Android Explorations

More than a year and a half since the initial release to the Android Market, WWWJDIC for Android's second major version update is now live. It brings a refreshed UI for phones, a fully optimized and easier to use interface for tablets, and one of the most often requested features -- Japanese text-to-speech. Get it now from the Market  and read about what's new and improved below. First thing, first: tablets. The tablet-optimized version of Android, Honeycomb, was released early this year, but affordable Android tablets are just now getting mainstream. The biggest user visible changes are the introduction of the action bar on the top, and the fixed system bar with soft back and home buttons at the bottom of the screen. And, of course, the obviously larger screen. To take advantage of those, Honeycomb apps move previously hard to find option menus to the easily accessible action bar, and display more information when more screen real estate is available. Here's how the main...

The latest version is now available in the Android Market  and soon in the Amazon Appstore. Example search has been largely improved by using a feature recently added to  WWWJDIC 's API . While clicking on the 'Ex.' button next to a dictionary entry would only show you sentences containing the exact word before, searching for examples is a lot 'smarter' now. It now matches inflected words, alternative spellings and more. For example, searching for 飲む　will match 飲んだ, as well as のまない; searching for 綺麗　will match きれい, キレイな, as well as the original 綺麗, of course. Up to 100 sentences matching the query will be returned by default. For common words, you might want to turn the 'Random examples' option in Settings on. If you do, you will get 10 random examples containing the target word each time you search, giving you a much broader view of the word's usage. Another new feature in this release is support for optical character recognition (OCR) of gallery im...

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...

A new version is now available in the Android Market , as well as the Amazon Appstore . This update doesn't add new features, but includes a critical change: support for the new WWWJDIC Japan mirror . The current one will be closing tomorrow (6/30), so if you are in Japan, or using the Japanese mirror site, update now. Another change in this release is improved display of kanji grade/type in the details view. Previous versions displayed the raw KANJIDIC grade number (1-10), the new one properly classifies the kanji, displaying 'Elementary 1-6' for kanji studied in Japanese elementary school, 'Secondary' for kanji studied in the chuu-gakko (junior high school), and 'Jinmenyou' for additional kanji used in Japanese names. Other notable changes are listed below. Head over to the project's website for even more details . stability improvements better error reporting various bug fixes Coming up soon: new Kanji Recognizer version with exciting ne...

The new version is now available in the Android Market and soon in the Amazon Appstore. If you don't have access to either of those, you can get it from the downloads section of the project's website . This versions adds support for the new JLPT levels (N1-5), both in the kanji details view and in the kanji of the day widget. You can now limit the kanji displayed by the widget to one of the 5 test levels. Here's how the widget configuration screen looks now: Another major improvement in this release is the handling of kanji search by English meaning. Not all relevant entries were returned before, and that has now been fixed. You should get the same results as from the original WWWJDIC . Other notable changes in the previous two releases (1.8.1 and 1.8.2) are listed below. For more details refer to the full changelog. Use the new WWWJDIC dictionary codes (for non-English dictionaries) Save TTS languae in history/favorites OCR error handling improvements Automatical...