For the past three years I’ve been designing my own Christmas cards for friends and family, usually with some kind of theme linked to my business or interests. In 2008 I created a Mac Santa themed card, in 2009 I went with a Japanese shrine covered in snow and this year I’ve given Santa an iPhone 4 complete with fictional ‘Naughty or Nice’ app. Such an app may well exist but I didn’t want to be influenced by anyone else’s design so I’ve not looked to see if there is. To go along with the iPhone theme, the card was designed with Autodesk’s excellent SketchBook Pro on my iPad.

I thought it would be nice to share all three designs with those who read this blog and hopefully I can inspire some of you to consider making your own cards if you don’t do so already.

Starting today and running until December 10th is the Give Good Food to your Mac promotion. The principle is simple, build your own bundle and the more you buy the more you save. If you’ve been holding off on buying some apps from your favorite developers (including ThinkMac of course) then this is the perfect time. Just click the banner below to see what’s available:

It’s been awhile but iKanji 1.4 has landed! The first change you’ll see is the redesigned welcome screen and if you’ve not purchased yet you’ll be greeted with the new trial limitation and registration system. Rather than limit which kanji sets you can practice, iKanji now limits you to running the app for 10 minutes at a time. As with iKana 2 it’s now much easier to install your license after purchasing, just drag and drop into the licensing window.

Most of the rest of changes are a bit less visible – the kanji database has undergone a big overhaul. It now includes all the new 2010 Jōyō kanji and has a new Jōyō kanji set to show them all off in. I’ve also stripped out all the WWWJDIC sourced example compounds as too many of them were obscure. There are now less compounds, just under 7,700, but the bonus is they’re now commonly used words. This is paving the way towards an iKana 2 style vocabulary trainer in a future version of iKanji 😉

Some other changes to the database include some more stroke animations and a few corrections to the existing stock. My thanks go to those on the support forum who diligently check my work.

I’ve also changed the way your personalised copy of the kanji database is kept. This will make it much easier to push out updates to the database in the future. It does mean you’ll need to go through iKanji’s new ‘Import from old iKanji’ option to bring across any kanji or notes you’ve added.

As some people have pointed out the font iKanji uses to display kanji in a brush script style is in fact a Chinese font. This shouldn’t be a problem most of the time, but a small number of kanji are written differently in Chinese. I’ve added an option to iKanji’s toolbar to let you switch between a variety of fonts easily now to remedy this issue.

The problem arises in the first place because Mac OS X doesn’t ship with any Japanese fonts that show how kanji would be handwritten or painted with a calligraphy brush. Given this is the origin of kanji it’s important to be familiar with this style. The squared off print-style kanji don’t give you a proper feel for how the original characters look. It would be like learning to read English in only uppercase letters set in a serifed font for example.

If anyone knows of a nice Japanese handwriting or brush-script font that is free for commercial use I could bundle with iKanji I’d love to hear about it (please leave a comment).

I’m really excited that the Mac is going to get an App Store. Why? It’s been getting ever harder to get any attention for new Mac products since the iPhone came out. With the iPad now too it’s near impossible. Just look at the TUAW on any given day, it’s all iOS all the time.

With the Mac App Store that may finally change. Even if it doesn’t generate news coverage of Mac apps, it puts those apps in front of many more eyeballs. As it is, most of ThinkMac’s business comes from the iOS App Store these days. I still love writing software for the Mac, but I get far less in return for the time I put into it. With the advent of the Mac App Store I’ve got renewed faith that this trend will change. It makes really niche apps like the ones I develop a lot more viable.

Of course as with most Apple related things there are a few gotchas to watch out for. There are a number of troubling clauses in the newly published Mac App Store Review Guidelines. Specifically those related to the modification or use of non-system controls. Without clarification to state whether this means no OS theming software (e.g. ShapeShifter) or no custom controls (nearly every nicely designed Mac app) there will be a certain amount of trepidation among developers.

Developers may also be concerned about the race to the bottom/99¢ price point that has depressed prices on the iPhone. It does look like Apple plans to more tightly curate the Mac App Store though so hopefully that won’t be the case and we won’t have serious apps crowded out by junkware.