Kitsun Website Update Notes

Neicudi · October 11, 2020, 1:23pm

2020-10-11

Time for a new update! This time the focus was mostly on the dictionary pages as they got a new design! Also got some other stuff coming up, more on that below the patch notes!

New Features:

Dictionaries - New design has been implemented!

Vocabulary result

Kanji result (Stroke order diagram image being broken is on the prio to-do list still)

Dictionaries - Added a CTRL+S hotkey to the default card popups for generating your cards more easily.
Kanji Dictionary - Now returns more than 1 result if you input a string with multiple Kanji in it. With a max of 5 Kanji (the first 5 it can find in the string).
Kanji Dictionary - Now strips away all non-kanji content from the search string in the background. Meaning you can just copy paste something like 水道は何ですか in it and it will return results for 水道何 only (whereas previously it would fail to return any results).
Default Dictionary Popups - Now have the generate button fixed at the bottom of the popup. You no longer need to scroll down to generate your card.
Cards Management - Advanced search now lets you choose a specific field to search through. Defaulting to “All” fields.

Bugfixes:

Payment Page - Added something to provide a bit more feedback about why a payment might be declining in the background.
Decks - Inactive Decks now also show community feedback counts (if feedback is available).
Timezone setting - Fixed a small timezone bug where trailing whitespaces caused it to fail.

Extra:

I’ve been working on rewriting the complete backend of Kitsun in Golang (a different programming language), and experimenting with a different database while at it. I plan on dedicating 1 day a week to the Golang rewrite for the next coming weeks, if possible.

Aside from that I’ve been working on a new guide system that will explain to new users how Kitsun works by showing and explaining the actions they can take. I plan on adding these for not just the basic actions (creating a deck, creating cards, explaining SRS etc) but also for the more complex features such as the reader and Subs2Kitsun.

Here’s a small concept sneak peak to give you an idea:

Note: the grey part will have gifs or images in it that showcase the action

On another note: Is anyone here well versed in Chinese that could answer a few questions for me? I’ve been looking at implementing Chinese Dictionaries but I don’t know the difference between some of the options (mainly about Mandarin vs Cantonese). Would love some help with it

Neicudi · December 6, 2020, 9:01pm

2020-12-06

Hey all! Been a little while but here’s some new features and bug fixes Took a break from the app development and focused on the website for a bit.

New Features / Changes

Navigating to one of the landing pages (like https://kitsun.io) while logged in will now redirect you to the “app” portion of Kitsun again. Note that this will not work until you navigate to one of the app pages (like /decks) at least once after this update. After that it should work forever until you delete the cookie.
Dictionaries - Kana-only words now have a larger font size.
Reviews - Wrap up now includes items marked as wrong in a previous review session.
Leeches - No longer displays hibernated or filtered items
Reading Tool - You can now skip to any page you want by entering the page number in the input.
Reading Tool - Navigating to another page now scrolls the page to the top.
Default layouts - Added a breakline to the displayed card tags (in the notes sections) and spaces inbetween tags.

Bugfixes

Community Centre - Fixed the responsive styling of the search and category page results. They should now take up the whole screen again
Manage Cards - Convert to other template popup has been made a bit bigger to prevent cutting off the dropdown options.
Reading Tool - Fixed an issue where ような would sometimes be displayed/parsed as ようなな.
Reading Tool - Fixed an issue where tapping/clicking away from a word would sometimes not close the current definitions popup.

Neicudi · January 7, 2021, 10:42pm

2021-01-07

Website-focused update again! The Lifetime Membership Sale was a great success and the Kitsun team has expanded to a total of 6 members (from 1). I will introduce all the team members at a later date so stay tuned for that A sincere THANK YOU to everyone who supported Kitsun and made this possible!

