just a suggestion: how about a feature that would display stroke orders for the kanji? I'm using a greasemonkey script and the kanji stroke order font for this atm, but it would be nice to have it integrated in the site itself.
For instance using the mentioned font it should be very easy. http://sites.google.com/site/nihilistorguk/

iPhones - I agree with DavidZ, the review buttons are too small and close together for the touchscreen (and I always hit the links below on the old site too!!). The fullscreen mode spaces things out too much as you can see in his screenshots. 

Fyi: a double tap in mobile safari intelligently zooms in on websites blocks - eg html div tags, table columns etc. Currently a double tap zooms in fully on the blank kanji area alone and you have to pinch-zoom out a little to see the yes/no/easy buttons below. Unless you've plans to write an iPhone specific interface it'd be handy if you could just include the white card and y/n/e buttons in a block together so a quick double tap will fit them to the screen.

Also, there was mention a while back about the search box in the study area... at the moment you can't use it on an iPhone because there is no clickable 'submit' button. Entering a number and hitting return does nothing. Could you add a search button please?

Lastly, I like pie! So that's one more vote for the return of the pie chart SVG welcome.

Great work on the site! I use it so much it's got a spot on my phone's home screen!!

NB: an iPhone emulator can be found at testiphone.com


EDIT: I've just noticed I can't click on the keyword on the flashcards to take me to the study area any more!? This used to open the study area in a new window/tab - which was very useful.

Last edited by torida (2009 June 01, 7:56 pm)

Green_Airplane wrote:

As for not being intuitive - it has a little number near the beginning of each strong. I can't imagine what could be unintuitive about that.

Animations are a lot more intuitive than hunting for a number in a 35 stroke kanji. In any case the point remains that end users would need to download and install fonts for it to work. Some browsers support embedded fonts but it's not an established web-standard yet.

As for the penji, I don't think the font uses 'proper' penji forms which one should try to emulate, they are just that guy's handwriting.

Like I said in my previous post, the font has its uses, but there are much better ways to do it on a website.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 June 02, 1:47 am)

Clicking on (FRAME xxx) links in stories just reloads the page.

ファブリス wrote:

> an iPhone emulator can be found at testiphone.com

Is that a serious emulator? Seems like they just pull the page in a small IFRAME.

I think it's just to get an idea of size constraints. That + viewing it in Safari is the closest you can get without installing the iPhone SDK I think though.

I`ve noticed that option to review non-expired cards is no-longer available. Actually, I never reviewed non-expired cards, but I think that the possibility should be there. For example, for those users who decided to restart RTK learning, after they have already learned a considerable number of kanji. In such cases there restudy pace could be very quick up to the point where they stopped during their previous attempt. I think that in  such cases it could be better, if they could force the reviewing of previously learned kanji ahead of preset schedule.

Last edited by LazyNomad (2009 June 02, 7:11 am)

ahhh, that testiphone.com is a bit rubbish actually isn't it... I just found the link a while back, not really used it. doh!


If you feel up to it you can get the iPhone SDK from apple, which should have an iPhone simulator with it. You don't have to pay to join Apple's developer program unless you want to actually release software, the SDK is free to play with:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/progr … /register/

You have to run it on a Mac, of course. Which I don't have, so I can't try it myself sadly


Quick overview of the website on an iPhone >

It'll open zoomed out with the whole page visible, so everything is really small (your big chunky 'progress chart', 'review', 'study' buttons are great for this though! As are the new review buttons above the Leitner graph !! ). To read anything else normally you have to zoom in. While you can pinch-zoom and adjust to your heart's content this is more readily achieved on most websites with a quick double tap -- which as I said above cleverly figures out the boundaries of what you tapped on (a paragraph, table cell, image etc.) and zooms to fit this to the screen. It works really well. A quick double tap zooms back out again, or if you double tap on another area in view it re-zooms and pans to this.

