I've been hacking today trying to get the Android version to work better. I've made some changes to the way the display scaling is calculated, which will hopefully fit the width properly on most phones, and allow for user scaling, too. Please let me know if it doesn't work on your Android phone.

I've also been investigating some freezing/crashing reports. The version of Flash player available to me, though, has a pretty horrific bug which causes rendering to stop as long as you're not touching the screen. It happens at random, but pretty often. The most obvious sign would be you'd finish writing a character, take your finger off, and the character (or last stroke) would start animating into its final position but never finish it. I haven't been able to find a workaround yet, but I'm trying to get in touch with support. I think this bug is fixed in Flash Player 11, but that's not available yet. Hopefully it'll be released soon.

I've also made some changes to get some possible hardware acceleration going on, in both the desktop and mobile versions, so please keep an eye out for general graphics performance and let me know if you see an improvement.

I've made the demo page more functional on Android, but we're going to have to redo a lot of things to get it working fully, as we can't put bubbles on top of Flash on Android 2.x.

Still no hints at a workaround that would let drawing be more responsive; it seems that there's no way to prevent the browser from delaying the touch events before delivering them to Flash.

Haven't been able to get to the reports of connection issues yet.

Not sure if it's just me, but drawing in skritter is suddenly very laggy(pen moving in a choppy fasion, very hard to draw) I tried internet explorer and chrome. It wouldn't even move around in chrome. Did a restart which also didn't help. Now after reading this I'm wondering if the problem could have something to do with the update? I tried youtube which I understand also uses flash, and it seems to be working normally. I will try it on my android tomorrow

Me too! Simply can't practice on Chrome both with mouse or Wacom, I cant get the cursor on the canvas -- just moves all the way across to a boundary.

Ditto Firefox. Mouse/wacom moving absolutely fine outside the Flash canvas.

Okay, I'll revert those changes until I figure out what's going on.

Sorry, I posted this in another area and then saw this about the update. I'm having the same problem with Firefox 6.02 in Ubuntu 11.04. Everything was working fine as of last night (9:45 pm Beijing time). Now the cursor won't draw on the canvas at all. I can only draw around the edges. If I move to the other side of the canvas I get a straight line from one end to the other. I don't have access to a Windows/IE computer at the moment so I don't know how this works in anything else.

Looks like the hardware acceleration worked fine (or at least didn't hurt) on Mac, but totally killed it on Windows in a variety of different ways. I've disabled it on Windows and am trying to keep it on for Android and Mac. Let me know if you continue to see problems.

When going to www.skritter.cn/study/all on my Chinese android tablet 蓝魔 W10 the screen has gotten bigger since yesterday but is still too small, also I can't see some information because the flash screen goes over it. Using www.skritter.cn/study/all?tablet=true works well now, it covers the whole screen and I can see all information, so I'll be using that link!

Writing and everything else seems to work fine.

@Junglegirl if you read this, I'm curious if your 蓝魔 W12 is working well? A friend maybe wants to buy it to start Skrittering.

Elwin, what information is the Flash screen covering? Also, has your User Agent string changed? What is it?

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-gb; W10 Build/MID) ApplewWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

The flash screen is covering the explanation of the part of a character, thus 你 is 亻and 尔, like that, only the lowest bit of information above the flash. The screen just doesn't get fully covered.

I don't mind using this link www.skritter.cn/study/all?tablet=true but it obviously doesn't work for studying specific lists, only the general 'study all'.

Previously I had display scaling problmes but as of now everything works fine for me on a Samsung Galaxy S2.
Thanks for the fix I am now able to also practice while on the go. :)

Hardware acceleration on macs? I thought that only worked for flash video? I guess my macbook doesn't count anyway since it's only got a standard intel shared memory graphics chip?

If you're not seeing a performance boost, it's probably not doing anything, Byzanti. I'm unclear about what parts are accelerated with which Flash versions on which platform.

Elwin, I'll try to get your User Agent enabled for default tablet mode again soon. The downfalls of buying such a non-standard (for American web developers) device is that you're not listed in the device databases!

Well, my flash is already running pretty fast so I don't think there's much more performance to be boosted. However I would notice if the fans quietened down, and I don't think they have!