New features:

Kanji Dictionary Tool - Stroke Order diagrams are now fetched from Kitsun itself. This also fixes the broken images in the Kanji results. I will run a script over the database later to update all the already generated cards

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Community Centre - Redesign of the Community Centre is now live! This change will make it look similar to the upcoming mobile apps. It also includes many tweaks and fixes to make the pages more responsive and mobile friendly. Here’s how it looks:

Community Decks - Deck Creators can now request published cards to be deleted. This can be done from the cards management table from the original deck (not the community version). I will periodically check the deletion requests and approve them, deleting both the original and the community version of the card. This also wipes the progress of all users of the card (as expected), hence why this action has to be approved by me.
Reviews - Wrap up now includes items marked wrong in the current session.
Whitelist - added <a> HTML tags to the whitelist of accepted field values.

Bugfixes:

Dictionary Tool - Fixed an issue with a popup not showing up while scrolling down the page, essentially locking the page until you refreshed.
Cards Management - Fixed an issue where content of a popup would not scroll if the content was larger than the screen.

Neicudi · January 17, 2021, 9:15pm

2021-01-17

Introducing the first few features focused on Korean!

New features:

A Korean auto-conversion input has been added. This input automatically converts your regular (English usually) input into Hangul, in the same way that an IME would (So it also combines characters into a single character like ㅁ -> 마 when typing a -> k and 맘 when you type another a after that) .

You can add it to your own layouts like this: {{type-kr:fieldname}}

Added a new default template for Korean. This template includes Korean -> Meanings and Meanings -> Koreanlayouts. These layouts also use the above mentioned conversion input so there is no need to switch IME/Keyboards yourself Note that I’m not very well versed in Korean, so if anyone has suggestions please let me know!

Reviews Timeline - The Styling has been altered a bit.
Reviews Timeline - Current Reviews are now displayed differently.

Bugfixes:

Reader - Fixed an issue where the generated furigana would sometimes contain okurigana.
Reader - Fixed an issue where the generated furigana would sometimes be the hiragana reading of a katakana word behind a kanji.
Reviews - Fixed an issue where n would sometimes be converted to hiragana rather than katakana when using a katakana-only input.
iOS - .wav audio files should now play correctly on iOS devices.
Mobile - Scrolling down at the frontside of a card during the quiz portion of a lesson session will no longer mark the card as incorrect.
Android- Home stat bubbles no longer show lines.

Neicudi · February 3, 2021, 9:35pm

2021-02-03

For this update I’ve mainly focused on making the styling of the website a bit more cohesive and (imo) much nicer looking and feeling. Especially on iOS devices and Firefox browsers things like popups and the font should look much better.

New features:

New light themes - Added more primary colors for the light themes:

Updated the sidemenu with a new design.

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All popups have been updated to a new design that fits much better and also works much better than before (no more iOS background scrolling or sidemenu showing through etc).

The card edit/add popup has become a panel that slides up instead, giving you some more space to work with. Note that this popup is likely to change more in one of the future updates in order to make it easier to edit your card values

The font has been changed for bold and header text to one thats very similar, but this time it renders correctly on iOS devices and Firefox browsers.
Settings page layout has changed to make better use of the space available:

As a last note, I’ve started work on the known words system (filtering duplicate cards / known words throughout all decks & tools (such as the reader)) and plan to release the feature in the next 1-3 weeks, which also opens up the way for WK API integration and some more cool things! More on that later

Neicudi · February 21, 2021, 2:58pm

2021-02-20

Yesterday a new update went live that includes the much anticipated known words system There is a lot of new functionality attached to it, so make sure you’re sitting comfortably while reading this!

New Features:

New Deck & Community Centre Categories - We’ve added a lot of new categories for your decks as it is required that you set the category correctly if you wish to make use of the known words feature (it works per category/language).
Kitsun Knowledge Base - The knowledge base has officially launched and replaced the outdated documentation/help section of Kitsun. Please take a look if you have any questions! Technical documentation, getting started tutorials and more FAQ articles are being added soon Here’s the link!

Known words system

As mentioned before, this feature keeps track of each word you learned in Kitsun.

