Smart.fm

Recently the beta Drill application has been suffering from one nasty performance bug. After a session or two, it would start to slow down to a crawl. This was causing jerky behavior on-screen and making for a poor experience.

Closing the application and firing it up again would solve the problem, but that’s a pain.

The good news is that today we fixed this problem. The app is running much faster now, thanks to an upgrade to jQuery 1.4 and some other optimizations.

Please let us know how the app works for you now!

P.S. If you’re having problems loading a goal for the first time, please clear your browser cache.

We’re rolling out a number of changes over the next few weeks, and first up today is an improved goal page and an improved Drill application.

The middle column of the new goal page lays out the applications in a more logical manner, and the right column shows all your progress on a goal across items (iKnow! and Drill Beta) and sentences (Dictation). Stats have also been pulled from the tabs and into the main page. If you haven’t started that goal yet, you’ll also see a preview panel of five items in the goal.

Together with this new goal page you’ll find a much improved Drill Beta. We made a lot of changes to improve the usability of this application. Font sizes were increased and overall legibility of content was improved in many ways (coloring/bolding/spacing), so you should be able to read both English and Japanese much more easily now.

The behavior of the app has also been solidified. Some unnecessary animation has been removed (shaking wrong answers, flying correct answers, scrolling of screens, etc.) in an effort to create a more grounded experience.

The two different views (embedded and full screen) on the Drill Beta app were a little confusing and difficult to maintain, so for the time being we decided to only support the full-screen view, which is more consistent with the iKnow! experience.

To change settings (such as timers and audio levels), you’ll find a new “settings” link right next to the app name on the goal page.

A lot of other small tweaks were made, from slowing down the timer to improving the sounds. We hope these all add up to a smoother learning flow.  There are more improvements on the way, so stay tuned.

An important note: iKnow! and Drill Beta work on different scheduling logic. Drill Beta represents our latest thinking and is built on top of more sophisticated learning algorithms, whereas iKnow! users our original algorithms. As a result, it’s possible to get conflicting messages between the two applications.

We know this is confusing, and we plan on resolving this issue. But for now please keep in mind that each app has its own logic. We recommend you give each one a try and see which fits your style. iKnow! holds your hand a bit more like a trainer, while Drill Beta tests your knowledge more accurately and allows you to gain progress more quickly on items you already know.

If you haven’t tried the Drill Beta app in a while, now would be a good time to give it a spin!

Up next? A major revision of your Home page. The new Home page will be a more useful and advanced dashboard for managing your goals. For example, at a glance you’ll be able to see next recommended study dates for each goal. Awesome!

More on that early next week…

Last week and today we put the finishing touches on the final round of fixes for 2009. There’s a lot more to do, but we’ve been working hard to get the site in good shape for the holiday season. We hope this round of improvements makes your experience on Smart.fm more enjoyable.

Here’s what got better:

Explore

The previous Explore page wasn’t really doing the job, either for partner content or user content.

We simplified this page and now show four panels: Partner Series, Featured Goals, Popular Goals, and Recent Goals.

Partner series is pretty self-explanatory–that’s where you’ll find all our official content. Featured Goals are the staff picks. Popular Goals are popular goals made by users over the past thirty days. And Recent Goals shows up-and-coming goals that are both new and that have rich content.

Clicking “see more” on each panel takes you into the full view of each of those areas. Now with pagination you can dig way back into each section, so you can see all the featured goals ever, or look into all the popular user goals of the site. It’s a simple but effective way of browsing content.

The drop-down in the top right allows you to jump to and from any section.

I just did some digging through the Recent Goals area, and even I was surprised at how much good content was there across a wide range of topics. I invite you to do the same.

Goal Creation and Search

The new Explore page also takes over the functions of the old “Start a Goal” page. That page was a little confusing, so we removed it completely. Now there’s a search bar at the top of Explore, and next to the search bar a “create a goal” button.

