しあわせ

Now with added Kanji Notebook.

New features in this iteration

• option to turn off tooltips
• click to display kanji information in statistics view
• shift-click for options on some buttons
• October 2010 standard Jyouyou kanji
• User defined keywords
• preferred language preference
• Spanish keywords
• French keywords
• Spanish, French and German automatic lookup on wwwjdic
• added Hispadic and Wadoku to list of online dictionaries
• Chuta.jp queried for English and preferred language
• sieve for custom list of kanji
• searched word in waeijiten is highlighted (verbs and adjectives decline)
• minor interface improvements
• improved character count for more accurate overall statistics
• Kanji Notebook (2010 Jyouyou, KKLD kanji, Kanji Oddysey)
• phonetic data (work in progress – 75 groups at present)
• Import images
• Images and Audio copied to media folder
• Image Editor from pixlr.com

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Another month another set of improvements to Kanji Sieve.
In this release I concentrated on getting data in and out of the program.

• It is possible to import records from a previous version.
• As I strongly believe that the data belongs to the user it can all be exported in a variety of formats to be used elsewhere.
• You can use a built-in mini browser to search for texts at your favourite sites.
• Plain text and audio can be imported.
• Chuta can now be viewed online on PCs and Macs
• There is a choice of 7 online dictionaries to search for word meanings
• Individual dictionary lookups are automated
• The layout is now more flexible
• There is a full screen mode for reading
• There is an online help system (in progress)
• The interface colour has been toned down
• Interface and navigation improvements

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I’ve been working away at Kanji Sieve whenever I get the opportunity.
Printing has now been added. It will now print the text, stats and vocab for a record properly.
As I don’t like jumping from application to application I’ve added the capability to browse your favourite sites within Kanji Sieve to find new texts.
Although the base layout is designed for small screens I’ve made the screens more flexible for larger screen sizes.
When making new records you can now import a text file. I’ve also added search and replace including regular expression abilities in New Record and Edit Record to clean up texts, removing furigana in brackets for instance. (I may look into the optional display of furigana at a later date.)
I’ve cleared up a couple of bugs. I’ve made popup windows modal to stop users going astray by accident.
I’ve updated the version of 360 Works Scriptmaster bundled in the runtime.

Windows still has me stumped to an extent. As this is a hobby project not a commercial one, and to be honest not many people seem to be downloading Kanji Sieve, I can’t justify the cost of setting up a Windows system just to chase down the glitches. (I looked at cheap netbooks but it doesn’t help that Windows 7 has a confusing array of flavours and I’m not sure at which point you get Japanese support. I prefer Mac’s system of buy once get everything.) So while I realise a lot of people are on Windows, I’m doing this firstly for myself and I use a Mac.

I should have something by the end of this month. As soon as I sort out data transfer from version to version I’ll post the update. I might need to consider a data separation model where the user data is kept in a separate file but this may have to wait until I stop adding to the solution.

Finally.
I’ve cleaned up the display as best I can for Windows. I don’t know whether it is just that I am am used to the display on the Mac, but I’m not 100% happy with how it looks on Windows XP. Maybe it looks better on a more recent release.
I’ve changed the colour to blue for the interface elements. Windows requires the Meiryo font or rather will probably look best with Meiryo. Unfortunately I cannot manage to resolve the display of the Chuta dictionary from within FileMaker, which cuts down the amount that is automated for a Windows user. Mac and Windows use the same base file and I just detect which platform it is running on and the changes happen automatically (more or less!). From the next version (whenever that might be) I hope to have a simultaneous release through more checking as I go along.

The downloads are here and I have a movie demonstrating Kanji Sieve instead of help files.

––update 01Aug10––
And already I have an update. When I was setting conditional formatting for Windows I inadvertently removed the record highlighting from the list view. Version 0.3.2 adds this back. I haven’t uploaded full packages for this just the Kanji Sieve Data.usr file. Replace the .usr file in v0.3.1 with this file. Unfortunately I haven’t implemented import of records yet, so any records you have will have to be re-entered.

Kanji Sieve for Mac v0.3 is ready. Unfortunately due to pressing matters elsewhere this is about as far as I can go for now.
Unavoidably that means it could be a few months before a Windows version appears.
Rather than sit on the Mac version which is functional, now that I have permissions for the Chuta dictionary and Flashcard Deluxe features I decided to upload it.
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Coming soon. I had hoped to release v0.3 of Kanji Sieve in May, but it will now be mid-June. It required a lot of work. I’ve been cleaning up the behind the scenes scripting etc. and learning a lot as I go along. All the features I want for v0.3 are in place and working (hopefully without any bugs). What I am now mostly doing is sorting out the fonts on Windows. I also have to make some decisions about Kanji Notebook. I am using some data from it but there’s at least a month’s worth of work before the file is usable as a notebook. It possibly needs to be truncated and definitely needs to be locked away from the user in this release.

Some screen shots after the jump.
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