When you complete a lesson of a deck where the category of the deck is set correctly (e.g. Japanese) and the “Main Field” of the template is set correct (e.g. Vocabulary), the value inside the main field (say “私”) is added to your known words.

For a regular user working through a community deck, this means that you don’t have to do anything at all to make it work. Only deck authors will need to make sure that both these things are set correctly. If you are using default layouts, this is also set correctly for you already.

A few things happen when a word is marked as known. Let’s go over them one by one:

Other Decks

If you go to the card management page of a deck, you will notice that there is a new column called “known”:

As you can see, there are two cards in my deck that I’ve already learned in another deck. This means that it probably would not make sense to learn them again in this deck. Ideally you’d want to filter out any duplicate cards that you already learned previously.

This can be done by filtering on the known status in the advanced search menu:

I’d recommend also filtering on “level 0” items only, to make sure that you only hibernate the duplicate cards that you have yet to learn.

So once you have it filtered, you can just select them all through the top checkbox and hibernate them to make sure you don’t get any duplicates in your reviews.

Dictionary Tool

When you search in the vocabulary dictionary for a word you already know, it will now show you if you already learned it before by putting a “KNOWN” tag on top of it:

Reading Tool

The reading tool overview will now display the % of words in a text/book that you already know Hopefully giving you a bit of an idea of when you’d be able to tackle those books comfortably

Inside the reading tool it also marks words as known in the definition tooltips (the “K” icon next to the frequency and jlpt level):

Previously learned Words

Now this part is important for users that already learned words in Kitsun:

You can manually add words to your known words by going to the management table, selecting the cards that you already know and selecting the action “Add to known words”. A popup will open and ask you to select the field that contains the values (if the template has no main field yet, you need to select it yourself, otherwise it is pre-selected for you).

Once ready simply hit the button and the words are added to your known words list for that language in particular (the category that was set on the deck determines what list it is added to, please doublecheck your personal decks to see if the category is set correctly!).

Community Deck Authors

Please double check the category of your deck and make sure you set a main field for the templates being used in the deck, if you have custom templates. After setting these, please publish an update to the community centre. Without this the known words system will not work properly for your deck’s users.

Setting a main field can be done from the add/edit template page:

Just click on the button next to the delete button to mark that field as the main field

Bugfixes:

Deleting a layout no longer triggers validation errors.
Popups no longer close when dragging or clicking outside of the popup by accident.

Please do let me know if you have any questions as a lot has changed!

Neicudi · February 28, 2021, 8:47pm

2021-02-28

Small update with some bugfixes. Mostly for the new known words system:

Bugfixes:

Known Words System - Trims whitespace correctly now when comparing your known words list with the cards in the management table.
Known Words System - Now correctly lowercases each word before comparing them in the management table (and before saving in the database).
Cards Management Table - New searches now clear the previously selected cards.
Known Words System - Fixed a bug where editing a card during reviews/lessons would cause the main value to be unset.
Dictionaries - Fixed the “taught in undefined” and similar tags when generating Kanji cards.
Cards Management - Moving hibernated/filtered/queued cards to another deck would not clear the status from the original deck, causing some issues with counting how many new lessons were still left to do. This has been fixed

Neicudi · March 13, 2021, 9:16pm

2021-03-13

Just wanted to let you all know that we have just added 28 new community decks to Kitsun. Each language has 1 Vocabulary Deck and 1 Phrases Deck :

Portuguese
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Dutch
Turkish
Russian
Arabic
Hindi
Filipino (Tagalog)
Vietnamese
Thai
Korean

We also have Chinese decks which will get shared as soon as we finish creating a specialized Chinese default template & layouts.

We will be adding additional information (sentences and audio) to these decks as we go forward, but we figured it would be good to already release these decks.

