Skritter (Flash) on Android 2.2
Today I turned 39 and I got a couple of awesome presents. One of which was the dropping of Android 2.2 which I installed on my Nexus One fairly sharpish and painlessly. The big question is that of Flash support and in particular whether the awesome Skritter would actually run. Well, sitting here wrapped in my home-made Tom Baker-style scarf of ownerage (my other present), I can confirm that it does!
Unfortunately you can’t actually use it… That’s because if you try and draw it will just scroll the browser window around. Which is something so obvious you would have thought they’d have inserted some sort of UI control to stop this from happening. If they have, I haven’t found it. Presumably this is an easy fix though. The only thing that’s now required is for the Skritter guys to craft a mobile web page with an appropriate sized flash app, probably the text will need to go on the top or the bottom rather than on the side like the current desktop version.
Still, the holy grail of mobile hanzi cramming might just be upon us. Sometimes I don’t even care if I’m getting old.
Isn’t it the case that if you just double tap on the flash content that you’ll be able to interact with it? So couldn’t you just double tap on the part of the screen where you need to write the character in order to be able to write it?
As it turns out the Flash just didn’t work with the plug in correctly. The developers kicked out another version which does work and it’s actually pretty cool. Not really usable due to speed and screen layout issues but it wouldn’t take much to make it workable. It is a cautionary tale though, mouse driven flash apps wont automatically just start working on touchscreen – they may need to be tweaked.