Thank you to everyone who purchased Jisho and Jisho Touch for Indie Relief. I was expecting to raise about $100 dollars but we managed to raise $170 dollars! This has already been donated to Drs. Without Boarders. Again, many thanks for everyone who participated.

On January 20th, Sugoisoft will be participating in Indie Relief. What is Indie Relief? Indie Relief is basically a bunch (over 101 as of this writing) indie Mac and iPhone developers banding together to help raise some money Haiti. All money raised by the purchase software from Sugoisoft Soft will be donated to Doctors Without [...]

During the summer I co-founded DisposableApps, as a home for iPhone projects that I collaborate on with a friend. Last week our first colaboration, Pubtunes, finally got accepted to the AppStore. Pubtunes is a musical guessing game based on the popular Power hour drinking game and is complete with an English-pub style interface to help [...]

When I started learning Japanese some of the best advice given to me was to forget textbook Japanese and learn what is actually spoken. I really took that advice to heart. Having only limited access to Japanese natives me at that point, I did the next best thing, watched loads of Japanese dramas. There was [...]

In Jisho 4, I spent a considerable amount of time in polish mode. In software development they say that the final 20% of an application takes 80% of the work. I can attest to that. Something I like, but I’m not sure if it’s immediately obvious, is a shortcut for combining two lists in Jisho [...]

The first time I came to Japan, I had been studying Japanese for less than a year. I couldn’t speak at all and only knew the more polite verb endings (ですます体 desumasu-tai). I wanted to go out with some fellow students and I was trying to tell my host family that if I miss the [...]

While most of the time when speaking Japanese you should try to be humble and polite, to ignore the importance of the other extreme (arguing) would be short-sighted. Unfortunately knowing how to argue with somebody in a foreign language is a required skill. One thing that pushes many foreigner’s buttons in Japan is when (as [...]

I mentioned Jisho 4 in passing a few posts ago. Beyond that I hadn’t said anything about it publicly. I’ve been working on it since August, with spare moment I had. With Jisho 4 I wanted to do things right, so I went back to the drawing board and created an entirely new user experience. [...]

When I first started working in Japan, I worried about how to request customers do something – without being rude. For example, let’s say I needed some images from them before I can continue working on their site. In English I might say something like: I need you to upload the image so I can [...]

With the JLPT coming up on Sunday, now is the time to get in some last minute cramming of Japanese grammar. One of the Japanese grammar points that I like a lot is “the more you X the X you you will become…”. I like it for the simple reason that I find it fun [...]