This was a combined effort of our team members and hopefully shows where we want to take Kitsun in the future. Speaking of the future, our team members are hard at work with creating decks for the Chinese (HSK), Korean (TOPIK) and Russian equivalents of the JLPT. After that we will be working on some very cool custom decks for Japanese

Neicudi · April 12, 2021, 5:24pm

2021-04-12

This weekend I took a break from working on the mobile apps in order to focus on fixing as many bugs for web as I could. While at it I also added a new button on the deck dashboard that will hopefully speed up the process of creating manual cards a little bit

New Features:

Cards Management - Uppercase is now ignored when searching through your cards.
Deck Dashboard - Added a new “Add Card” button to the page. Clicking the button will open up the same popup as when you click on the “plus” button at the manage cards table, but now you won’t have to go to that page and load in all the cards first in order to manually create a new card. Note that it only shows up on your personal decks of course.
In order to preserve the screenspace, I’ve removed the “Feedback” button by default. It now only shows when there is actual feedback waiting to be checked.
Korean IME Input - Now accepts actual Korean characters as input as well, rather than only (English) characters that get converted automatically.

Bugfixes:

Cards Management - Sorting by Status now works correctly.
Session Results Page - Gained Experience is now always displayed accurately between multiple sessions.
Cards Management - Fixed an issue with double scrollbars on Firefox browsers.
Dictionary Page - Custom Card Popup layout has been fixed.
Dictionary Page - Generated Audio has been fixed (this one was hotfixed a while ago)
Import - No longer shows the category dropdown when doing manual imports
Import - Automatic CSV/TSV/TXT imports now have their id fields set correctly, preventing issues when changing template field names.
Community Centre - Styling of the deck “cards” was acting up on certain resolutions or when the sidemenu was expanded. This has been fixed.
Add/Edit Card Popup - Selecting a new layout no longer wipes the preview values.
Add/Edit Card Popup - Validation is no longer wrongly triggered right after saving a new card.
Add/Edit Card Popup - The card preview now correctly refreshes once a user uploads an image or audio.
Korean IME Input - Fixed an issue where some android phones (Samsung) were unable to use the auto-conversion.
Media Upload - Any newly uploaded media should now get the proper Content-Type header attached to it. Previously this would sometimes be “application/octet-stream” and prevent playback or display in certain browsers.
Popups - All popups now resize based on the content
Popups - Selectboxes/dropdowns will now correctly open the options dropdown list above or below, depending on whether there is enough space left below them inside* the popup.
Payments - Made a tweak to prevent a failed subscription payment from cancelling another payment (e.g. a payment for lifetime).
Push Notifications - Some push notification subscriptions were being removed incorrectly, preventing the user from saving their user settings (hotkeys etc). This has been fixed.

Pfew! Felt good to be working on the website again! Hoping to finish the first version of the apps soon so I can continue working on some new cool features

Neicudi · July 1, 2021, 10:01pm

2021-07-01

I’ve mostly been busy with the apps but did manage to sneak some much needed bugfixes in there for web as well! I’m hoping the apps will soon be stable enough for me to work on some website features and bugs again

Bugfixes

Reading tool - Fixed an issue where some words would not be matched correctly with their associated dictionary entries.
Reading tool - Fixed an issue where some kanji would not get matched with their dictionary entry when no vocabulary entry was found.
Dictionary - Fixed an issue where some known words would not be marked as such.
Feedback table - Fixed an issue where some feedback would show up as blank values.
Cards Management - Fixed an issue where the actions dropdown would sometimes become a dropup (lol).
Popups - Fixed an issue where dropdowns would sometimes be cut off at the header of the popup.

Neicudi · July 20, 2021, 10:59am

2021-07-20

Small new update with some bugfixes:

Bugfixes

Dictionary Cards - Jisho.org changed their api results to include more verbose descriptions for the part of speech categories of vocabulary. This caused generated dictionary cards to differ from how they used to be and in some cases break a part of speech category into multiple tags. This has been mapped back to the original values (thanks @seanblue !)
Publishing Decks - Fixed an issue where pushing an update of the deck to the community centre would not update the template fields correctly.
Edit Layouts - Fixed an issue where saving a new layout under one of the default templates would return an error while it actually saved correctly.

