!

凯, press 'Z' to undo. There used to be a button, but it didn't pull its weight, so we killed it but kept the keyboard shortcut.

How do you guys find your writing speed being affected, especially on characters where recognition doesn't work quite right?

Hmm, I have to say I have mixed feelings about this one. The current method (leaving squiqs rather than strokes I think? the naming is counter intuitive for me) is definitely +1 for demanding true knowledge of the character. However -1 for speed, it definitely feels like slower process and it seems like it would be really hard to learn how to write a new character this way...

I would say a good 10-15% of my strokes never get picked up by the engine. The cursor moves, but the ink never flows. So I've kind of got used to watching the screen closely and redoing a stroke if it's missed.

I don't find squig mode slower than regular mode. In fact, for me it's faster, as I seem to lose less strokes.

(I haven't moaned about lost strokes because it's possibly something I'm doing wrong with my homebrew touchscreen.

Yay, I finally have a video of me and my magic home-brew touchscreen to share!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGtK5VIV27M

I'm currently working on a stand-alone USB version.

I tried this a few days back when I only saw the image of what I wrote after the character was complete. In that mode, I was simply curious about how ugly my handwriting was or how to more closely match my strokes to the skritter-desired ones. So it was a curiosity, not a particular help.

However, in this new mode it is really helpful and not a distraction as you are concerned about, Nick. As others have said: skritter no longer gives me hints, coaches me along. I know there were characters that I didn't know all that well but I could make a guess at the first stroke - and then the prettified shape and placement guided me to the next one, and so on.

As to your question, Nick: Does it slow me down? Yes, somewhat but for characters that I really know well there's not a difference. For ones I am shaky on, I must think and that can be slow. I've run into a few where I knew the correct stroke but it was misrecognized so my subsequent strokes weren't identified... and that made a mess. However when I realized what happened I erased and started over with better placement/angle with better results. That's not the fault of skritter but of my poor handwriting (not style but clarity). BTW: My strictness is rather high.

Overall - much better for testing/recall, a little slower but worth it because it's effective. Really, it is great - add my thanks to others. You guys are great at responding to your user's whims - even when you don't like 'em.

mjd - sounds really cool. Unfortunately, YouTube has been blocked over here for a long time now, so I can't check it out. Your video won't even load up through my VPN, which is odd...

@Nick - I won't get a chance to try out the new version for a few hours, but I can't wait to give it a run. My hypothesis is that it will be a little slower, a little harder, (possibly) a little less fun, and much more effective, a worthwhile trade-off for me. If recognition errors end up causing too many problems, maybe you could try creating an experimental mode to run in tandem with this that bypasses stroke recognition and superimposes an overlay of the character on top of the ink once we finish the character. The downsides of this idea would be a loss of fluidity, and that it would undermine all of the hard work you guys have done building what is really a very good stroke recognition system.

@mjd Get some chinese practice by uploading it to the video site that works in China and everywhere else: http://www.tudou.com/

To be honest, I'm finding the squigs a real chore. My wacom just isn't responsive enough. If you plan on keeping this a while, do you think you could make a shortcut to the +strokes version? Cheers.

Actually, it seems that the "blue squigs" when you've finished are actually what you've written, whilst the "black squigs" you write are truncated for some reason. Maybe it wouldn't be so tiresome if the black squigs behaved like the blue ones.

@nick: To echo sarac's comment, it's slower but vastly more effective for characters I'm not 100% sure of. I have already figured out that I was totally BSing some characters I thought I knew, even though I genuinely thought I was being super strict on myself and marking them wrong whenever the hints helped me. When I know the character 100% it's the same speed.

An added plus is being able to see immediately how (il)legible my handwriting is for each character.

James

I agree as well, on the characters I know really well I am just as fast, it is slowing me down on the ones I don't know as well.

Annoying that im slower but I feel like I am learning better.

edit: "Annoying that im slower but I feel like I am learning better." should be "Annoying that im slower, but I feel like I am learning better."

Totally digging it. Unrecognized strokes haven't been any more of a problem than they are in normal mode, and I've only had one instance of a stroke recognizing in the wrong place, and that was a user error rather than a system error.