This is only really relevant for this site during reviews, where much iPhone time is spent. As it stands a double tap on the review card will fill the screen with it, and you can't see the buttons underneath -- you have to pinch-zoom out and adjust. Unless you can write a redirect to a version for the small screen the solution may be to put both the card and the buttons in their own block/table cell/whatever so mobile safari identifies them together as a zoom region and fits them to the screen when you double tap. Important to note that the double tap zoom prioritises the WIDTH of the element over the height (it fits to the width and assumes you'd be happy to scroll down a paragraph, for example) so maybe putting an extra wide block around the card would force safari to zoom in less, and therefore wide enough to see the buttons below??


Also, though this doesn't really bother me, you used to be able to see your progress above the card (eg: 10 of 20 cards), now of course you'd have to scroll to the right to check.

torida wrote:

It'll open zoomed out with the whole page visible, so everything is really small

Ok so ideally I need to adapt the layout to fix dimensions to a small size that the iPhone won't zoom out, and use a different layout for iPhone. The fullscreen page uses a 100% width and 100% height table, so the iPhone is using default page dimensions from somewhere.

The easiest next step would be to put the buttons and question into the same div as the card itself. Let's try that first. I'll post back in the next couple days.

iPhoney!!

Ok I'll try this on a MacBook without running all the hoops from Mac developer program and receiving all their unrequested emails (I already had to cancel once ..).  I hope it works. It seems like I won't be able to simulate the double-tap functionality you explained though.

http://www.marketcircle.com/iphoney/

When you fail a flash card it gets added to the restudy kanji list in number order.  In the STUDY page I would prefer if this restudy list was in random number order.

Also I prefer the learned button when reviewing failed kanji.

Some parts of the page
http://test.koohii.com/index_staging_no … /learnmore
are placed outside the text frame.
http://imagebin.ca/view/EsWDP0He.html
http://imagebin.ca/view/4O56aWbE.html

Last edited by axelb (2009 June 03, 11:07 am)

@edureu: thanks

@axelb: thats my leet design skills for you
  But yeah, I plan to redesign the learn more page, using something like the Manage Flashcards layout to split into multiple sections and make it more readable.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Okay less talk and more code

The following list is to acknowledge all suggestions so far, that could make it into the "Refactor" production release. First come the easiest/quickest to do. If it's not all done by 15 may then whatever is done will go in production, and the rest will go into a subsequent update.

As a reminder to myself I won't post comments here until this list is cleared. I will post updates of progression with changes completed in bold text. Any suggestions from here on I will read and consider for another list.

= Please port the font picker page to the test site
= Restudied List review should be randomized
= Keyword on flashcards should be a link to the corresponding Study page
= Fix the frame number links in stories (the {} notation)
= Change the Study page search box label to indicate kanji search works too
= Fix the Home link on Manage Flashcards page
= Fix # characters at beginning of story text (cf. frame 2091)
= Active Members list, change title
= Study > "Restudy Kanji List" should have the date of last review on one line
= "Detailed Flashcard List" should have the date of last review on one line
= Fix the non-repeating gradient in fullscreen mode
= Fix the broken/split buttons on WebKit(Chrome/Safari) (Review page)
= Align secondary links in header to the tabs (Learn More, Members, Donate, Forums)
= My Stories "ribbon" design to fit with website theme
= Fix layout: footer positioning problem
= Fullscreen Review option, switch on Review page, or preference setting
= Update the Progress Page to handle missing kanji (gaps) in RTK order
= Remember sorting options on datatables for the session duration (column, order, rows per page)
= Remember the RTK1/RTK3 filter on the Review page (user session)
= Add "Rows Per Page" option to all datatables, and remember setting (user session)
= STUDY > Add link to export "My Stories"
= call the step-up list the 'learned list' everywhere
= when you add a kanji to the 'learned' list, go to the next kanji in the 'restudy' list
= change the button on the study kanji page to say 'add to the learned list'
= clear the 'learned' list confirmation > change text ("learned list")
= create a way to review the 'learned' list from the review page
= allow adding individual kanji from the study page
= improve layout of Flashcard Review for iPhone (testing with iPhoney emulator)
  so that it doesn't scale down and the buttons and card and progress are
  clearly visible and the buttons not too small