Now, while we are extremely grateful for all the bug reporting that everyone is doing (honestly thought there'd be more - after all, we've been working on renshuu 3 for 8-9 months), it wears us down a bit to plow through bug after bug, so we wanted to take a minute and talk to you about a few of the new areas of the site we're particularly happy with (bugs aside 笑).
[b]The Study Center[/b]
While power users will not get as much use out of this as newer users, we have spent a ridiculous amount of time building the study center to house all of your study materials as well as make it extremely easy for you to browse and add new materials to your studies. Among a number of other things, you can now:
1. Make schedules with just two clicks.
2. Study one or more sets of materials at once, regardless of where the resources come from.
3. VERY easily browse the official/community materials - no more of those ridiculous dropdown menus in renshuu 2.0
4. Study the studypad! (who would have thought?!)
5. Get IMMEDIATE and truly global statistics across all your materials. Our new system takes every term you study and applies its results to any bookbag material you have that contains it, so you can, even with a collection you've never studied, immediately (well, within a minute, when you add new materials) see exactly how much you know the materials inside based on other studies.
We have plans for including colorful, real-time (no more of this daily/weekly update stuff) graphs for any 1)lesson or 2)set of lessons in your bookbag.
6. For Renshuu 3.1, we will introduce user subscriptions - easily link into someone else's public materials and have a section of your bookbag immediately update when they adjust their public bookbag. In other words, teachers can add and remove lessons based on what they are teaching in class (or a student that wants to help other students in the same class), and the materials will appear in any student who has chosen to subscribe to that user.
[b]The revamped dictionary[/b]
The dictionary has been rebuilt to be faster, more flexible, and simpler to use than before. While it's not 100% yet, you should be able to throw anything into those search boxes and it'll figure out what you're looking for. This is particularly useful for kanji - you can mix readings, radical names, stroke counts, and english definitions all in one.
[b]The hankos/achievements[/b]
One of our new developers Trenton put together a simple yet vibrant achievement system in your dashboard that lets you feed your progress into the center 'pillar' kanjis as you advance through different areas of the site.
[b]Games games games v2.0[/b]
The games had, until this point, never felt very 'game-ish'. The overall look and feel of the pages were something closer to an office webpage than one that was supposed to be fun. From the colorful haikus to the shiritori where you can actually see the word chains (and it now supports a quick and easy way to add definitions so you can learn from other users' words as you play), we've worked really hard to both bring some life to the game pages and give them a more prominent place on the site. We already have other language games in the pipeline for ...2014, but please take a minute and revisit the games if you tried them a long time ago and haven't been back lately.
The three of us will be adding onto this list over the next few weeks when we need a break from the bug-squashing, but we really simply cannot tell all of you how excited we are in being able to bring this to you.
