Wow reading this sort of pissed me of:

Skritter was described in The New Yorker as "a pleasant distraction"

"A pleasant distraction"?? what an incredible understatement lol, more like a revolutionary super fun, effective and efficient way to learn Chinese characters...

Got it from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skritter

The actual quote is "For students: There are many electronic tools to help you learn to read Chinese, but not very many to help you learn to write it. (Take heart: even the Chinese are forgetting how to write characters.) This free study aid for writing characters is a pleasant distraction."

I don't think it was meant as any kind of slam, but Skritter is far more than a "pleasant distraction" for me.

Because it was free at the time (while we were in beta), there were people who weren't seriously learning Chinese but liked to play around with writing characters anyway. Our friend Trina would pass the time in our local theater box office with Skritter on her laptop. She learned a couple hundred characters just by messing around. The author may have been talking about this sort of use case.

Anyway, it's much more powerful now than it was then!