This means that Explore becomes your starting point for browsing content, searching for content, and for creating a new goal. We think this is a simpler approach that is much easier for everyone to understand.

While we were at it, we also greatly improved search for both English and Japanese. Search wasn’t always working properly, but now you should find what you’re looking for.  The advanced settings on the right side have also been simplified. Now you can see at a glance what your settings are.

Creating Sentences

The most important part of creating goals is obviously creating items, so we’ve also done what we can before the holidays kick in to improve item creation.

Now you can add sentences to your items again (sorry it took so long!!). Clicking on “sentences” next to an item in one of your goals pops up the sentence creator view. Areas we fixed here include:

1. Viewing translations for sentences
2. Adding/removing audio to sentences
3. Adding/removing images to sentences
4. Editing sentence translations
5. Editing sentence readings (i.e., transliterations)

We know it’s still not perfect, but all the above should make your life much easier creating content. We also know that making content has been extremely frustrating since the release in early November, and we apologize again for that. Fixing content creation has been our number one priority for the past 6 weeks, but the problems turned out to be much thornier than expected. We appreciate your patience.

Goals

The goal page also got a minor facelift. Instead of a drop-down with a bunch of options, now you can see start buttons for each app clearly identified on the page. The icons for full-screen and settings got pulled into the app itself, and are now next to the play and pause buttons. We also fixed some display bugs around the goal name. Long goal names now wrap and display properly.

Profile

The last change is  a minor one. To get to your Profile page before, you had to click on that little link underneath your profile image. That made the Profile page appear to be nothing more than the external view of your Home page.

But the Profile is also where you go to see just your activity. The tabs on the activity stream on your Profile (All Activity, Shouts, and Favorites) page show only stuff you’ve done.

To make the profile more prominent, we’ve put a link to it in the header.

That’s all the big stuff. Lots of other little things have also been fixed around the edges.

We hope you like. And we hope you and your loved ones have a happy holiday season!

We’ll see you in the New Year.

All the best,

Team Smart.fm

Since we first introduced the new activity stream, we’ve heard lots of feedback requesting greater control.

The first round of improvements was giving you filters on what you saw: All, Highlights, Comments, and Favorites. You can see activity in these areas across your social orbit (from the “Home” page) or just stuff you’ve done (from the “Profile” page).

This was a big step forward, but still the stream wasn’t always delivering what you wanted. We constantly heard two very vocal pieces of feedback:

1. You weren’t seeing what you expected from your friends; for example, “I’m following a friend, and she did something, but I didn’t get that in my feed.”
2. You were seeing too much noise and uninteresting activity, especially in your “All Activity” tab; for example: “I started a goal, and now I’m flooded with activity from that goal.”

Basically the way the system works is that every time you interact with something (follow a person, favorite a journal, comment on a goal, etc), you get a subscription to that object in your stream. And since there’s way too much stuff coming in to show it all, some stuff you want to see (such as friends’ activty) wasn’t appearing.

To fix this, we’ve added a control that allows you to decide what kind of events you want to subscribe to. To get to this control, click the “Settings” link in the top right and go to the “Notifications” tab. Scrolling down, you’ll see a new slider that sets what appears in your stream:

At “least”, you’ll only get activity from your friends.

At “less”, you’ll get activity around your friends and content you created.

At “more”, you’ll get activity around friends, content created, and content you favorited or commented on.

And at “most”, you’ll get all of the above, plus activity from goals you’re studying.

We hope this level of control helps you tweak the activity stream to deliver news that is relevant, meaningful, and interesting to you.

In other words, more signal, less noise.

Yesterday another round of fixes went out that should make your lives on Smart.fm much easier. I know we’ve been a little quiet the past two weeks, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working hard putting out some fires.

