We just got a new Samsung Galaxy, which runs Android 2.2, and one of the first things we tried on it was Skritter. It's fantastic! For writing and definition prompts, I think it's almost equal to the PC plus the Wacom. (The reading prompts are still kind of dodgy and don't seem to submit when I hit the return key, although they do kind of work.)

One thing which is a little strange is that it doesn't allow you to resize the page; there's a wide border of unused space around the edge, so it would be nice to be able to zoom in and use the whole screen.

James

Thanks for this report... thinking about getting one of those.

I still can't figure out how you get the reading prompts to come up. (Then again, I'd probably figure it out if I spent any time on that bug.)

Sounds great that it runs that well! I need to manually tweak the layout for each Android screen resolution, and right now everything's set up for the HTC Incredible / Nexus One. Can you send me a... screenshot? Photo?--of what you're seeing so I can have a starting point to tweak things? Thanks!

How do you get skritter to work? I tried one in the store here in Singapore and the main practice page wouldn't load. Do you have to use the mobile practice page from that other forum?

I was thinking about getting one just for skritter on the go, but got discouraged by the message saying you need flash...

jcardenio: I believe you have to go to the android equivalent of the app store and download/install the flash package first.

@jcardenio you might have been using one that was running 2.1. Was it the tablet or the Galaxy phone? My wife has a Galaxy phone which is still on 2.1 (supposedly it's getting upgraded to 2.2 any day now, but it's been "any day now" for months).

@nick I uploaded a video to YouTube; this serves as a demo of how much works and also shows some of the remaining problems. Sorry for the poor camera work but I didn't have a tripod so was holding the camera with my left hand while I Skrittered with the right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XIE_8f3meQ

If you want a better publicity video I can try to shoot one with a tripod (maybe tomorrow). You can see the problems with reading practice starting at 1:38. This time it actually DID register the return key, but instead of showing me whether the pinyin was right or wrong it took me immediately to the next page. When I went back to see whether I was right or not, apparently the focus was still in the text box so it popped up the keyboard again, which is annoying, and I had to click "show" to see if I was right or not.

I also have some more details on the zoom problem. There's a setting in the web browser for "Default Zoom"; if I go to the practice page with that set to "Medium" and then change it to "Close", I can zoom in. However, as soon as I try to zoom the page by pinching with my fingers, it snaps back to its usual size, and then I can't use the default zoom trick any more. I would guess you are looking for zoom events and resizing based on the screen size?

James

whoa chinese users get writing prompts AND example sentences!

@g1itch - The example sentences still have a lot of kinks in them. It is taking a while to iron those out. To be honest, I have started tuning them out since a lot of them don't make any sense even if you know the words/characters involved. We really do have the better deal. I hear the portion of the Skritter community studying Japanese is growing, though. As your population reaches parity, maybe your nifty features will too.

Then again... you all only need 4k characters until you know as many as a well educated Japanese person. (I refuse to hear tears over 102 letters.) I need roughly 10k characters to know as many as a well educated Chinese person... *grumble, grumble*

:)

further reason i think for japanese leaners to benefit from typing prompts since not all words are expressed using kanji, and could make them difficult to recall

I sometimes wish japanese used kanji exclusively though :|

your points are all very true

The zoom is theoretically disabled, as I need to manually set the page sizes and such. I guess it's only mostly disabled!

I will try to work together a new layout based on the resolution of the Galaxy Tab soon, although not sure when I can get it done.

g1itch, Japanese feature parity is on the map, but it's a tough thing. We have more Chinese users, and although Scott's all about Japanese, the stuff that we're missing is all work I would do, and I tend to deprioritize the Japanese stuff. But as Japanese usage grows, I'll be herded into coding up many nice things for y'all.

Another strange thing: the magnifying glass pop doesn't have the links to Nciku, YellowBridge, etc. on the tablet. Presumably you removed that for the Android phones with their small screens?

Yes--they weren't easily clickable and were interfering with the "X" button on the word popups. Plus, it's a bit more of a hassle to switch tabs on mobile. I am not sure how the Galaxy Tab feels in terms of clicking on small things; it's possible some of the removed elements could come back in for that one.

Oh no, it's not a hassle, you just click on the tabs button and it shows previews. Without it, it's very hard to do the research to come up with good mnemonics. Also, clicking on all the small elements is a problem because zooming is disabled.

I've been studying on the tablet on and off all day, and the biggest problem is really the lack of the dictionary links. It's also not clear to me how to copy and paste, so I can't grab the character and research it by hand.

After I posted I figured out how to copy and paste, but then I realized the mnemonics buttons aren't there either... :( Is there a way to bypass the Android customizations so I can see if "normal" Skritter would work better?

Not currently; the writing uses an alternate input scheme to work with Android, so you'll have to wait for me to make another mode--the original mode can't 写.

James, I've just uploaded a slightly better Galaxy Tab layout for you. It should auto-detect your device, so let me know if you don't see it. I just made the prompt bigger, basically, and put back the dictionary links and readiness indicators. It doesn't have the mnemonics editing yet; wanted to get your input before trying to make those work.

A horizontal layout more like the normal Skritter set up might work better, but I don't have time to hack on that right now, so hopefully this should tide you over. Let me know what you think.

Awesome! I'll try to check it out today.

sorry, I didn't see anything different. I cleared my cache just in case, no effect.

Can you tell me what your User Agent string is when on the Galaxy Tab?
http://whatsmyuseragent.com.

HTTP_CONNECTION:keep-alive
HTTP_ACCEPT:application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET:utf-8, iso-8859-1, utf-16, *;q=0.7
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING:gzip
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE:en-US
HTTP_HOST:whatsmyuseragent.com
HTTP_REFERER:http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=63392121&comments=17
HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; SGH-T849 Build/FROYO) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1
HTTP_X_WAP_PROFILE:http://wap.samsungmobile.com/uaprof/SGH-T849.xml

Merry Christmas

Okay, I've done an upload that also sniffs for that user agent, so you should start to see that tablet layout. If it doesn't work, you can also manually add ?tablet=true to the /practice/all URL.

The Galaxy tablet changes seem to have taken effect; I can now edit mnemonics and look things up in the dictionaries, which is awesome. The zoom is still screwed up, in what looks like a new way. Changing the zoom levels (under "settings/default zoom") seems to have unpredictable effects and even refreshing the page doesn't seem to produce a consistent size.

James

That's pretty cool to see, thanks for the vid.

You know, I still think that's pretty sluggish James. I'm sure you could get used to it but calling it the equal of a tablet on a PC is a bit of a stretch.

Unless your PC is kind of slow? :)

A little sluggish compared to the PC, sure. I don't think it's a showstopper. "Almost equal" here refers to overall usability; there are certainly several things which the PC+Wacom is better at, one of which is the screen size issue and one of which is the overall speed.

James

Maybe dual core processors and Android 3.0 will solve the problems of sluggishness or re-sizing. I'm still not ready to give up using a stylus though, although going from Palm to using an iPod for Pleco has at least convinced me that characters CAN be written with the finger tip.