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.

I just noticed this is the 201st blog post on ThinkMac, I didn’t realise I’d written quite that many as I don’t update this space that often. Anyway down to business, NewsLife 1.2 is here with a long list of fixes and updates. A lot of little wrinkles and rough edges have been ironed out. Give it a spin, I think it’s the nicest RSS reader on the Mac and it’s still in active development.

iKanij tech demo

I know it’s been quite some time since iKanji was first promised but it’s still under development and I’m hoping to have it ready for around the end of July/early August. I’ve created a little video that demos one of neatest features in iKanji and that is creating your own stroke animations. iKanji (like iKana) is totally geared up to letting you learn at your own pace, which means you’ll want to make your own kanji flash cards. Being able to make your own stroke animations therefore is pretty darned useful. One of the test modules in iKanji will make devilish use of this showing you multiple versions of an animation and making you choose the one with the correct drawing order!

Hope you like it, I’ve made a few further adjustments since this video was made. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can reveal some screenshots of iKanji.

This is just a quick note to let you know that I’ve been accepted into the iPhone developer programme now and I’ve got a shiny (fingerprinty) new iPod touch for development so I don’t mess up my iPhone. I can’t really tell you about it because it’s all under NDA, but it’s running stuff I compile in Xcode so that’s cool and it feels a lot more real than using the simulator. The iPhone OS platform is going to be so huge, they might even give Nintendo a run for their money as the DS looks stone age in comparison.

I’m working on some updates to NewsLife, iKana and trying to get iKanji off the ground and ready for this summer. Getting iKana touch ready is also a major concern. This does mean InstantGallery 2 is taking a bit of a back seat at the moment but it will be out eventually.

I’m very excited by the iPhone SDK, it’s exactly what I’d hoped for – a relatively open and Cocoa based development platform. Hopefully Apple won’t take too long to approve people outside the US to get in on the program. To begin with at least, it’s all about iKana – loads of people have asked for an iPhone version of iKana and I’m looking forward to getting it to you! There is the potential to do so much awesome stuff like practising writing kana with your finger on the touch screen.

Here’s a little teaser until then…