Skritter for iOS release imminent

[rebor]

I use it every day(this is the rule, exceptions apply, but I've been pretty good at making a habit out of it). Reviewing and adding 5-10 new words takes me about 20-30 minutes a day on average. I always tell Skritter to add 10 words, but if I've previously studied writing a word, but not the reading, Skritter still counts it as one new word. When I started out using the service, I didn't study the readings, so I know about 500 fewer readings than I know writings. And some completely new words are only variants of ones I already know of course.

I really like the app, it is very polished and writing feels very natural. It is a perfect example of how a touch interface can enable novel and creative application designs. Syncing can sometimes be a problem. I've found that shutting down(double clicking the home button, holding and pressing the Skritter icon, tapping the red symbol in the upper right hand corner) and then restarting the app fixes this. Inelegant, but hey, it works. I'm also very satisfied with the service as a whole - I like how convenient it is to add new words, thanks to the vocabulary lists and the built-in dictionary.

I feel, though, that spending so much time writing might not be optimal, as I see little practical use for handwriting in my life, for the foreseeable future. It was very beneficial at first, as it made it easier to distinguish similar characters and made me familiar with the most common radicals. I feel that diminishing returns began to set in after the first 1000 or so most common characters, and right now I would probably be better served using a "normal" SRS app. It would have to be as user-friendly, and have a lot of word lists available, though.

[character]

^ You can turn writing off in the settings.

[icebear]

^ You can turn writing off in the settings.

Not worth a subscription fee for something that Pleco is at least as capable of. But I use it strictly for single-character handwriting.

[aussiebec]

I trialled Skritter for a while and couldn't work out why I'd pay to do what Pleco could do for free, but when I really hit the wall with my tones (argh!) I thought I'd give Skritter another go. I set it to do just tones, and started all the way back of the beginning of NPCR (I was already in book 4 but went all the way back to book 1), and paid for a 6 month subscription.

In just a few days, my attention to tones, and therefore my ability to hear them, speak them and care about them increased massively. I know Pleco can kind of do this too, but really it was way more user friendly and streamlined (not to mention beautiful!!)

I <3 skritter!!

[Marguerite]

Bumping this thread because the newest Skritter only runs on iOS 7. For those of us with older hardware, this could be useful if it works: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/17/apple-begins-offering-last-compatible-version-of-apps-for-users-running-legacy-versions-of-ios/ Apple lets you download the last compatible version of an app, if your device can't support the latest release. So in theory you can still get Skritter for the 3GS and other devices that can't run iOS7.

[muyongshi]

However, yesterday when I tried to download it on my 3GS running 6.1.3 (before I knew it was only iOS 7 compatible) I hit download and it went through the process of asking for my password and starting to download it, then a dialogue box popped up warning me that it was only available for iOS 7 and never gave the option as the above link suggests. I will try and again and see if it was a fluke-or perhaps Skritter has chosen not to allow it (or simply doesn't know that it can allow it).

[Marguerite]

That's a disappointment. From the thread on the Skritter forum, they hadn't been aware of this until someone pointed it out. I don't know if it's something they need to explicitly allow or whether Apple is supposed to do this automatically -- and maybe it needs a certain version of the App Store before it'll happen, too.

I know that the Skritter guy posting was open to finding other ways to get the app to non-iOS7 users, but they'd all probably be more inconvenient than if the "last compatible" thing ever works.