Now I know exactly what you're thinking - the man has no shame. You're right!

I'd like to unabashedly and blatantly plug http://www.pocketchinese.com , a free, open source program for learning Chinese on your mobile phone. Which, er, I wrote.

Here are some of the cool features (OK I'm biased, I wrote it):

*All the quizzes are stored on a wiki (like Wikipedia) where you can create your own quizzes. These are then available for download to your phone.
*If you have a pen phone, you can test your knowledge of how to write the characters.
*If your phone can display Chinese characters, you can test your reading vocabulary.
*Regardless of what type of phone you have, you can test your englishpinyin knowledge.
*Seamlessly integrates the stroke order animations from lost-theory.org
*Quizzes and animations are available offline once you've downloaded them from the wiki, so you're not constantly caning your airtime.

Totally free and open-source and will always be.

Features slated for the next version (manana, manana, I know...):
*On-phone quiz creation
*Integrate support for Wikipedia's stroke order animations (much nicer than lost-theory's)
*Other cool, unspecified stuff.

Did I mention the program is available from www.pocketchinese.com ? Oh yes, I did.

> a shameless plug for pocketchinese.com

Indeed.

Okay, Skritter users, here's a question for you: do you want to see stuff like this here, or should we moderate it?

If this was a commercial posting, the answer would be easy. Since it's free and open source, it gets some cred. And it also gets some cred for having a bit of Shanghainese on there. But I'm not sure it's interesting or relevant for Skritter users.

What do you guys think? This is your forum, so speak up.

If it's not competing with you guys, i don't see why it's a big deal. If it is, I say don't allow it.

Turf "em!

I don't like it. Bringing it up at an appropriate time as part of another thread, that would perhaps be ok. If it were pre-screened and recommended by skritter, that would definitely be fine.

Thanks for responding, Nick. You said:

>>But I'm not sure it's interesting or relevant
>>for Skritter users.

It's a mobile phone quiz program for learning Chinese. That has integrated stroke order animations. It also has audio clips. And on a pen phone, you can use it to test your handwriting. AFAIK there is no other quiz program for Java mobile phones which offers these features.

What more *does* it have to do to be relevant to Skritter users? I mean, it's squarely in the same problem domain as Skritter. But unlike Skritter, it can run offline on your phone.

Anyway, it's your forum so if you want to scrub the information, or if other forum posters object to it, of course it's your perogative. To be honest, I was hoping for a slightly warmer welcome... :|

By the way, I love the stuff about spaced repetition, and will definitely integrate support for that into a future release. Also, I hadn't heard of Jake Marble's site before. Turns out he's using a very similar XML format to PocketChinese's own one. Integrating support for it will be a doddle, so the ability for pocketchinese to download quizzes from his site is definitely going in the next release!

I'll keep this thread alive to allow for further discussion here, but perhaps I'll moderate future threads in this vein.

jrg, I agree that the focus of the program is similar, and I'm not worried about competition or anything like that. It's more a question of the approach this forum takes to other e-learning software:

1) People post their stuff here trying to get feedback and users. Skritter users see lots of bad software, a few good pieces, and not as much Skritter- or language-related stuff.

2) Skritter users themselves endorse software, or the makers contact us to introduce it (the way chineseteachers.com did). Skritter users only see the good stuff.

3) Other software doesn't get posted here and the forums remain less commercial.

I guess I'm naturally leaning towards option 2; do other forum users agree?

jrg, a touch of feedback for you: the first time I checked out the demo, Java didn't load, so I left. I just checked it out again and got it to load, but it was pretty involved downloading the quizzes. I got errors trying to download anything from your wiki, and could only get stuff from Wikiversity.

I also accidentally clicked "pause" a few times when it displayed a message momentarily and put the pause button there. Also, pause seemed to take me back a menu? Then when I went to actually do a test, it just sat there, not giving me any feedback when I put a wrong answer, I guess.

I'd recommend altering your demo so you start off with a quiz already loaded so people can practice right away and see the meat of it. They could then download other quizzes from the menu if they liked.

I guess for me the 'shameless' advertising part of it makes this topic seem out of place. I mean, if you had framed it as asking for feedback (and our users are a wealth of good feedback! I wouldn't blame other up and coming sites for wanting their opinions), or had asked one of us site owners to present it for you, I think you would have had a much different response. I mean take for example when we went to chinese-forums.com.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=27165

Or as Nick mentioned when the developers at chineseteachers.com wanted to have some Skritter users try out their site.

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=4047933&comments=9

But framing it as a straight up advertisement... That's not really what this forum is for in my opinion. It's for discussing how to make learning Chinese efficient and enjoyable (particularly but not exclusively within Skritter). Maybe the request for feedback you felt was implied?

I'd have to agree that the commercial feel of the initial post (even though there's apparently no desire by jrg to make money) made it feel out of place. I'd rather see the forum dealing with issues users of Skritter bring up, not products users(?) are promoting. It's a bit different if in the course of discussing an issue someone brings up a product, or if Skritter finds something that they are able to support in a way they are in comfortable with (e.g. the handling of chineseteachers.com and recommendations on the resources page). I like number 2 in Nick's list the best, but if the forums should ever start to regularly become a billboard for products, I'd rather it be number 3.

I think the way it was written really grated with me...

As for how these posts should be handled, I think Nick's option 2 sounds best.

Definitely a number 2 for me, I mean starting this thread was just really not subtle...

I'm also with Number 2.

Actually, the "spamtastic" tone of the initial post was intended as deliberate irony, rather than to be taken seriously.

I guess it didn't hit the comedic sweet spot, and appears to have rubbed people up the wrong way. My bad, sorry about that.

Thanks for the feedback Nick:

*I like the idea about shrinkwrapping a built-in quiz into the program so that people don't have to download any quizzes to get started.
*As for your problems downloading quizzes from the pocketchinese wiki, I guess you must have picked a time when berlios.de (the open source hosting provider who host it) were having server problems. Try again, it shouldn't normally have any problems.
*The Pause option is designed to minimize the application when running on a real phone. But on the emulated mobile phone on the website, it has no effect. I'll look at disabling it when the app is running in the emulator.

Scott asked: "Maybe the request for feedback you felt was implied?" Definitely - and I'm glad to have got some.

Anyhow - guess I started off on the wrong foot, but if you have a Java enabled phone, do give it a try. There's nothing quite like it out there, and having used it myself for learning Chinese over the last couple of years, I can attest to its effectiveness.

jrg
Why is your software limited to just the Java enable phone when Java enabled computers could possibly use it too?

Hi davidy,

Good question. It's because although the versions of Java which run on phones (J2ME) and computers (J2SE) are compatible at the language level, the UI frameworks they use are very different (MIDP and AWT/Swing respectively).

When I first started writing the app, I did think about adding an abstraction layer so that the program could run on either phones or PCs. But I decided against it because of the extra work it would entail. Plus, my personal requirement was for mobile learning. There's lots of Chinese learning software for PCs out there, not so much for phones.

It's definitely something I'll keep in mind and look at again at some point. One easy way might be to wrap it in a mobile phone emulator with a PDA-style skin which doesn't look too much like an emulated phone.