Re: Re: [edict-jmdict] RE: Announcing gSho, my new J/E dictionary app for Android!

[Jim Breen <jimbreen@*********>]

On 26 October 2013 05:09,  <masterkale@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been pretty quiet about gSho lately, but I implemented some additional
> functionality today that I think will interest some of you here. That
> additional functionality is...romaji input!

Great!

> When I first released gSho back in August, there was a huge demand for
> romaji input. I hemmed and hawed on whether I'd implement it or not out of
> an ideological dislike of Romaji but always kept it in the back of my mind
> as something I'd consider at a later time.

There is a world of difference between Romaji input, which after all is what
IMEs do, and Romaji operation/display, which should be avoided.

> ....... Thanks to the release last Monday
> of the open-source Javascript IME WanaKana (http://wanakana.com/), I finally
> had an elegant way of offering Japanese kana input via any keyboard that can
> type the Roman alphabet!

I was hoping that you would provide support for both Hepburn and Kunrei
romaji. Most IMEs do this and the romaji input option in WWWJDIC does too.
It means that both "tu" and "tsu" map to つ, both "ti" and "chi" map to ち, etc.

Does WanaKana do this? If not, it should be upgraded. Should only be
the addition
of extra mappings.

> Lowercase letters are converted to Hiragana
...
> Uppercase letters are converted to Katakana

Fair enough. In WWWJDIC (and xjdic) I put "@" on the front to signal
hiragana and "#" to signal katakana. ave selecting options, checkboxes, etc.

> Combined with the recent Kanji Lookup functionality introduced in 1.1.0 last
> week, gSho's becoming quite the nice little app if I do say so myself. It
> still has some rough edges that need polishing, but if you dismissed it
> earlier, maybe this will convince you to give it another try? :)

I've certainly been waiting for the introduction of Romaji input, as it's
a pain switching virtual keyboards every time I want to look up a
Japanese word. In the case of my tablet it means disconnecting the
physical keyboard too as Simeji won't run with it there.

Looking forward to trying/using it.

Cheers

Jim

-- 
Jim Breen
Adjunct Snr Research Fellow, Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University