Here’s a quick overview of the two main areas where we’ve made some improvements:

Item Creator

1. Set “language studying” to goal creation added
2. Add image items fixed
3. Add audio fixed
4. More support for transliterations (hiragana, pinyin, etc) added
5. Better labeling of input added
6. Confusing autocomplete removed
7. Item search improved
8. Add sentence fixed

We’ve fixed most of the glaring mistakes, so now we are examining ways  to make the process and flow faster and more intuitive. A LOT of people have given us feedback here, and you will continue to see improvements made to the item creator.

New Learning Application

1. Many IE7 layout issues fixed (you can study in the new app now!)
2. Fixes made to correct answers marked wrong
3. Special characters (brackets, spaces, etc) don’t have to be typed now

There are still some typing issues which are causing correct entries to be marked wrong in IE7. These should be resolved by tomorrow. There are other IE7 quirkiness issues that need to get resolved, and we’re focusing on those now. For those of you using IE, we’re working on making the experience better, but we recommend using Smart.fm in Firefox or Safari, as the site looks and performs much better in those browsers than in IE.

Over the weekend, a number of improvements have been made — lots of bugs fixed and functionality added. Here’s the overview:

Journals

* They’re BACK!
* Journals are accessible from the Dock at the bottom of the page
* There’s also a “Recent journals” panel on your Home and Profile pages

Item Creator

* Major performance improvements
* Fixed ability to edit items you created
* Improvements to design
* Sentence creation separated from item creation (see note below)

Note: sentence creation is getting a complete restructuring next week, so hold on a little longer! Good things are on the way…

Home

* The “What’s up next” panel shows you the more urgent goals to study (previously it just showed recently studied)
* On this panel you can now quit goals
* To see goals by recently studied, just click on the “more…” link

Learning Apps

* Removed image from sentence question that gave away the answer (the image is shown after you get the question right)
* Added new sentence spell quiz
* Fixed milestone bugs saying how many items you studied and got correct
* Fixed bug that sometimes displayed data that hadn’t been updated
* Many other small tweaks here and there

Items and Sentences

* Items are now displayed properly in the activity stream and on sentence pages (you can flip them over now)
* Many small fixes to sentence and item display (correct audio, translations, etc)
* Item and sentence pages got one round of improvements (more to come!)
* Retweet buttons were added to item and sentence pages

We’ve been killing bugs with fervor the past few days.

Here’s a brief recap of the some things we’ve been working on:

1. Lots of item creator tweaks, but it’s still not there yet!
2. Performance optimizations
3. Layout tweaks, especially for IE7
4. Better actions on goal and profile pages
5. Better “start a goal” page
6. Can’t quit a goal bug fixed
7. Can’t add a favorite bug fixed

The rest of the fixes are around the new learning app:

1. No more hiragana spelling for words in hiragana
2. Auto-answering of questions fixed
3. Double welcome milestone removed
4. Item sentences lost in a sesssion fixed
5. Welcome message that said you had items to study when you didn’t now fixed
6. Input for the Japanese sound “byo” fixed
7. and a bunch of other small things…

Of those, the biggest for learners of Japanese is that you’re no longer asked to spell kana words when you see the answer right there on the screen (we know that was a bit silly – it wasn’t intentional). And for those of you who experienced the app answering all the questions for you in super-fast mode, that’s fixed, so you’ve actually got to get them right yourself now!

This is just a start. There’s loads more crawling around our plates. And we’re out to get them.

The site was a little sluggish on first release, which we anticipated, so we’ve been monitoring usage carefully. Whenever some ugly code rears its head, we lop it off.

Yesterday we pushed out a bunch of changes that massively increased performance, and we just did a few tweaks now that should also help. The site and the new learning app should be zipping along now quite nicely.

With the latest update we just pushed out, the problem of goal comments being truncated has also been fixed, so you can see all comments again. Expect a bunch of other enhancements and tweaks to be rolled out on a daily basis. The team has been running like a train on red bull, but we’re not slowing down yet. There’s still a few more hours before a well-needed weekend of rest…