The mobile apps have some much needed bugfixes coming up soon, so keep an eye out for that too

Neicudi · July 24, 2021, 12:12pm

2021-07-24

Just released another small new update for the website

New Features:

Reviews - Excluded unneeded information from individual reviews so they should now load a bit faster

Bugfixes:

Reviews & Lessons - Hibernating the last card should now properly end the session.
Firefox - Subs2Kitsun - Fixed an issue where the generate cards popup would not appear on firefox browsers.
Firefox - Fixed an issue where firefox would should up- and down-arrowkeys in numeric input fields, next to the actual Kitsun UI up- and down-buttons.
Payments - If creating a new subscription fails the first time (e.g. due to bank/card issues) it will now void the invoice and let you try again right away.

Also submitted new app versions to the app stores so will post the update notes for that when they get approved (usually takes around a day)

Neicudi · September 8, 2021, 2:20pm

2021-09-08

New Features:

Cards Management - Index-based decks now sort by index by default.
Subs2Kitsun - Added custom “buffer” options. You can now add a buffer (in milliseconds) to the front and back of the recording of the audio. This lets you add a bit of space to make sure that the sentence does not cut off if the timing of the subs is just a little bit off from the actual audio.

Bugfixes:

Reviews & Lessons - Trial Expired overlay should now show correctly when entering a session without being subscribed after your trial runs out.
Default Kanji Cards - These now correctly show up as known in cards management where applicable.
Tag input (Add Layouts, tags, synonyms etc) - No longer loses focus upon selecting a tag. Also no longer closes the dropdown so you can select multiple tags at once
MacOS - Pressing Enter while selecting a form in the IME will no longer submit the answer.
Fixed an issue where entering Japanese text directly (without using the auto-conversion input) would incorrectly be marked as wrong.

Neicudi · September 29, 2021, 4:05pm

2021-09-29

Changed the designs of a few sections and pages to make it look a bit more neat.

New Features:

Reader Overview page now has a much cleaner design:

Changed the design of the community centre deck “cards” a bit:

Home - The news section now looks cleaner as well:

In case you are wondering what’s happening lately, we’ve been hard at work on something special that I hope to tease more about in the future

Neicudi · November 8, 2021, 11:32am

2021-11-07

New Features:

Reviews - Reorder menu now has a more mobile friendly view (bigger text & inputs)
Cards Management - Now shows the number of cards that will be deleted on the confirmation popup.
Cards Management - You can now double-click on a row to open the card edit popup.
Backend - Preparation for mobile push notifications is done. Expect a mobile app update very soon!

Bugfixes

Cards Management - Removing cards and moving cards to another deck now correctly removes all affected cards from the table. (Was a visual bug)
Themes - Switching from dark to light theme will now correctly change the input background in popups.

As mentioned above, mobile app update will be coming soon too, hoping to submit a new build today!

Neicudi · November 29, 2021, 11:05am

I just realized I forgot to post update notes!

2021-11-22

New Features:

New Icons - Kitsun has a new iconpack which I personally think is a better fit for the platform. It’s mostly noticable in the sidemenu. Here’s a small preview:

Community Deck Details Page - Gave this screen a small overhaul design wise. The pictures should now fit better and the reviews look a bit more neat.
Sidemenu - Sub-menu-items now have an indentation so it’s easier to differentiate them from the regular menu-items.

Bugfixes:

Subs2Kitsun - Fixed an issue where pressing the next/back hotkeys would skip through the subtitles too much.
CSV/TSV Imports - Fixed an issue where it would not split the columns correctly during import.

Neicudi · April 7, 2022, 1:08pm

2022-04-07

New Features:

Dictionary Cards - You can now upload your own custom audio, aside from being able to generate audio. This works for both custom cards and default cards, although the upload flow is a little bit different.
Dictionary Cards - Changed the above mentioned upload section to a dropzone rather than a button, making it more convenient to upload your own media.

