ThinkMac Blog

Feeder 2.0 from Reinvented Software

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:40:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:30:00 +0000

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!)

iKanji touch available on the App Store!

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:24:00 +0000

Grab it now! Details here. If you spot any bugs or errata let me know (visit the support forum).

It is done

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Won't be too much longer now ^_^

Update

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

Finding the sweet-spot

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:43:00 +0000

If you follow the Apple news then you've probably seen the new iPod shuffle they released today. While voice over is pretty cool the new control interface is less so. In fact it's actually pretty poor. It's a case of Apple trying to push the limits on how few buttons they can get away with but this time I think they've missed the sweet-spot.

For an mp3 player designed mostly for listening to songs with minimal interaction I'd say the sweet-spot design wise was the previous generation shuffle. You could skip back and forth through songs easily. If you hit one you wanted to hear again you just had to press the back button. Skip forward, press the next button. Now those simple actions have been added to a single button which is overloaded with nearly all of the device's functionality. Having to press a button 6 times to jump back two tracks just isn't good design. You may not want to skip tracks that often, but when you do it's shouldn't be unnecessarily tedious.

I'm reminded of the Apple Store in Ginza, Tokyo. The lift there had two buttons, one to sound the emergency alarm and one to hold the door open. You couldn't choose the floor, the lift just stopped on every floor going either up or down. It's simple yes, but is it really good design? Clearly under certain use cases it is, when you're in a crowded lift with everyone wanting different floors it's the same as any other lift, easier in fact as you don't have to press a button for your floor. But if you're in the lift alone or with people all wanting the same floor it's less efficient and annoyingly so.

The point of all this really is to get across the idea that when designing interfaces oversimplification is just as bad as over complication. In fact it can be worse because at least once you have learned a complex interface you can use it efficiently where as an oversimplified interface will always be cumbersome to use. Overly complicated interfaces are the ones people most often flag up as being bad, as John Gruber frequently does on Daring Fireball. Applications like that car milage tracker everyone raked over the coals were hammered for trying to pack every feature into the same screen. But I wonder if an application that only had a single field for entering milage on its main screen would be damned for being oversimplified?

The reality is overly simplified interfaces get far less attention but are frequently just as bad or worse than complicated interfaces. Hitting the sweet-spot between complexity and simplicity is rarely an easy task, but when we start overloading single parts of an interface or burying functionality to keep things minimal we should probably step back and ask 'is this really good for the user?'. Sometimes it will be, more often it probably won't be.

iKanji touch sneak peek 2

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:56:00 +0000

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.

Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:53:00 +0000

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.

Give Good Food returns!

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:14:00 +0000

Remember the Give Good Food to your Mac promotion that's run these past two years? Well it's back again and I'm proud to say iKanji is in the bundle mix this year. Unlike other software bundle deals Give Good Food lets you pick the apps you want from a huge selection, and the more you add the bigger the discount you get! Sounds pretty tasty huh? So feed your Mac some good quality software!

iKanji 1.1 is here + iKanji touch sneak peak

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:20:00 +0000

I'm happy to announce iKanji 1.1 is now available. There are loads more stroke animations in this release, I'm slowly getting through all of the kanji! The stroke recorder is also much improved now too, you can draw straight lines and then add points to them to make adjustments and to smooth stroke animations. In fact I went back and improved all the existing stroke animations too. I've migrated iKanji from XML storage to a SQLite database behind the scenes which means memory usage should be a bit lower and loading and saving a bit faster. iKanji touch also uses an SQLite database so I wanted the two apps to be able to use the same dataset as easily as possible.

Speaking of iKanji touch, it's coming along well but it is a little bit behind schedule, sorry I know many of you are eager to get your hands on it. Here are some screenshots to give you a taster:

The flash card design was really difficult, I went through a huge number of designs before settling on this one. Stroke count and stroke animation (where present) is seen by flipping the card over like in iKana touch. You can view all the example words by tapping the Examples button at the bottom. One is selected at random for the main card.

Wait a second that's not our app

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:01:00 +0000

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.

At work

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:33:00 +0000

Work on iKanji touch is going well. With SQLite doing the heavy lifting the performance is very nice even loading thousands of kanji. Should be complete and submitted to Apple by the end of the month with any luck.

iKana touch 1.1 on its way!

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:38:00 +0000

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.

ThinkMac Art & Design

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:11:00 +0000

Download the PDF (8MB)

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to gather together a whole bunch of the artwork I've created over the years for my various applications and compile it all together. A lot of design work is sort of lost in the process so there isn't as much as I'd like but hopefully there is enough here to give you a taste of what goes into designing Mac software.

iKana touch details revealed!

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 13:39:00 +0000

iKana touch is very close to being finished now. I fully expect to submit it to Apple for review during this coming week. Here are those promised screenshots...

Update!

iKana touch is now available on the App Store!


Kana Set Menu You choose the kana set you want to practice on this screen.	Kana Browser Tap a kana to view its flash card or practice this set using the Writing Test or Speed Test.

Flash cards You can browse flash cards by swiping left or right with your finger. Buttons at the bottom let you add this kana to your practice set or hear it pronounced. Some example words are included for completeness.	Flash cards When you tap the flash card it will flip over to reveal an iKanji style stroke animation.

Kana Speed Test Tap the correct answer before the timer runs out in the speed test. Any questions you get wrong are added to a special kana set you access from the Kana Sets screen for revision.	The Kana Writing Test Trace the strokes, starting and stopping within the circles in the correct order and direction.

Announcing NihongoMac.com

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:47:00 +0000

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.

