Well I just released my first application on the android market. It’s called KanjiWriter. It’s a stroke based kanji dictionary which utilizes a subset of KANJIDIC. I reduced the size of kanjidic to only include the 2,010 characters currently recognized. Here are a couple of screenshots:
The user draws the character on the screen with their finger (paying attention to proper stroke order). After selecting lookup they are taken to the next screen with the five closest matches at the bottom, as well as the dictionary information at top. the back button will take you back to the original screen where you can either make changes to the currently drawn character or clear the screen and start again. This site will be a contact point for users to request new features as well as report bugs/annoyances.
In putting the application together I jumped through a few hoops that I thought I might be able to help others with. So over the next few days I’ll be posting a few utilities I created for Japanese text encoding translation and formatting. I’d post them now, but I think I should add some error/input checking before I make them public. I should note that this was built against Android 1.6 (Donut) with large screen support as well (for the upcoming Droid phone from Verizon). I’ll make the Android 2.0 (Eclair) version available once it makes it’s official roll out.
P.S. I’ve adding some basic error checking to my commandline Japanese text conversion utility. It’s called CharConvert and it will automatically recognize the input format (either Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, ISO 2022 JP) and convert it to UTF-16 (16 bit unicode). The usage is (you have to have a java runtime installed):
java CharConvert inFile outFile
grab it here: CharConvert.class
Cheers,
Brandon