As Flash is probably not to come anytime soon to the iphone: Will there a Skritter iPhone app in the future?
:)
Henning

Why not build it with the iPhone SDK? It's in ObjC though. I assume you use Actionscript for the flash, Nick?

I guess there's not much difference, eh? ;)

There will be an iPhone app. I hope that the amount to which it will totally rock is as easy for you to imagine as it is for me.

Yeah, AS and ObjC aren't terribly different. It's a lot of work to do, though, since forking the practice page code increases our code complexity significantly. Also, none of us have Macs, yet. (I was just on the Apple website yesterday and there's no way I can afford one of those right now... with all the options I'd want. I mean, you just gotta have the 17" screen and 8 gigs of RAM, you know?)

We are figuring out shortly how soon we'll be able to get that going. We're also going to put a poll up soon to suss demand among existing users.

I was joking. What I've seen of AS doesn't look at all like ObjC, which is IMHO a painful and overly verbose language.

NString, NSMutableString, NSArray, NSMutableArray... every object has a mutable/immutable counterpart. Great for memory conservation sure, but ... not much fun for anything else. Oh and string concatenation sucks (almost as bad as the documentation): NSMutableString *aString = [string1 stringByAppendingString:@"some text here, and a number: %i, another string from a function: %@",1,[self aFunction:@"avalue"]];

Read and giggle: http://riactant.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/concatenating-strings-in-objective-c-now-this-is-some-bullsht/

If you guys did bring out an Iphone app, I would probably have to buy one just for Skritter. . . .

I guess I think of "very different" from AS being things like Lisp, Haskell, etc. Things with semicolons are all things with semicolons to me. That said, I know very little about Objective C.

> Things with semicolons are all things with semicolons to me.

Laughed out loud at that one. Right on!

Getting to practice my Chinese on the go??? Twist my arm!

skritter on an IPhone? Then I would buy one of these completely toooooooo overpriced nice gadgets the same day I could have skritter on it :-)

The iPhone has Chinese input that works on full-character recognition. I like using it to make sure that I'm not remember the second half of a character by Skritter's correcting of the first half (if that makes sense).

The big drawback is that the iPhone doesn't have a stylus - dragging your finger across the screen for a while starts to hurt.

I really really really want an Skritter app to come out! I love the touch screen experience and really wish I could be practising my characters while on the bus/waiting in line etc etc.

I know Apple aren't very friendly when it comes to design and the app store but this would make Skritter even more worthwhile, especially now that we can add Chinesepod lists!!

Please Skritter? :)

It's on the agenda, but not in the near future, I'm afraid. We've got so many things on our plate that need to be done before beginning a major project like that. We're still looking at options to get it out sooner, though, and we figure it's only a matter of time. I have an iphone now, so I want my copy too!

Well, enjoy all the features that are being built in the meantime!

I would definitely like to see an iphone/ipod app as I have one and use it extensively for practice.
I also like the idea of a writing tablet to use as home.

As I wrote in a previous email to Nick, doing Skritter for the upcoming Flash 10 for mobiles will probably be an easier option. Also, pretty much everyone except Apple has joined this venture and will support it.

I'm pretty biased though, since I have a Nokia 5800 running Symbian S60 which will be among the first to support the new Flash. Anyway, from what I've heard of it, porting the existing code should be pretty easy once it comes in late 2009...

Can anyone recommend a iphone app to use in the meantime?

You can get the ChinesePod Quick Review app, but I don't know of anything else good. Don't be tempted by iChinese, which is no good.

But yeah, I'm interested to know, too: has anyone seen anything good for Chinese on the iPhone? Or even which dictionaries are good?

Anki Online is great to use on the iPhone. I use my iPhone to jot down any new vocabulary I encounter in the iPhone notes app throughout the day, and then at the end of the day add it to my Anki deck. Then whenever I have a spare moment, I use Anki Online to review (character recognition, pinyin reproduction)

In terms of a Chinese dictionary, I just use the MDBG web site.

I hope you can get the iPhone app out as quickly as possible.

I read that Flash will be supported on the iPhone for building apps. I don't think it will be a Flash player for the browser though. I am just wondering if this changes anything?

Yes! If it works as they claim, we'll start working on a native iPhone app built from the current Flash codebase as soon as we can get our hands on it. That'll possibly be during the beta, before the end of the year. If not, then starting sometime in the first half of next year.

That's very exciting, oh yes.