Android Explorations

The new versions up of Kanji Recognizer (1.6.3) and Hanzi Recognizer  (1.6) are now available in the Android Market. The major feature of this release is search on stroke. While you had to draw the whole character, and then press the 'Recognizer' button in previous releases, now the list of candidates is updated automatically as you add or remove strokes. This gives you immediate feedback and is particularly valuable  when you are not sure of the number and order of strokes in a character. On the flipside, it requires some processing power, so on older devices it may not work smoothly. If recognition is slow on your device, you can switch to the previous list view mode in Settings. That, of course, is not all. Here's a list of all the new features and changes: Drawing pen size and color are no adjustable. You can select any color with the built-in color selector (added in 1.6.3 for Kanji Recognizer). Shake to delete stroke/clear all. A simple shake will delete the l...

The new version is now available in the Android Market  and the Amazon Appstore . The major feature added in this release is text-to-speech (TTS) for kanji (English) and dictionary entry translations (English/German/French/Spanish). Each kanji or dictionary entry translation now has a little speaker button on the right, pressing it will pronounce the translation. Uses the Android text-to-speech service, you'll need to install the data files if not already installed. Unfortunately, Android's TTS service does not support Japanese, and there are no free Japanese TTS extensions. Google Translate uses an unofficial text-to-speech Web API that does feature Japanese, but it is not yet available for third party developers. So, at least for now, TTS for Japnese is not supported. Here's the obligatory screenshot:

The newest version is available on the Android Market now. This is the first release to offer premium features. To unlock those, you can upgrade from within the application using Google Checkout. There is no need to download a separate 'pro' application. The new premium features are:  Search by reading and meaning: quickly lookup characters by reading or English meaning. Uses the Android native search framework.  Favorites and history: characters and compounds you view are automatically saved to search history. You can mark any item as favorite to review later with a single tap on the star button.  Compound search: lets you search for compounds containing the current character (starting or any position). You can view compound details and mark them as favorite.   Favorites export to CSV: all fields displayed on the hanzi or compound details screen are exported as CSV columns.  Other changes in this version:  Add...