These are neither urgent nor necessarily very important, but they'd potentially be nice to have.

First, and the lesser of the two: Thinner Squigs - I suppose I could probably alter this to some extent by changing the hardness setting of my pen input, but I feel like a thin squigs option for raw squigs mode would be aesthetically appealing to me, especially if it were to carry over to the shadow that superimposes with the Skritter version of the character when you're done.

Second, and somewhat more geared towards practicality than simple aesthetics - No-Recognition mode for writing. I suppose this might conflict with Skritter's purpose of being more than just SRS, so I definitely understand if it's never implemented, but as many people have noted before, it can be easy to trick Skritter into giving you a hint at the radical of a character you're uncertain about, even to some extent with raw squigs mode turned on. A pure no-recognition, self-graded writing mode would be nice. What I mean by this, if it's not clear, is putting the pad in free-draw mode, and then showing the shadow squigs and moving onto grading mode upon the user hitting the "show" button, or something like that. This would take the concept of the pen-and-paper study style that some people have advocated and remove the irritation/wasted time of swapping between pen and mouse/stylus all the time, and it would keep users more honest than the "imagine the character and self-grade" method others have suggested. Kind've a happy medium between the two, only somewhat lacking the real-life handwriting practice of "pen-n-paper mode".

Again, if these aren't implemented (or even considered at length), I'm A-OK with that decision by the team, but in the interest of being pesky (likely) and potentially contributing to the positive development of Skritter (dubious at best, though I like to imagine that my feedback had a direct impact in the decision to create "raw squigs" mode...), I thought I'd spit 'em out for consideration.

I have a request too. I find it speeds up my reviews quite a bit if I do the writing first and then do the tones, then the definitions. The reason is that I do not need to switch between tasks. As a man I am bad at things like that.

So to be clear I do study writing, tones and definitions, but I just want them all grouped in that order until I am down to 0.

There are obvious disadvantages like when your queue is really long. You will then never study tones or definitions until you get a good chunk done. But especially at times when my queues were hundreds of items I found I could get down to 0 much faster by doing writing first, then tones, then definitions, then switching back to everything.

I also find writing more important than the other categories so if I have only limited time I would be okay to skip tones and definitions.

If nobody else feels the same way I can just disable what I dont want to study under options, but I was wondering whether other people felt the same way. Even if you dont feel the same way I can recommend you try it sometimes.

+1 for skritterjohan's idea. Anything to prevent switching from tablet to keyboard over and over again.

They already come in groups, don't they? I mean, I'm fairly sure I never get just one writing followed by one recognition. I agree it would be nice if the groups were larger (maybe 25 instead of half a dozen).
Rachael.

I feel like switching tasks is fine, as the different tasks are easily distinguishable by their layout so going from one to another isn't a big deal for me.

However, if readings could be grouped to minimize switching from pen to keyboard, I would be tempted to start integrating them into my study.

@rachael they are somewhat grouped, but over the span of an hour or two I find myself switching constantly.

Only me and jww1066 seem to think this would be a good feature. That puts us just a few people shy of a majority.

It is possible to do it manually the way I have been doing now, so I guess that's fine.

I also like skritterjohan's idea! When I have many items due to review, I usually turn off writing mode and get rid of all other reviews, then turn it back on and do the writing.

It also helps with motivation as the number of reviews due drops much faster at the beginning.

On a different note: would it be possible to get a "save me from unknown words"/"I just want to review and not learn anything new today" button? I have >2000 items to review and hardly any time to study, but I would like to at least review everything I (should) know. Right now, unknown words come up every few minutes and my review pile hardly decreases, which is not exactly motivating. If I could just push all unknown items one day ahead and focus on reviews, that would be great!

I really like friederike's idea. When things get busy, I want to at least review my old words so I don't forget them. When I get time, I could then tackle the unknown, newer words.

On the "save me from new words" idea: this is how things used to work way back when, and people asked for it to be changed so that new characters would start to be added earlier in the review process. I think the easiest way to accomplish this now would be to pause your active lists while you're reviewing. However, that won't prevent items from the queue from being added.

James

@James - I think the issue they're talking about is not with new words being added (easy to change), but with recently-added words showing up a lot because of low retention rates.

One (somewhat troublesome) way to deal with this would be to remove those words as they come up, and then add them to the queue to reintegrate them into your study. Not ideal, but it's a band-aid.

Hmmmm, how would you distinguish between "newer items" and "not newer items"? Would this be based on how recently the items were added?

I don't think I would personally use such a mode. Part of the point of the SRS system is that, if I added something yesterday, I should review it several times today.

James

I know this was talked about a fair amount a long time ago. I believe Nick was thinking about doing something where you review words in the 100 - 150% range before the ones above like 300% or something. This way you can focus on retaining what you have rather than learning what is essentially forgotten.

Normally I wouldn't use or necessarily want this. But there have bee multiple times when I'm on vacation or something when I only have 5 minutes or so and I want to focus on reviewing items that are slowly slipping away. I found it extremely frustrating to have to focus on learning the items that were still newish and hadn't really been learned.

If you are good about not adding items before a known break, this probably isn't as much of an issue. But I think it is unrealistic to believe that one could always be prepared for every slowdown in available skritter time. I know this is a feature/option I'd still like to see.

Okay, I'm late to the party and there are a lot of good ideas here. I attempt to organize and to be brief:

1) Thinner Squigs: You change the hardness setting on your Wacom, I'll lower the default width of the post-squigs (which can't be related to their original raw squig width, unfortunately) and we'll call it a deal.

2) Recognition-less Writing: No, sorry. It's an interesting idea, and I'll continue to try improvements here, but not right now as I'm really behind.

3) Segregated Reviews by Parts: I've been trying this out manually on my review queues for the last few days and it makes things go a lot faster. Awesome. We have a good idea for how to do this, but it'll have to come later. Keep turning your parts on and off manually for now (and do reading before tones because tone prompts are built into reading prompts).

3.5) Automatic Grouping of Reading Prompts to Minimize Keyboard/Writing Switching: Have it but it still doesn't work very well with small review queues and adding words. On my list to improve.

4) Smarter Save Me: the current Save Me button just pushes back all items so you can add new ones. Not usually a good idea. Much smarter would be to do as described: only push back items that are not learned well and have been added recently, so as to favor longer reviews. Would be a good idea, except I think the next one is even better:

4.5) Scheduling Prioritizing Savable Items: It's been on my list for a long time to change scheduling such that if you've got a lot of items, the ones that can be saved (as jcardenio describes) would come before the ones that were hopelessly overdue.