Greetings all, hope you all had a good holiday season and new year. Annoyingly I’ve been ill over most of Christmas which has set back my work on iKanji touch and iKana 2 significantly. I’m also going on holiday to Japan in a weeks time which means most of this month won’t be very productive work-wise. I’m working hard to get these apps done but these delays do mean I’ve missed my planned release dates. I hope I can release both apps during February now. Please be a patient a little longer!

Once both iKanji touch and iKana 2 are out I’ll do a final push and get InstantGallery 2 out which I know is horribly late at this point. The Japanese language apps have been so successful it’s been hard to justify spending a lot of time on InstantGallery, but I’m getting to the point where I’m happy with the state of iKana and iKanji so I can work on some other apps soon.

If you’ve spotted an application called iKanji appear on the App Store this weekend don’t be fooled, it’s not from us but a company called GClue Inc. This isn’t iKanji touch and has nothing to do with iKanji on the Mac. Obviously this could be very confusing for ThinkMac customers so I’ve contacted the developer and requested they rename their product. Hopefully we can sort this out amicably.

Update

My thanks to GClue for addressing this so quickly, their application is now called KanjiDo and looks pretty cool, go check it out on the App Store.

I’ve submitted iKana touch 1.1 to Apple for review and hopefully it won’t take too long before it shows up in the App Store. The update includes a few small fixes and some highly requested features like an option to turn off the sound effects and test looping. The speed test will now show your score when looping is turned off and you’ll be able to see how far through the test you’ve progressed while taking it. The writing test now shows the romaji of the current kana and also shows your progress through the test.

I have decided to set up a separate blog dedicated to learning Japanese with iKana and iKanji and their upcoming mobile companions. There will be various tutorials and general learning tips and tricks posted every few weeks.

iKana touch update

iKana touch is coming along beautifully, it’s going together faster than I had anticipated and I hope to have it in the app store by the end of the month, Apple permitting. I will post some screen shots and maybe a video in the next few days so you can see what’s coming.

iKanji is developing very nicely and I hope to have it ready for beta testing within the next 7 or 8 days. So time for some more details on this great new app. For a start people have been asking how many kanji it will contain. iKanji 1.0 will contain 2227 kanji, which includes all kanji in grades 1 to 6 and JLPT levels 1 to 4. In addition to that all 214 classical radicals are present and there are just shy of 20,000 example words. A good number of the most common kanji will also have animated stroke drawing guides.

Like iKana, iKanji is split into several modules; there is a flash card viewer and editor, a kanji meaning test, a kanji reading test and a kanji writing test. iKanji tracks scores across all these tests and provides detailed information on your proficiency in each kanji so you can track your learning progress.

Here are some teaser images…

More details to follow early next week.