VersionNightmare

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:22:00 +0000

Can I just say that I really, really hate VersionTracker? It is the slowest, most cumbersome and utterly frustrating Mac software listing site in existence. MacUpdate, Apple Downloads, iusethis.com are all fantastic, I simply enter my applications details and hit submit and shortly there after the updates appear for people to be able to download. With VersionTracker on the other hand I frequently have to wait a good 30 seconds for their site to even load (over broadband!!) then adding a product is nothing short of a nightmare. You have to specify the category to put your application in, not once but twice and you need to specify your OS compatibility in 3 separate places, two of which are nicely tucked away in little popup panes that are hidden until you click them. Then you hit submit and the chances are it will find something you've supposedly not filled in (which you of course have) and refuse to submit the update no matter how many changes you make. In fact I have a feeling the JavaScript is probably throwing a wobbly or it's trying to talk to some database over a 1200 baud connection. The page doesn't even reload after pressing the submit button subsequent times and Safari's status bar seems to indicate parts of the page are still loading, which of course they never do.

Anyway that's my rant over with. Maybe I'll be able to submit iKanji on my 3rd attempt... Wait no that didn't work either!

Addendum

Oh and another thing that bugs me about VT is you have to submit your icon and screenshots in a separate form after submitting your application listing. Just because the whole process wasn't cumbersome enough already. When I submitted an icon for my iKana listing they replaced the existing screenshot with a nice blown up version of the icon. *sigh*

Update

Oh look at that iKanji has suddenly popped up on VersionTracker, so someone managed to get it listed then. It also mysteriously has a 3 star rating even though no one has reviewed it yet and the Feedback summary shows no ratings in any category. Suspicious much?

Spy shot

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:12:00 +0000

Hmm what could this be?

iKanji 1.0 is here!

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:56:00 +0000

It's taken a little while to get there, but iKanji is finally available for everyone to download and enjoy. Many thanks to all who helped with the beta testing over the last few days. I've been overwhelmed by the amount of interest and support I've received from the community. I hope iKanji will make a lot of people's lives a bit simpler when it comes to studying kanji.

Yes iKana and iKanji will be coming to the iPhone/iPod touch!

I've said this before but I'm getting asked this question so frequently now I want it on the record again, I do plan to port both apps to the iPhone OS. In fact I already have an alpha of iKana touch up and running on my development Touch. iKana Touch will come first as it's a nice relatively simple starting point and the data set is fairly limited and easy to deal with. I'm hoping it will be ready by the end of August, but then again I'm pretty lousy at hitting deadlines as long time followers of this blog will realise ;) Someone asked me if I'll do a similar bundle as with iKana and iKanji on the Mac or a bundle that includes both Mac and iPhone versions. The simple answer is no, I'm not able to offer a bundle of these due to the limitations imposed by Apple's App Store. Each application has to be sold separately.

iKanji now in beta!

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:00:00 +0000

I'm happy to announce that iKanji is now in beta and I hope to have 1.0 released by Thursday if no major issues turn up. The iKanji product page has also been updated. iKanji will cost € 20 ($30~) when it goes on sale so now is your last chance to get it at the reduced price.

~~If you would like to try the beta please get in touch. I can't promise everyone who applies will be accepted. Priority will be given to students studying Japanese and native Japanese speakers.~~

Update

Thanks for the overwhelming response! No more beta requests please, I've just dealt with the last 50.

Here's another preview of what's to come:

iKanji now available for pre-order

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:21:00 +0000

iKanji is in the final mile and now would be a great time to show your support and pre-order your copy today. As a bonus you get a 10% discount. You can now also purchase iKana and iKanji together as a bundle and save over 20% on their combined price. You'll get your license immediately so you're ready to go the second iKanji becomes available for download which will be within the next two weeks.

To whet your appetite here are some preview screenshots:

The kanji meaning test:

Full details of what's in the app are on the iKanji product page.

iKanji is nearly here!

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:45:00 +0000

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.

iKanji tidbit

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:17:00 +0000

So something I've found while working on iKanji is the annoyance of having to toggle between Japanese input and regular (British in this case) input. I've been thinking about this problem and it just doesn't feel very friendly to have to explain to users that they have to rummage around in System Preferences to enable Japanese input so they can type in a few characters. Then there's the Japanese input software wanting to help you convert the kana into kanji, which is absolutely what you want if you're writing Japanese normally, but not so useful if you're trying to just bash out a few kana to answer a question or perform a quick search when you don't necessarily understand the kanji that might pop up. One solution to this is built into the OS in the form of the Japanese Kana Palette which is pictured below. Unfortunately it's cumbersome to use, takes up a ton of space and looks awful with tiny little characters which are barely distinguishable in some cases.

Clearly the kana palette idea is a nice solution for knocking out a single word in hiragana or katakana but it needs to be redesigned drastically to be quick and pleasant to use. This is my solution, it's a hybrid approach in that it requires you to use both the mouse and keyboard, but the result is you don't have to scan 100 odd buttons, you can switch back and forth between hiragana and katakana much quicker and the characters can be displayed much bigger so they're easily recognisable.

To use this input method in iKanji you press the consonant or vowel you want and the button selection changes. So you press 'k' for example and you get ka, ki, ku, ke and ko along with the contractions, kya, kyu and kyo. Want them in katakana? Type a capital K instead. I think it's a nice compromise and is ideal for typing in single word answers and search queries. If people like this I'll add it to iKana too.

NewsLife 1.2 is here and iKanji demo video

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:25:00 +0000

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.

I'm in!

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:00:00 +0000

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.

On the iPhone SDK

noreply@blogger.com (Rory Prior) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:28:00 +0000

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...