Android Explorations

This blog post is a little late, but Kanji Recognizer 1.7 (and soon after 1.7.1) is now available in the Android Market . This release introduces two major new features: multiple character input via the Simeji mushroom, and stroke order diagrams in character details, as well as a number of improvements and bug fixes. Multiple character input has been one of the most often requested features since the introduction of Simeji mushroom support in 1.5. While you had to call Kanji Recognizer from Simeji for each character you needed to input before, now you can input a string of characters with a single invocation. After you select a character from the candidates list, it is added to the input buffer and the drawing area is automatically cleared. You can add as many characters as you want, and return the string to Simeji by pressing the green tick icon on the right. If you want to clear the buffer and start over, you can press the cross icon. As before, this is a premium feature...

The latest and greatest version is now live in the Android Market . Upgrade now and read on to find out why. The most significant feature in this release is Android text-to-speech support. Once you enable it, you will have access to audio pronunciations for single characters, as well as compounds (premium version  only). Android's default text-to-speech engine doesn't support Chinese, so you will have to install and enable the eSpeak engine . The app will prompt you to install it the first time you access a character or compound details page. Once you have it installed, open Android's Settings menu, select 'Voice input & output', then 'Text-to-speech' settings, check 'eSpeak TTS' to enable it, and select it as the default engine. See the screenshot below for how all this looks like: Once it is enabled, you will see a small speaker icon next to the star button in the character and compounds details screens. Press it to hear the pronunc...

As promised, a new version is now live in the Android Market . This release brings a major new feature: kanji writing quizzes. Now you can not only use the app as a dictionary or input helper, but also test your writing skills. To start the quiz, press the menu key, then select 'Kanji quiz'. You will be presented with the quiz configuration screen, where you can select the number of kanji in the quiz, the school grade or JLPT level to select kanji from, or even create a quiz from the kanji you marked as favorites. The free version offers quizzes based on elementary school grades 1 and 2 kanji, as well as JLPT level N5 kanji. To get access to all levels, upgrade to the premium version. The difficulty option, changes how your answers are graded: if you select 'Hard', only first recognition candidate is considered ; 'Medium' looks at the first 3 candidates; 'Easy' is the most forgiving and considers a match within the first 5 candidates as correct. If you...