There is a new colour field in the bottom right corner changing from organe to yellow green. It is very distracting. I don't like it. Any chance to have a option for getting rid of this.

Basically any animation changing colours, or other moving things are distracting me. This is something I really don't appreciate. Please allow for options to turn this kind of stuff off.

Otherwise I am one of your biggest fans. Your site is just absolutely fantastic and needless to day that I am totally excited by your iOS support plans!

That is an Alfa feature so turn off Alfa features and it will be removed. I usually do not bother about such things but I too is actually not thrilled about that. +1 on the IOS plans. That will help me a lot on planes etc. Fantastic news!

It's a feature that the guys are working on to make a better service for us. In the meantime, in less than 5 seconds it disappeared for me by simply by re-sizing the window. The fact that the guys are always tweaking for a better product is unreal.

Okay, good to know. We were a little afraid of that, but figured we'd try it out. I will try tweaking the design.

I like it, it's good to know the response-time to the server.

Not so keen.. My connection's not great so it's traffic lighting on me.

Do most users need/want to see this on all the time? There's not been a time where I'd thought "I wonder what the latency to Skritter is now". If there's a real problem, that's pretty obvious - "..." appears in the flash window and it grinds to a halt. Does the trick.

Still, if you're wanting to make a permanent latency indicator, I'd suggest making it way less intrusive (a 2-3 pixel wide dot), use dull reds/yellows/greens, and make it less responsive to spikes...

Or instead of using colors, you could use a text indicator, something that's like "syncing..." Or use Gmail's technique and only display it if the connection to the server is down for a certain amount of time.

By the way, I was actually convinced for a minute that "organe" was the name of a color and even looked it up. In my defense, there are a LOT of crazy words for colors in English (ecru, etc.) ;)

James

Good to know what the traffic light is all about now. Here in China it is constantly 'signaling'. I have turned on the alpha features again. One thing that I like a lot are the tone colours when writing characters. Without the alpha features turned on this feature is not on either...

@jww1066 Sorry about the organe typo :-)

I like it because it tells me if it's safe to close the page or not. I've seen a lot of people asking for this kind of feature in the forums, so I'm surprised to see so many people complaining about it now.

I am currently having 11-29 seconds as average response time and the number of request is around 2-5. Is this really just due to App engine? I agree that the info is interesting but i tend to know when I am having problems like this;-) Now it is so slow that i have to switch over to Anki for tonight. But It has been very fast for most of the day so this i can live with since it usually is very short periods like this.

I like this, personally. I feel like it fits in perfectly well on a design standpoint, and I've found it useful as an end-user to know how the servers are doing, especially since there have been intermittent issues in the past because of App Engine or other server stuff.

@MandarinBoy - I'm noticing the same thing - App Engine's reporting a huge spike on its Execution: Latency chart.

Actually, Skritter already seems to have sped up to normal speed again, though the app engine graph still appears to be in a spike.

I just noticed this thing and looked through this thread, but I still don't understand what the function of this thing is? What exactly is it for ?

It indicates server response time - if it's red or orange, you're probably going to notice lag. If it's green or yellow, you should be in the clear for the most part. If you mouseover, it'll show you the response time in milliseconds.

@ Fatdragon oh ok, cool, thanks!

@ YouJing,
Please can you explain what you mean about whether it is safe to close a page or not?
What happens if you close a page when response time is slow / fast ?
How do you close a page?

I worked out what the new colours were telling me, but I can't think of any reason why I would want to know that information.

Rachael.

@Rachael, suppose you're studying for a while and your network connection goes down. Then the last several items you've studied might not have been sent to the server yet; if you close your browser before they get sent in, the server won't know about your results. Then the next time you open Skritter you might get them again.

The color is just telling you whether it's safe to close your browser. Red means "not safe".

James

Hmm, it's actually not the color telling you that; color just indicates the average response time of the last few responses. There's a number that shows up just to the left of the pill when there are unsaved requests outstanding, and that's the one that indicates you should wait to leave the page.

LOL, guess it's not so intuitive then, thanks for the clarification

And here's me thinking it was so you didn't need to look up when Skrittering at junctions.

I just remembered an idea I had for this yesterday at 5:30am before falling back asleep. Seems like from what I'm hearing that having it show the color only on hover would do the trick; the rest of the time it'd be grey and unobtrusive, but still have the relevant info there for a quick glance. Give this a whirl and let me know if distraction issues are resolved.