Tagaini Jisho

Tagaini Jisho 0.2.5 rc1 released

Gnurou — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:15:49 +0000

The release candidate of Tagaini Jisho 0.2.5 is now available, both source code and Windows binaries (Mac binaries will arrive a little bit later). It fixes a couple of bugs and all the planned features have been implemented. Some more polishing needs to be done, and unless anything goes wrong the final 0.2.5 should be released next week. If you can, please test this version, as it is the last chance to squeeze bugs before 0.2.5 is out!

The translation strings are frozen and it is therefore safe for people willing to provide a translation of the user interface to do it. The translation templates are available from the source tarball in the i18n directory (files with .ts suffix, can be opened with Qt Linguist for translation). Right now we have a French and Dutch translations (both needing to be updated) but anybody is welcome to contribute a new language. If you can, please consider maintaining a translation - it only takes a moment to update and makes Tagaini accessible to more users. Also, I'm still looking for people to maintain binaries versions of the software (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora, ...). If you have experience in packaging for your Linux distribution, please consider maintaining its binary package. If you have experience with Winamp's installer (or any other good Windows installer program), please take over the Windows binary. If you understand Mac OSX bundles, the Mac version is in need for some love too.

Tagaini Jisho 0.2.5 beta 2 released

Gnurou — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:18:36 +0000

The second beta of 0.2.5 has been released. Compared to the first one, it features improved lists management, a mode to auto-search on the clipboard contents when it changes, a reworked user interface that allows the search interface to be moved anywhere on the screen, and several internal changes to improve stability. The components selector has been disabled for this release and it is not sure whether it will make it for the final version - most likely, it will be replaced by a classical multi-radical selector.

Please download and try this version (warning: no way back to 0.2.4!), and report any problem you may have with it!

Tagaini Jisho 0.2.5 beta 1 released

Gnurou — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:54:53 +0000

The first beta of Tagaini 0.2.5 is available at the beta section of the download page. The most noticeable new feature is the ability to organize items into sorted and hierarchical lists, a feature useful for people trying to read books or who like to organize their vocabulary/kanjis following the lessons of their Japanese manual.

A first version of the kanji component selector is also available in a very slow and buggy version - please don't worry about it too much. The user interface has also a been a little bit reorganized, both visually and from a source code perspective, in order to allow vertical space optimization.

Behind the stage, the database builders have been totally rewritten in C++ and any dependency on Python during compilation has been dropped, which fixes the problems many have been encountering when trying to compile from source. Thanks to the use of CMake, compilation should now be a breeze on any supported platform.

Users are encouraged to try this release and report their experience with it, but please keep in mind that the user database schema has been updated and that you won't be able to switch back to 0.2.4 after having started using this beta unless you restore your user database as it was before installation. Therefore, it is advised to export your user data (in the Program menu), so that you are able to import it back in case you need to return to 0.2.4.

Documentation updated

Gnurou — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:23:04 +0000

Thanks to the great job by Neil Caldwell, Tagaini now has an up-to-date and extensive user manual, which will be integrated into future releases.

Neil did not stop there since he also turned the previous documentation into a quick start guide and also wrote an extensive installation manual with details about how to configure your system properly in order to enjoy Tagaini. Hopefully all these nice documents will be updated and further improved as new versions are released.

Thanks, Neil!

An insight at the next version of Tagaini

Gnurou — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:54:10 +0000

Even though I'm slow releasing new versions, I'll try to keep users more informed about what is going on. The following video is about the main feature of 0.2.5, that will almost be released for it. It is a new way of finding and inputing kanji that you don't know anything about, as long as you are able to identify one or several of its components. Watch the video below to see it in action (in HQ or you won't see anything).

It looks like a radical selector, excepted it is much more powerful (works with any component, not a limited set of radicals) and faster to use because the list of potential components is refreshed in real-time. Therefore it is probably the fastest way to find an unknown kanji for anyone with a only basic understanding of kanji.

Comments and suggestions are welcome - the feature is not available yet, but 0.2.5 should not be too long to come considering the current state of things.

Tagaini Jisho 0.2.4 released

Gnurou — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 07:15:59 +0000

The long-due 0.2.4 release of Tagaini Jisho is finally available. This release has been baked for months in order to provide much more polished preferences and tons of new features. Amongst them are full wildcard search support, automatic filtering of some entries according to their properties (e.g. obsolete words), hiragana/katakana agnostic search, training on a given results set, improvements in the kanji strokes rendering and navigation, support for SKIP code search, an improved score calculation algorithm, a Dutch translation of the GUI, and much more.

0.2.397 beta version released

Gnurou — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:37:20 +0000

So, it's time for another beta release! Not many changes in this one (although the kanjis popup outline has been reworked because Qt 4.6 made it too buggy), but rather cleaning and improvement of the building and release process in order to make it more comfortable. As a result, this version is available and working on Windows, Mac and Linux again.

The score calculation algorithm has also been reworked - the previous one was totally flawed and only based on the number of attempts/number of success ratio. The new one takes the last time the entry has been reviewed into account in order to tune its score.

A Dutch translation of the GUI has also been submitted by Jeroen Hoek - many thanks to him.

