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.

iKanji 1.2 root menu

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.

iKanji 1.2 writing test

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 🙁

Feeder 2.0 from Reinvented Software

Feeder 2.0 - check the ASCII art!I’m happy to announce that Feeder 2.0 has been released today by Reinvented Software. Feeder is a great app for publishing RSS feeds, be it for podcasts, news, Sparkle or anything else you can think of. I use Feeder for my Sparkle appcasts and the ThinkMac news feed. Sparkle as you may know powers the ‘check for update’ feature in a huge number of Mac apps these days, including all our Mac apps. Feeder is simply the easiest way to maintain these feeds, it can even upload the app binaries to your web server along with the appcast feed via FTP. A great end-to-end solution and time saver.

iKanji touch App Store Feedback Q & A

People often leave complaints, requests or questions in App Store reviews where I can’t reply to them. This is a major source of frustration to me and many other developers. I’ve decided that for now I’ll use this blog to respond to some of the things people have written which will hopefully be helpful to me and you. I may edit the ‘reviews’ a bit for brevity sometimes.

ross_drew writes: “This is a very nice app with useful features. I’d like to see the trace working better, if you dont hit the target points dead on it counts as a fail. As well as this I’d like to see some romanji as well so that I know how to pronounce what I’m seeing.”

The writing test is a little sensitive at the moment, you do have to make sure you finish the strokes close to or inside the circles on the screen. Because kanji can be quite complicated and have many strokes starting or finishing close to each other the hot spots are necessarily quite small. Perhaps I can make the hotspot zones light-up while you’re dragging your finger to make it easier or make a sound through the speaker when you’ve gone far enough.

I have no plans to ever include Romaji in iKanji touch. You really should learn hiragana and katakana before embarking on learning kanji readings, it’s the only sensible way to go about things. You won’t be able to read Japanese without knowing them. Once you can read kana and associate the correct sounds with each syllable you won’t have to worry about pronouncing individual readings or compounds. Checkout iKana touch for the iPhone or iKana for your Mac.

Xanduur writes: “I would have liked this software (I did buy it) if it allowed more control by the user. What do I mean?
1. The stroke order testing shows the shape of the character. It would be nice to have the option to draw the kanji purely from memory. No option for the end user.
2. This is the big one. Stated that it tests using an SRS (spaced repetition software) mode. The problem is that there is no way to access this from the begining. Instead you MUST go throught the “training” to learn the kanji first. I would much rather be able to choose my kanji and be tested using SRS methods from the begining. This severely LIMITS the usefulness of the software. I truly feel I have wasted my money on this software. Again, no option for the end user.”

I’m sorry you feel like you’ve wasted your money but at the same time please understand I can’t add in an option for every imaginable thing or the application would be an endless sea of check boxes. Proper kanji handwriting recognition is seriously difficult to do. I’ve yet to see an implementation that works flawlessly. Detecting whether you’ve got every stroke right would be a major task too. iKanji uses a simple algorithm which tracks whether you’re writing the strokes in the correct order and direction by hitting certain hotspots on the screen marked by circles, it’s not perfect but it should get you into the hang of writing them correctly. Hiding the kanji completely would make this test more like a join-the-dots puzzle which is different to writing a kanji from memory.

As for the SRS – you only have to review kanji once in the SRS (Teach Me test) when they are in group 1 of the Leitner system. Once you’ve demonstrated you can correctly answer the kanji you’ll never be shown the review again unless you get the kanji wrong at a future date. Since I don’t know your proficiency in each kanji everything has to start in group 1, there is no practical way around this. You’re not going to want to have to go through each kanji manually selecting whether you think you know it or not.

Digityou writes “A great app for those trying to learn kanji. A great addition would be stroke practice. But still 5stars easily!!”

Thanks for the 5 star review – there is a stroke practice test!

stevesayskanpai writes “If I had one suggestion for the next version, it would be the ability to turn off one of the testing areas in terms of getting a kanji “right” in the SRS- for example, if you are just learning the meaning, readings and/or writing, you could turn off the others and just be tested on this.
” (edited down to request part)

You’ll be pleased to hear this is a planned feature for the 1.1 update which will be out in a couple of weeks hopefully (argh I pre-announced an update again!)

It is done

iKanji touch in iTunes Connect

Won’t be too much longer now ^_^

Update

iKanji touch’s product page is now online with videos and screenshots.

iKanji touch sneak peek 2

iKanji touch is taking a bit longer to finish than I anticipated but I can assure you it will be worth the wait! I’ve been hard at work adding some cool new features based on requests and feedback I’ve had about iKanji on the Mac. In particular a lot of people have asked me to add a spaced repetition teaching system. I’m pleased to announce that iKanji touch has this feature, based on the Leitner System. Kanji move between five groups which are tested at decreasing frequencies if you keep getting them right or at increased frequency if you get them wrong. iKanji touch gives you at-a-glance learning progress for each kanji and for sets of kanji. To make browsing and learning more efficient each grade and JLPT level is subdivided into sets of 20 kanji. Also new in iKanji touch will be kanji groupings for GCSE and A level Japanese for British students.

iKanji touch kanji sets in groups of 20

As well as the usual meaning, reading and writing tests iKanji touch has a compound test where you have to pick the missing kanji from a word which contains multiple kanji or kana. This will help test your ability to use kanji readings and meanings together as well as help you learn common words (and some less common ones as shown in this daft example I managed to pick at random!).

iKanji touch compound test

Hopefully as you can see iKanji touch has a really polished interface. I’m spending a lot of time sweating over the details. Speaking of the interface, I’d like to introduce Tsutsune, the little fox. He’s the application’s mascot who will offer you words of wisdom or deride you if you do badly! (He’s a bit of a cheeky fellow actually). Here he’s saying thanks for your hardwork. He has a tendency to end his sentences with ‘tsu’ for some reason. Crazy critter!

iKanji touch result screen with Tsutsune

I hope to have iKanji touch finished fairly soon, I don’t want to give any firm dates as I’m now fairly famously bad at missing my own deadlines! Watch this space as they say.