Ok, so I'm sure the developers are tired of hearing this... but either of those coming into user-accessible land anytime soon :) ? The only reason I bring it back up is the HSK test is coming in November and I need to work on my reading/definition abilities as much or more than my character recognition/writing. While doing that on Skritter would be awesome, being able to download all my characters and do it on Anki or w/e would also work, but even in the worse case scenario it would be better for me to know both are a while off so I can figure out something else :)

Let me pile on here. I recently sat next to a Chinese guy on a plane and tried my best to use some of my Skritter-learned words, but could remember only the things that I'd practiced with Anki. So, please, provide a way for us to export our characters and words and their pinyin and definitions. Semicolon-separated would be fine.

Also, it seems from the blog and forum posts that you guys have a whole big pile of features you're working on. Is there a list showing your priorities, i.e. which ones you think are up next and most important?

James

Nick is hard at work doing the reading/definition practice stuff, so that's coming as soon as possible. Nick can give the best estimate.

As for exporting your data, I can move that up in priority. I hadn't heard many calls for it lately so it wasn't high on my list of things to do but it can be moved up, and I don't think it's something that would take a whole lot of my time anyway. Tell you what I'll aim to get that done next week.

Besides Anki, are there any other programs I should make sure we're compatible with?

Oh yeah, as for listing what we're doing in what priority, I think the best place to keep on top of that is to read the blog. We can make sure when we blog that we say what is next on our agendas. What we're doing in what order fluctuates so much ( such as data export moving up on the list just now ;) ) that it's tough to be more specific than that!

Basic pinyin and definition practice will come shortly after the new prompt interface goes up with the rewritten Flash code. I've gotten the scratchpad working with the new stuff, so I'm close to getting the practice page and cram working, as well. I'm not sure how long it will take to implement all the new prompt interface stuff, though.

After that, pinyin and definition practice will be very easy to turn on, but without the active typing bit at first (you'll grade yourself 1-4). I'll be working on that soon afterwards. I can't make any promises, but I'm not working on very much else and I'm making a lot of progress.

By the way, the new back button is great.

I didn't want to pester you about the export feature, but it's number one on my list.

Any thoughts on using something like Bugzilla so people can vote on feature requests and fixes instead of using the forum?

James

@scott/nick Cool, thanks for the update. I'll wait on the export then and just power through some more characters until then :) And I'll try out the pinyin and definition practice as it comes along... back button also sounds pretty sweet.

We've started using FogBugz, which is like Bugzilla. I'm pretty reluctant to open up the ticket list right now, mostly because there's so much stuff we know we're far behind on. It is not going to be doing people favors to vote on things that I won't be implementing for the next several months anyway.

Perhaps later, when we're more on top of things and we can respond faster to feature requests, and it's less clear what needs to be done next, we can try a public thing like that. I do like getting explanations of why things are wanted, though, instead of just numeric votes.

Just wanted to cast my vote for the export feature. Right now i don't have any kind of flash-card program running, but if we got exporting to Anki it would be easier to start one.

Hehe, a cleaner way of exporting would be nice.. What I'm doing now is just highlighting-copying what I want while I'm in Edit mode, then pasting into Excel as Unicode text.
What I'm starting to realize now is that my 'word vocabulary' is way behind my 'character vocabulary', although the former is much more practical. For me, when I'm practicing individual characters it'd be extremely useful to see one or two common words so I can make the association right there. As I see it, if I always just add the words to my lists, I end up overpracticing the common character.

Is the "Scoreboard" still on the list?

I'd like to throw my vote in for the reading/definition practice... I can't wait to get that feature!

As far as exports go... I use Pleco on a PocketPC, I'd love a native export to that format.

Yep the scoreboard is still on there. It kind of got pushed back since it's not as necessary as many of the other things we've got on our list, though hopefully when I implement it it won't take long to do.

I'll make sure our data export works with Pleco. And reading/definition practice is definitely the next big thing; we (mostly Nick) are working on it until it's done!

Getting to this discussion late--I've been in Lijiang with terrible internet the past few days :-)

A feature I'm looking forward to is the Add button. You press it to manually add a new word from one of your Active Lists or the Queue.

Is this still on the list, too?

Yep, it's still there, and pretty high on the list for me to do. Things to do before it are mostly small bug fixes which shouldn't take long to do, and making a helpful tutorial page, as opposed to our old try it page which apparently was just making everyone confused.

I'm going to start working on the export function today, so everyone let me know any other purposes you have for exported data so I can make sure it will suit your needs!

Browsing over the pages for Anki and Pleco, it looks like the easiest way to import data is just to make a tab separated file ordered like this (without the extra spaces):



With one line for each word. It doesn't look like there's an obvious way to transfer information on how well you've learned each part, though. Maybe we can figure something out in the future, but for now will something like this suit everyone's needs? Is there any demand for more detailed info about each of the items, and if so, how would it be formatted?

I'll make one page that will allow users to export all of their data like this, and also a way to export lists from the list pages.

Hmm, the way I formatted it the server thought the format was in html! Let me rewrite that...

Formatted like this:

[writing] [tab] [reading] [tab] [definition]

That would be great.

James

That would be perfect. The "Learned" level, The time spent and time next is of no interest since you won't UPDATE this content in the future.

Anki suppresses duplicates automatically, but wouldn't it be a good thing to be able to choose a date from where to export?

If you have created_date or added_date on each item for a user, then I could see a benefit of "Exporting every new item since ".

This will 1. Minimize the load for your servers. 2. Minimize the time to import, since we can skip all the obvious duplicates.

Optionally to this: Save the export time in a separate table and you will be able to suggest which part to export next time. Convenient and server-nice.

Okay, good to know.

Hmm, that would be good to do, exporting based on date added, but yeah, we don't keep that information on the server at this point. It would be feasible to seed that data, or just start adding that information to the items now.

I'm not too worried about processing power, although making it faster for the user would be good.

Right now all we can do is sort the same way things are sorted on the viewer: next, last, amount learned, and time spent. You'll be able to export in all of these orders at least.

Okay it's live. Check out

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/export

or go to any list and look under the advanced tab. There you can export that list.

Let me know what you guys think!

Choosing the number of words exported would mimic some of the things I mentioned above, so I bow and thank you once again.