Won’t be too much longer now ^_^

Update

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

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.

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!).

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!

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.

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.