This is from London’s Regent Street store but I’ve also had word its on display in stores in the US. If you spot iKana touch (or indeed any ThinkMac app!) on display at an Apple Store, snap a picture and send it in and I’ll send you a free license for an app of your choice. I can’t give you promo codes for the App Store though – sorry! Send your photos to blog_at_thinkmac.co.uk (replace _at_ with @ of course!)

iKana 2 (Mac)

Is nearly complete now, it would have been ready sooner but I decided to shake things up a bit and add Leitner style spaced repetition training for both kana and now vocabulary too! The vocabulary trainer is designed to teach you around 700 words which fall in the general remit of JLPT 4/5. A number of vocab sets will be predefined and you’ll be able to make your own practice set. Should be out before the end of March.

iKana Nōto (iPad)

iKana touch remixed for the iPad! This is still in the early planning and design phase so it won’t be ready for awhile yet. Ideally I’d like to have an iPad to test it on too before I release it which means we’re talking late May or June as likely release time. Nōto (ノート) is the Japanese word for notebook by the way.

InstantGallery 2 (Mac)

It’s not dead! I know it’s been on the horizon for years and that it keeps getting put on the back burner but it’s still in active development and it will be ready sooner rather than later. I don’t dare put a date on it though as I’ve promised and missed dates on it too many times already. IG2 has undergone a lot of redesigning over the past year to make it easier and more flexible to use.

On the horizon

Other things due in the not too distant future are an update to iKanji + iKanji touch. A full set of JLPT 2 stroke animations will be included finally. iKana touch 2 will sync with iKana 2 on the Mac. Later in the year I hope to get spaced repetition into iKanji on the Mac to make it possible to sync progress and practice sets between the iPhone and desktop versions. If iKana Nōto does well there will likely be an iKanji Nōto too.

Right that’s all the updates for now, I’ll blog more about iKana 2 when it’s closer to release.

ThinkMac on Twitter

There’s now an official ThinkMac Twitter stream for you to follow!

Christmas has come early for NewsLife users, version 1.5 is now available for download! The big new feature in this update is the Picture Tile mode which you can see in the above screenshot. NewsLife already looks for any images that appear in article summaries and displays a little thumbnail – but wouldn’t it be awesome if you could browse a feed purely by those images? Well now you can, version 1.5 lets you browse a feed purely by thumbnails. If a feed doesn’t contain an image for a given article NewsLife simply swaps in the headline on a cheerfully coloured tile so you still know what else is there.

I think this injects a bit of fun into what can otherwise be a bit of a mundane experience, I hope you enjoy it too! You can of course still browse using the standard list view – there is a little toggle button at the bottom of the window to quickly switch modes as well as menu and keyboard shortcuts.

Also new is a feature that was planned for 1.0 but which never made the cut – you can now filter feeds by author. This is handy if you read a feed where there are multiple contributors, just click the author link at the bottom of the article summary to see everything else published by that person. Where an email or personal website link is provided you can access that too.

Note: You may need to clear and redownload the articles for a feed for the author to be displayed on articles downloaded under earlier versions of NewsLife. Look for the option under the Feeds menu.

Adium

As much as I like iChat I have a number of friends who use other networks. Adium has long been the best multi-network chat client. It’s running on my Mac almost continually.

AppViz

I used to curse iTunes Connect daily for it’s miserable interface before this wonderful application came and saved me from it. This app lets me monitor my App Store sales with ease without having to mess with CSV files. Apple should license this app for all iPhone devs and garner some goodwill.

Feeder

I use Feeder to maintain ThinkMac’s various Sparkle appcasts and news RSS feed. It’s got lots of nice little thoughtful features that make getting feeds published that bit easier.

Lineform

I’ve been a bit annoyed by the lack of development of Lineform and the persistent bugs that have remained unsquahsed, however it’s still the most user friendly and best designed vector graphics app I’ve found. Many ThinkMac icons have been made with this tool including iKana and iKanji’s icon.

Update: Since this piece was originally written Lineform’s developer has been purchased by Ngmoco, an iPhone game developer. This likely spells the end of Lineform’s development so I can’t really recommend it any more. The current version of Lineform (1.5.3) still doesn’t work properly on Snow Leopard after various betas and updates.

MarsEdit

I have to admit I’m rather new to MarsEdit but it’s proving to be a very capable tool and will hopefully ensure that I keep this blog a bit more up-to-date!

Perian

It’s easy to forget about Perian with it being something I don’t directly interact with. But every time I’m able to load to a movie from the comfort of QuickTime Player that isn’t a standard QuickTime file I’m thankful for this plugin.

TextWrangler

This wonderful text editor is perfect for peering into all manner of text based files and provides a clean and uncluttered interface for hammering out HTML and CSS. One of these days I’ll have to stump up the cash for BBEdit, its big brother.

The Hit List

I’ve been beta testing The Hit List for months now and I’ve found it an essential tool for organising my projects and life in general. I’ve found it great for organising holiday itineraries. I’m really looking forward to the iPhone counterpart, I think I’ll use it even more then.

Transmit

I’ve been using this FTP app for years to keep the ThinkMac website up and running. It’s always been a pleasure to use, and it’s never given me any trouble.

~

Well that’s the lot, I hope I’ve helped you discover some cool new apps you might not have tried before!

iKana 2 features all the cool features from iKana touch; namely stroke animations, speech samples and the practice set mechanism. In addition the user interface has been spruced up significantly and improved. The vocabulary selection will also be greatly enhanced. Here’s a little preview of the updated flash card window:

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.

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.

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

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!)

Won’t be too much longer now ^_^

Update

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