App news and new forums

It’s been a little while since I last blogged so I thought it was high time to tell you about an upcoming new version of iKanji touch! This update adds more stroke animations, adds a new help book and generally makes some improvements.

The new help section gives you an overview of what kanji are and where they came from and explains what radicals and readings are. There are also getting started guides for using iKanji touch as a reference tool or as a kanji tutor.

One of the main complaints I’ve received so far has been that the writing test is too easy to accidentally mess up. In 1.2 I’ve made it a bit more resistant to accidental input and you’ll now see a halo appear around where your finger is touched when you’ve successfully met the end point of a line. That makes it much harder to just miss the targets in an otherwise valid stroke.

I expect to submit iKanji touch 1.2 to the App Store this week so look out for it in the App Store soon.

New support forums

I’ve been forced to abandoned PunBB which used to run the old support forum here. This is due to issues with the new builds being totally incompatible with the old themes and templates and various problems handling UTF8 properly. The database upgrader also scrambled foreign characters in many of the posts and the most recent backup proved all but unreadable due to some weird compression issue. I’ve decided to migrate to Phorum which seems to work well and which is quite pleasingly hackable from a theming point of view. I’ve still got some work to do but it already looks pretty good. I’ve not had any joy in moving the old database over so you’ll need to re-register to use the new forum – sorry! The old posts are most likely lost at this point sadly 🙁