After getting the latest Skritter yesterday I find that it's very hard to go back now, to the point where I multiple times ended up skipping several words ahead instead of going backwards when I wanted to go back and mark a word as "not yet" or "got it" instead of whatever state it ended up at first. At one point I was tapping the exact same spot repeatedly, and every other time it would go forward and then backward. Really odd behavior and nothing I've seen in any previous releases. I'm trying to keep a fairly high velocity while skrittering, so the ability to back and fix mistakes is crucial to me. I'm on an iPhone4 if that matters.

And while I'm complaining, I may as well bring up another little thing that's been bothering me for a while. Since I'm studying both Simplified and Traditional, I'd really like it if it was more obvious which one it's asking for on the writing screen. There's this tiny tiny little "simp" or "trad" text, but "simp" goes on the left and "trad" goes on the right, except when something like "new writing" is on screen, in which case "simp" goes on the right. I'd prefer a single location, with bigger text size and more punch in the color so that it's immediately apparent which is being asked without looking around. It's soon been a year since I started studying both simplified and traditional, but I keep failing the writing because I'm writing the simplified when it's asking for traditional or vice versa.

I have the same problem on the latest Skritter on my iPad Air (running iOS 8.0.2). The back button on the left side of the screen often seems to periodically become non-responsive, ESPECIALLY when I try to press it while viewing one of the writing prompts. When I encounter this in the writing prompts, I'll press the back button and it will just draw a black dot on top of the arrow (roughly half the time I try). I can then press several times all over the arrow and it just thinks I'm trying to make additional strokes on top of the arrow. Eventually one of my presses will be considered "ok" and it will then go back like it is supposed to. It feels like whatever "boundary box" is set around the arrow to pick up the touch is too small. Since the arrows on the writing prompts are outside the "paper drawing area", I would expect you not to even be able to draw on the arrows at all, but you can.

Same problem. I thought it was some problem with my iphone.

Me too. Having troubles hitting the back button.

Yes, would be nice of the simp/trad labels stayed in the same spot consistently.

I've also been noticing problems with hitting the back button.

Sorry guys, it's probably due to the graphics upgrade not thinking the back button is in the same spot as before. Can you let me know whether it seems to behave more accurately if you try tapping either above or below the back button?

After feeling a bit on this again today I think part of the issue is that button has actually moved into its correct position and my muscle memory is hitting the old spot. It was always a bit off before, so I tend to hit slightly below the button. However, I was still able to get the behavior that it jumped back and forth hitting the same spot. It may be that I'm very close to the button edge. Have perhaps the button narrowed a bit horizontally? A couple of times I accidentally went backwards in the middle of drawing a character. Fairly sure I wasn't hitting anywhere near the back button, so there may be something else going on also.

A part of the problem may just be this behavior that if you just tap in the middle of the screen it marks it as "got it" and moves forward. Could we perhaps have an option to disable that? I've never liked it and I'd prefer that if I miss a button that nothing happens. The most common case is trying to hit the "not yet" button and tapping slightly too high, and the word gets marked as "got it" and it moves on to next. Sometimes I fail to hit the back button properly then, and it skip forward another word, at which point I can no longer fix the original error. I'd like either the buttons in the bottom to extend a bit higher, alternatively add a bit of a dead zone between buttons and the overall screen area, or simply an option to disable tapping the main screen area to move forward. Or all of the above. :p

I noticed that if I tap the button, it works fine. If I press and hold my finger down it goes into drawing mode. Reliable now if I tap the button.

I tried a lot of different tapping locations and tapping pressures, and on my iPad Air, I get the best results by tapping the "wings" of the back button (the back ends of the arrow, closer to the "paper" drawing surface). If I try to tap the tip of the arrow, it almost always thinks I'm trying to draw. In fact, even if I touch the arrow wings, I still get black "ink" appearing ~half the time instead of the touch being detected as a tap on the arrow.
EDIT: if I make even the tiniest swipe motion while tapping, it always thinks I'm trying to draw instead of tap. Perhaps the tap vs swipe indicator is just set too sensitive?

Same issue with Skritter going forward, not back. Didn't notice the swiping issue. Also, if I hit slightly left of the red 'X', Skritter marks the character as OK and moves forward. Really counterintuitive, wish the whole area there would just mark the character as 'didn't know'. I'm on iPhone 4.

I just took some screenshots of a writing prompt with strokes drawn on the back button. Let me know if they'd help to debug things, and I can send them to you.

"After getting the latest Skritter yesterday I find that it's very hard to go back now, to the point where I multiple times ended up skipping several words ahead instead of going backwards when I wanted to go back and mark a word as "not yet" or "got it" instead of whatever state it ended up at first. "

I'm having the same problem - I try to go back on the latest version and about half the time it skips forward. If the next prompt is a tone prompt it then marks it as neutral and skips forward... and then you can't go back and fix it because you can only go back a maximum of one word. I hate knowing that it's screwed up the scheduling by randomly selecting tones for me and I can't fix it :/

(Update 1: The above problem probably happened about ten times in the last twenty minutes of study, hoping I'll figure out how to hit the back button more consistently. Maybe use the left / right side of the clue area would make more sense for back / forward as they're not used for anything? Update 2: still haven't figured out how to hit this consistently, it seems it's possible to press just to the left of back button and have it go forward :/ )

Also agree on simp / trad prompts - I stopped studying trad but used to have this issue.

One month later I am still having this problem regularly, so I'm not getting used to whatever changes have been made to this. Disabling the skip forward when you miss the invisible button would be another solution. As it is I have things marked incorrectly by mistake with no way to go back and correct

Sorry, I haven't yet had time to fix this bug and upload a new build; my first guesses as to what's causing the problem turned out to be incorrect.

Any progress on this? Still seems to be pretty sketchy on my iPad 2. Thanks for all your hard work.

I finally dove deep and found several bugs causing frustrating tap behaviors, so I fixed all of those, reduced accidental forward taps, added dead space around the back button and grading buttons, improved accuracy, etc. I should get a new build submitted tomorrow, and they typically take a little over a week to pass review.

Awesome! Looking forward to try it out. :)