Author: Ward

I’m the creator and operator of this little corner of the internets, writing on all things related to art and more specifically my experiences trying to figure this whole thing out. I guess I’m trying to figure out life, too, but mostly I just post about art here.

Kotoba Tweets Kanji Based on JLPT, Frequency

Kotoba will now be tweeting a few more kanji every day with the aim of better aiding Japanese learners. In particular, Kotoba will begin to tweet kanji based on their JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) level, 1 through 4. Hopefully this will prove itself useful to those who want to focus on characters more specific to their current level of study.

Additionally, Kotoba originally tweeted kanji randomly selected from its rather large database of said characters. While this could prove interesting for those wanting to stumble upon new Chinese characters, it could at times prove itself to border on useless expect for deep Japanophiles. In order to help better target the randomly selected characters, Kotoba now selects from a pre-filtered set of kanji that include frequency ranking. This frequency ranking is based on the number of occurrences the character appears in modern literature; the smaller the number the more it is used. Again, this will hopefully help refine the utility of our tweets for Japanese learners.

As always, you can still go to http://kotoba.wardosworld.com/character_of_moment to get a random character selected for you if you do not want to wait for the daily tweets.

API v0.8 Changes to Coloring Sprites

Luke Hatcher’s excellent write-up on coloring sprites is a bit out of date for the latest version (v0.8.0) of Cocos2D.

Some very minor changes are necessary to get the example to work.

Originally, the tutorial sets both the position and color with the following two lines, or:

[redSprite setPosition:cpv(200, 160)];
[redSprite setRGB:255 :0 :0];

We need to change cpv to ccp and setRGB:r :g :b to setColor:ccc3(r,g,b), or:

[redSprite setPosition:ccp(200, 160)];
[redSprite setColor:ccc3(255,0,0)];

That is it to get the example working.

Cocos2D

Not that I have ever developed anything other than most cursory of games, but development of a fantasy RPG has been a childhood dream.  Of course, what isn’t?  More to point, a game allows me to be both technical and creative simultaneously and be something I can develop entirely for myself and be content.

But if I ever do get something fun to play worth sharing and have an itch to make $0.99 then having an easy means of distribution would be the proverbial cherry on top.  Now, given the end-to-end ecosystem that Apple’s iTunes Store represents along with the fact that iPhone has arguably more horsepower than Nintendo’s Wii, iPhone as a game platform seems like a good place to head.  And getting back to my neophyte status as a game developer, I am happy to discover the Cocos2D API which provides a 2D gaming frameworks for iPhone and iPod Touch.

At this point I am still working through Monocle Studio’s SimpleGame example.  But it is fun to have something very simple to work on that actually works.

Kotoba Goes Radical

Kotoba’s base set of information is nearing another milestone: radicals （部首【ぶしゅ】or ‘bushu‘）. Radicals are the base components that can be used to describe an ideogram, often most strongly associated with Chinese characters （漢字【かんじ】or ‘kanji‘).

We have used the source from RadicalKanji to provide the relationships between our Japanese characters. This information allows us to more easily to discover kanji when we do not know one of its readings. The next step is to build a visual search that allows users to select radicals to the search until the desired kanji is found. Till then, discover the many interesting relationships between Japanese characters.

UI Refinements

There are now a few more refinements to Kotoba’s interface.

Of some note is that the character filter is now available from the characters page directly. Just click on “Character Display” in the upper-right to select what type of character family you want to view. This functionality used to be available on all pages even though it only impacted characters.

A more subtle change has been to both the Character and Word of the Moment. Whereas before multiple, common values were shown individually, we now aggregate them by common type. Additionally, the reading of the character includes better styling that should make it easier to read and understand.