I just been getting a tonne of ideas since I started using Skritter, as I think it's the perfect study tool, and I thought I'd just blurt them out to see what you guys think. I hope I'm not posting any old ideas.

So, in order from reasonable to crazy...

1) At http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html is a list of the 3000 most common characters in order of frequency, which I would like as a standard list. Similar to the HSK list, I suppose, but good for those of us who'd like to study characters rather than words. I'd use it as a complement to following a textbook to check my general Chinese level and develop a basis for further understanding of new words and the language as such. And imagine the feeling when you nail number 3000 in a couple of years from now! =D

I'll probably try putting some of it in once you get the custom list function up and running. Speaking of which, how will that feature work? Will definitions, pinyin, traditional version and stuff like that automatically be added when you add a character or will I need to do that all by yourself? Will users be able to share lists with one another?

2) Can you make the clock stop ticking when you finish writing a character? I usually write new words or the ones I get wrong in a little notebook, 田格本, a couple of times after I've written it on Skritter, but it annoys me that the clock keeps ticking. It should stop after the last stroke when the brush turns into that arrow if you get what i mean.

3) As I'm by the computer quite often it would be great if you could schedule Skritter to pop up and force you to practice now and then. That way you'd be sure to study on a regular basis. I don't now if that's possible since it's a website, but if you ever get around to that iphone app everyone dreams about, I think you should consider it. You'd just tell Skritter to pop up once every hour or so and make you practice a preset amount of characters or for a couple of minutes, so you wouldn't get stuck, and then you'd go one with whatever you were doing. Chinese for lazy people!

4) This one is for the future, but still. Add more languages! I've seen requests for Japanese, but I think the main advantage with Skritter is that you have to practice writing words, not just look at them, as one would perhaps do with flashcards. Be it Russian, French or whatever, a program like Skritter is great for learning, especially as it's so easily compared to other ways of study – personally I've never found studying this easy and fun.

5) Being unemployed and Swedish – meaning that I'm unwilling to pay for anything online, if you've heard about the Swedish Pirate Party and the recent Pirate Bay Trial – I'd appreciate if you added a basic version of Skritter, where basic user would have advertisment on the website, which would go away if one went on and purchased the full version, similar to how Spotify works. Basic users should still be allowed to add words, but perhaps have access to less features. If you decide to try it, it would be super fancy if the ads would pop up in the practice field between characters.

I appreciate your work and will of course start paying, if not now, at least after my summer vacation, but I think this could be a way to reach a larger crowd, and still getting some financial support. Otherwise I really like the clean, ad-free site and understand if you want to keep it that way.

I don't know if this is to any use, or if I should've just gone to bed instead, but keep up the good work guys and thank you for the work you've done so far.

#3 breaks the first rule of web programming: "Don't popups!"

1. I suggested something similar. Nick basically said HSK lists already do this. See

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=5603126

2. What's 田格本? I suppose argument against clock stopping is that you might still be looking at it trying to remember it. It will stop at 30 seconds as well.

3. Something like the little clicks FaceBook uses for incoming instant messages might work. These come up even if the chat window's in a different tab.

4. Agree, doesn't just need to be languages either. Lots of things could benefit from Skritter style learning. But from my point of view, features to help with Chinese are more important by quite a way!

5. I was thinking something like the opposite. Maybe you could have a tickbox so that price-insensitive people could pay a little more and have it checked by default, encouraging just students and anyone who evaluates themself as hard-up to pay a slightly lower price (i.e. what you've got at the moment).

3. Interesting. You could have a neat little cross-platform desktop app that pulled in Skritter data, and that would let you know your current stats and your time since last logging in or something. Then you could click to go straight to Skritter. It could sit on your taskbar and glower at you threateningly (or enticingly, depending on your perspective) all day until you get back to practising. Sadly, I have absolutely no competence in making neat little cross-platform desktop apps...

田格本 is a book filled with squares that are used to write chinese characters. Sort of like a maths book, but the squares are much bigger. This is the type where the squares that you write characters in are divided up, to help with structure and balance of the characters.
I used one once, but I didn't think it was very good, the squares were all so large, for children learning to write characters. No one writes characters that big in real life.

I use 田格本 as well, each time a new char appears I write it a dozen of time on it.

I was today also thinking about something similar mentioned in #3, albeit I'm coming from a slightly different angle.

I have realized that I hardly get any (maximum 5% of all the reviews) of the reviews at a 100% which would theoretically be the best time to review them. It would be great if Skritter could give some general pointers when the best time would be to study to maximize studying impact. For example after having worked down the review pile and added a few words, Skritter might say: come again in 2 hours because then 50 characters are between 90% and 200%.

1) Instead of ordering everything by frequency, I've got a better method which incorporates importance given by textbooks, based on the level of the textbook and how early the word appears in it. So especially at the beginning of the list, it's better than a standard-usage-frequency-ordered list, because you don't get stuff like 经济 or 发展 close to the top. I've also got it ranking single characters vs. multiple character words pretty good.

So I may use that to generate a more general list, once I see if I need to do any tweaks based on what the kitness center thinks of my estimations. I'm not sure whether I'll do a character-only list, but I guess some people will go for that.

The custom list system will use our definitions and everything, so you just put in the characters. For any words that are missing, you then have an opportunity to add the information for it, and we'll eventually review it for correctness. And the lists will be shareable or private, remixable, forkable, lickable, etc. I think you will be pleased.

2) Yes. I've been stubbornly planning on doing it when I made the time-tracking really good, but I'll just do that bit now. The downside is that until I fully fix it up, your total practice time per day won't count time after the clock is stopped, either. That makes some sense, but it'd be best if it counted smarter.

3) This is a sweet idea. I think a desktop app like thinkbuddha describes would be best. I also know nothing about making neat little cross-platform desktop apps, but I didn't know anything about making web apps a year ago, either. Then again, perhaps a neatly exracted web/desktop app might be more forward-thinking. Of course, only those users who wanted it would install it.

Baifameizhong, I wouldn't worry too much about not hitting reviews 100%. In the short-term, it's impossible, and the precise scheduling isn't as critical then either. And in the longer term, something like 90%-140% is still going to be very efficient. If you wait a bit longer, you'll forget a few more items, but you'll save time on the ones you do remember. That's actually a bit more efficient (depending on your targeted retention rate), but potentially more frustrating if you forget more often.

4) We may add a ton of other languages once we get all the tech down for Chinese and Japanese. It depends on how big we want to get. I do think we've hit upon something good with this, 'cause I never thought learning efficiently would be this much fun, either (and we haven't even really tried to up the fun yet). But we won't be doing other languages soon, though.

5) I sympathize with Swedish pirates, but we've run the numbers on a more basic subscription and they don't make sense. Advertising just isn't going to work on a site like this, either (and ads are gross). We can't afford to have the typical free/paid ratio of a freemium service.

We will likely do a premium subscription at some point, with some handy goodies, but I want most of the people using Skritter to get most of its power, if nothing else than to encourage people to learn better (but I think it also makes sense financially, too).

Some great ideas, here! Keep 'em coming.

Faceleg has created the cross-platform desktop app that sits in your tray and reminds you when to practice:

http://blog.skritter.com/2009/10/skritter-agent.html

Check it out; it's really cool!