There are still a couple of imperfections to fix and 0.2.4 will finally be released. Then it will be time to work on more interesting features.

0.2.396 beta version released

Gnurou — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:27:51 +0000

A beta version of the upcoming 0.2.4 has been released for Linux and Windows (Mac binaries coming soon). Despite of the "beta" label, it should be safe to use by regular users. The features set includes everything that was planned for 0.2.4. Some shaping still needs to be done, but the purpose of this release is to get some feedback and confirmations that everything works as expected.

If you are interested in trying the future next release and don't mind encountering a couple of rough edges, please download this release, give it a try, and give some feedback either as a comment here or on the mailing list!

Development news, Mac OS Snow Leopard problems, and call for help

Gnurou — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:13:38 +0000

This is the first time a news item is posted that is not a release announcement. This was a mistake not to post more often - although Tagaini now have a community of regular users (according to the hits I get from the new version checker), the mailing-list is pretty inactive and there is still no external contribution.

Anyway, for the people following this website, here is a little update about the upcoming 0.2.4 and what will happen next.

Development status and future

The latest release is several months old, but 0.2.4 will bring its lot of novelties. Too bad most of them are invisible to the end user. :p But from the "not-too-late" department, hiragana/katakana insensitive search is here, as well as enhanced stroke colors (many multi-part kanjis got their coloring wrong). Linux users can already enjoy a beta version if they use one of the binary repositories.

Another requested feature is the possibility to filter dictionary entries according to some of their properties. Indeed, only a few people need to know about archaic and obsolete terms, while others also want to avoid using vulgar words or slang in conversations. It is now possible to filter such terms so that you do not look like an 田舎者 by using Edo-period vocabulary! :p

The trainers have also been improved, with the possibility to train on the set of currently displayed entries, and a better score calculation that depends on the date of last training - entries not seen for a while are more likely to be either forgotten or on the contrary remembered on the long-term, so the score increase/decrease is higher than entries that you just trained a couple of days ago.

Most of the changes are, however, invisible. The source code has been reorganized, and the GUI part separated from the rest of the code. This means that the Tagaini engin will probably be turned into a library in the future for other applications to use. However, this will not happen soon, as the engine itself is about to be rethought and rewritten.

0.2.4 should indeed be the last instance of the 0.2 series, and 0.3 will hopefully converge into something that will become 1.0. The goal is to provide a fast, multi-threaded and SQL-less query mechanism to efficiently query and display entries. This is why the future of Tagaini is probably to become a library - so that other Japanese software can use its engine and take advantage of all the possibilities it offers.

Tagaini broken after updating OSX to Snow Leopard

This problem has been reported a couple of times - after updating to Snow Leopard, Tagaini stopped working on OSX. To fix it, find the file Library/Preferences/net.tagaini.tagainijisho.plist in your user directory, delete it, and restart Tagaini. Your preferences will be lost, but not your study list or tags, and Tagaini will function again. An alternative it to wait for 0.2.4, which will solve the problem.

Call for volunteers

Working on Tagaini is a big time-eater. Especially, the release process, which involves producing and testing binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux, is long and painful. This leaves me with little time to work on other aspects, like translations, documentation, and so on. Things could work much more smoothly if some users were willing to take some responsability in the Tagaini release schedule. Some of them could include:

Writing and updating a documentation,
Maintaining a translation,
Maintaining binaries for a given platform (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Mandriva, ...)
...

If you think you can take over one of these tasks and are willing to to it, please contact me. I will be glad to receive some help on these boring tasks, and due to my limited ressources, some platforms may become unsupported in the future (OSX especially) if no one is willing to build binaries for them.

Tagaini Jisho 0.2.3 released

Gnurou — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:03:25 +0000

A new Tagaini Jisho release has been made available.

http://www.tagaini.net/download

This release fixes many bugs and adds a couple of improvements, like a much better dates handling (supporting relative and absolute dates) and the possibility to save and organize searches in sets that basically act like bookmarks.

New features include print preview (especially handy to evaluate the size of a booklet) and a new reading practice mode, that puts studied words that only contain studied kanji in front of the user and ask for the correct reading.

The user also gains more control over which entries to train with a new train settings configuration dialog, that allows to filter entries by score or last training date and to influence the order in which entries should be appearing.

Changelog:

Fixed display bug when selecting multiple entries in the results view
Added "sets" that act like search bookmarks
Added a "Train settings" configuration dialog
New reading practice mode, where the user must guess the correct reading of studied entries containing studied kanji
Added print preview options for regular and booklet printing
Added page range and selection printing
Added reset buttons to extenders
Icons appear in result views for entries that are tagged or annnotated
Training history not limited to last two weeks anymore
Better dates handling, featuring both relative and absolute dates
Added last trained date search option
Extender buttons size now limited, tooltip displays entire content when useful
Uses flow layout to handle extender buttons
Improved and simplified notes edit dialog
... plenty of small fixes and improvements

The main development efforts will new concentrate on the 0.3 series, which will see a redesign of a good part of the lower-level code to allow more powerful features to take place and should put the bases to a 1.0 release. The 0.2 series may still see a couple more releases with backported features.