A+

Byzanti, I would hesitate to keep another mode around. Can you try playing with your Wacom's tip feel setting to see if that helps? That should be the only thing affecting the difference between blue and black squigs.

mjd, that homebrew tablet is AWESOME! Just read your blog about it and I tip my hat to you. Any plans for further improvements? Or ideas for why it doesn't recognize as well as it might?

Nick, have a look at this image:

http://tiny.cc/xnmwe

My wacom is set to max firmness. Given that the blue lines appear fine, but the black ones don't, is it not due to Skritter's handling?

I don't have the same hard data as Byzanti, by my first impression with this new mode was that my strokes were all much shorter than I had thought. In my head I thought I was drawing them just as they showed up, but the squigs made them look have as long as I thought they were.

I assumed this was just an artifact of not being able to see the actual stroke and learning how to work with skritter, but looking at byzanti's image I wonder if it isn't just in my head.

Hmmmm, I think my black strokes are the same length as the blue ones. I'm using an old Wacom Bamboo:

Black:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jww1066/4601229303/

Blue:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jww1066/4601229345/

They look about the same to me, although the blue strokes are thicker.

James

Definitely not like that here. I've also noticed sometimes the blue strokes seem a little off too (sometimes shifted over to the side - check out the 5th stroke, the black one had the correct starting position). Not sure what's going on.

http://tiny.cc/tgipg

James, your black squigs actually are shorter, too! Thanks for the screenshots, guys. You've uncovered two bugs with the squig drawing where it doesn't draw the last point in the black squig that you wrote or the first point in the blue version. The errors were most noticeable when writing very quickly. I'll upload the fix later today.

Much better now - still one slight bug, just aesthetic - the last section of the black squig is sometimes only 1px or so wide.

Two full study sessions later, I totally love the new ctrl-alt-d mode. Contrary to my expectations, I work at least as fast, though I feel like I'm going notably faster, and I'm having more fun, not less fun. It is a bit harder for characters I don't know very well, but I'm finding it to be much, much better for effectively learning characters. In addition, my 7-day retention rate has increased by more than 1 percentage point per session in this mode (though it's still modest at approximately 90%).

Additionally, stroke recognition issues have been minimal in this mode, and I have only had a couple instances of strokes being misrecognized, each instance of which was probably due to user error rather than a mistake of the system.

Ever since I started using Skritter, I knew the stroke hints were messing up my learning, but now I realize just how much of a difference it makes to have them turned off. Even when we could input non-snapping strokes a few days ago, the strokes still tipped me off occasionally by their shape, even if their angle, location, and size had been altered by how I input them. Now, however, the hints are gone and I'm loving it.

Now is there a chance we could get an "incorrect stroke order" message as an option to replace the phantom strokes that currently indicate a stroke written out of order? I'm not sure if people would like it in the end, but it could potentially be a helpful addition for those of us who are trying to eliminate hinting.

@FatDragon are you using maximum order strictness?

No, I'm not, but that's partially because I write a few strokes out of order from habit, and I don't feel the need to change. Notable examples would be the third stroke of the 手 radical (as seen in 把) and the fourth stroke of the left-side radical in 特 and other characters, which I write second and third, respectively. I'm afraid ramping up the strictness would damage my fluidity, and I honestly don't have much stroke order trouble one way or the other right now, so I don't want to try fixing something that currently works very well unless I know the fix is going to improve the very few sticky points without messing with the stuff that works.

@FatDragon: I ask because of Nick's comment:

"If you do try out this mode, I'd recommend setting your stroke order strictness to max, because the order corrections are pretty unintelligible when it's just your squigs."

I actually find that the recognition gets better when I turn this all the way up, presumably because it has only one stroke it's looking to match.

James

I am still using this mode - catching lots of characters I thought I knew but instead relied on the hints inadvertently given by stroke corrections.
As 董雅各 (and others?) suggested - how about saving the setting? I know, another fiddly thing to deal with. Such a thing would be nice but the main feature itself is so well worth it I won't fuss about the lack of the default saving.

Great - thanks Nick!

It's now a preference, "Write raw squigs", in the practice settings. Maybe there should be a better name? Gotta be short. Ctrl+Alt+D will continue to work for now, but I will turn it off eventually.