Dictionary Cards - Default cards - It now pre-selects the generate/upload audio tab with your last selection in the previous session.
Review Session - The wrap-up clock icon will now display how many unfinished reviews (one or more layout done, but not all of them yet) you have left on hover. This way you can easily see how many items are left to do and whether you want to wrap up your session or not.
Add/Edit Card - Popup has been changed and now has a dedicated card preview popup rather than displaying it next to it. This gives a bit more space to input your values more easily.
Reader - Now sorts your personal texts based on your usage (last viewed comes first).

Bugfixes:

Reader - Fixed an error causing the page to not load your text when encountering a specific parsing problem.
Lessons - Entering the quiz should now autofocus the input correctly (iOS always tries to prevent this from happening…)
Dictionary - Custom Card - Generating audio should now put the correct URL in the selected field value.

Neicudi · June 5, 2022, 12:01pm

2022-06-05

Small new update went live just now, with a mobile app update coming soon after (waiting for app store review)

New Features:

Added a mobile class to the card renderers for the mobile app. Meaning that you can now use this class to style your cards/layouts for the mobile apps specifically.

Bugfixes:

Fixed an issue that prevented Gboard (an Android keyboard) from submitting answer values when word suggestions are on in the settings of that keyboard. This clashed with the prevention of IME composition on MacOS triggering answer submission.

Neicudi · June 15, 2022, 2:06pm

2022-06-15

New update just went live, bringing some (often) requested new features and bugfixes.

Also, we’re hiring!

New Features:

Home - You can now change the month of the Study Streak view, letting you go back to the very first month you started studying in Kitsun.

Notifications - Kitsun will now first ask you if you want to enable notifications through a popup. If you decline you can then re-enable them later on at the global settings.

Demote - You can now demote individual cards on the edit card popup and page itself (e.g. when clicking on a item on the review/lesson results page).
Leeches - The leech table items are now clickable and will bring you to the edit card page.
Cards Management - The last used sorting is now saved per deck. Meaning it will now remember your preferred sorting for each deck.
Cards Management - Holding shift to select multiple items now works both ways (upwards and downwards).

Bugfixes:

Cards Management - Demoting without selecting any card will no longer lock up the page actions.
Feedback Table - Editing cards and then cancelling/closing the popup will no longer remember the changes you made, but instead load in the usual card values again.
Edit Card - Fixed the Propose Changes Comment textarea alignment.
Cards Management - “Remove Template From Deck” button no longer shows if it is a community deck. Instead it will now show a message that there are no results and you might want to select a different template.
Reading Tool - Now correctly includes the “kanji repeater” symbol (々) to correctly match words such as 星々.
Furigana - The furigana syntax no longer errors when 々 is included in the string that you are trying to add furigana to.
Toasts (In-app Notifications) - Fixed the icons for the toasts and changed the styling a bit.
Reviews/Lessons/Quick Study - Having an answer like bla (bla) bla will now correctly trim whitespace into bla bla as a possible answer (along with bla bla bla and bla (bla) bla.

Neicudi · June 24, 2022, 5:14pm

2022-06-24

The known words management page is here! You can now easily delete, clear and (mass-)add known words

New Features:

Timezone Setting - This setting now influences the times on the review timeline charts on both Home & Deck Dashboard pages.
Known Words Management has been added! You can find the page through the sidemenu (Tools → Known Words)

This will bring you to a new page where you can select a subject (like Japanese) and view your known words for that subject:

From there you can do multiple things similar to managing cards:

Search through your known words
Select words → Remove from known words
Clear the whole list (of the selected subject)
Add words. You can either just fill in a word or copy paste a list of words separated by either , or ;:

Bugfixes:

Study Streak - Arrows to change months no longer change position due to the length of the month name.
Study Streak - Next/Previous arrows are now also visually disabled when at the current month or at the first month you started studying.
Study Streak - Shows the background card while loading to prevent the layout from jumping around while the data is loading.
Feedback Table - Removed community cards no longer cause the table to error out (and corresponding feedback entries are now properly deleted when community cards get deleted).