(From what I remember reading of the flash update notes, on OSX only video gets accelerated, and only if it's got a nvidia graphics chip. I was hoping perhaps you had found something different!)

Thanks Nick, I hope it's not much effort for a device that's clearly been copied from the famous devices, W12 as well, they arrive on the market like breadsticks do in France! And for only 600 rmb now.

I'm sure Samsung and Apple would love to sue them, if they could!

I think I've adjusted it so that you don't need tablet=true -- let me know if it works.

Yes it works now, thanks Nick!

Only pity is the text size which is a tad too small for my liking and the dolphin browser has an inflexible text re-sizing, from normal to big, too big a difference. But I don't even wanna start asking if Skritter could add a flexible text size-option in the study settings ;-) ......

I'm not sure if you explained this somewhere else or not, but when I get to the Skritter page on my HTC Wildfire S, running Gingerbread, I can't figure out how to make my finger movements write characters - all the movements do is move the window around.

Chris, ideally you just have to solidly tap the Flash window to focus it. Then the touch inputs are given to Flash for writing instead of the browser for scrolling. Are you seeing the Android layout? It should say, "Tap to focus Flash" at the top of the Flash window.

If that doesn't work for you, then there might be a problem with the phone's browser/Flash integration, although I think others are using your device without that issue.

Since yesterday, I have the problem that the Flash field is smaller than the rest of the Skritter field (translation, pronunciation, example sentence etc.). So if I have the Flash field on fullscreen, I can't see all of the other stuff.
I tried it with and without the workaround. Doesn't make any difference.

Yes, I noticed this problem too. I had to settle with having the writing field fill 3/4 the screen so I can see the other information.

This is with tablet or non-tablet devices? If you add ?tablet=false to the end of your URL, does it fix it?

What are your user agent strings?

http://whatsmyuseragent.com/

sounds like it has something to do with the adjustment for my tablet, same time.

no that doesn't fix this problem. it's on a non-tablet device with ?zooming=true?tablet=false.

You don't need ?zooming=true any more, and when you have more than one GET parameter, you use & to concatenate them instead of ?:

http://www.skritter.cn/study/all?zooming=true&tablet=false

or just

http://www.skritter.cn/study/all?tablet=false

No matter where or how hard I tap, the skritter window never gets any of the strokes - I just get the stroke window to turn green, that's it.

If you add ?android=true to the end of the URL, does it work then?

http://www.skritter.cn/study/all?android=true

maybe you need to download another browser like dolphin browser 6.2 or in the settings you need to change the user agent to android, if it's on desktop or custom atm.

Screen size is good for me but it's still slow and laggy to use on the phone compared to a couple of months ago when I started skrittering.

Yue Meigui, I don't think it's a change in Skritter's code. Which isn't to say there isn't anything we can do to restore the performance, just that I don't know where to start in this case.

Have you tried running it with no unnecessary processes running, or in a different browser?

It's also possible that we're getting mauled by a particular Flash or Android or browser version, but there's less we can experiment with there without jailbreaking or waiting a long time.

@nick and @elwin,

I tried all of your suggestions, but unfortunately none of them work.

Chris

Did you update flash to version 11? Have a try:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.flashplayer&feature=search_result
or
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1288287

Chris, does it say "Tap to focus Flash" for a few seconds when you start it up, at the top of the Flash window? That would be a clear indicator of whether it's properly running the Android touch handling code instead of the normal code.

@Elwin,

I'm in Malaysia now, and I can't figure out how to download Flash 11 from Malaysia.

@Nick,

I do see the "Tap to focus flash." I tap on it, but my finger still just jiggles the window around.

Huh. If it said that, and you tapped on it, and it flashed green, and it still scrolls the window, then I am not sure--it might be a problem with the implementation on the device, or there might be something extra I need to do for it.

One last try:

http://www.skritter.com/study/all?zooming=false

@Chris

I don't know if flash 11 can change anything but if you're in Malaysia for a long time I could email the flash 11 apk file to you, it's still on my desktop. If you want to give me your email here or through Nick for example.

@Nick,

Yeah, it flashes green, then still scrolls...

Chris

Sorry Chris, I don't have anything else. Maybe Elwin's Flash 11 APK would help.

@Elwin kindly sent me Flash 11 and that didn't help either. But thanks for the help guys!