Denshi Jisho for the iPhone

January 6, 2008

I just enabled a version of Denshi Jisho optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can access it by going to jisho.org with your iPhone or iPod Touch. If you want to access it from any other device you should use iphone.jisho.org. But bear in mind that it looks best in browsers based on WebKit.

It’s still a little rough around the edges, but it has most of the features of the normal site. Although the kanji by radicals search is a little slow and hard to navigate on such a small display. I’ll keep working on making it easier to use, but wanted to release it since it works better than the normal site on the iPhone.

Enjoy!

16 Responses to “Denshi Jisho for the iPhone”

  1. Kathleen Says:

    This looks like it might work pretty well with the nintendo ds browser too but I can’t tell yet (my copy is in the mail). Keep up the great work!

  2. Rick N Says:

    It works GREAT on my iPod touch. Thanks very much. I bookmarked it to my homescreen and the homescreen icon looks great too.

  3. Ben Says:

    On my iPhone I’m just seeing the site credits. Clicking on any of the 4 tabs does not change the display for me. Am I missing something?

    The denshi jisho has an amazing amount of data all in one place. Great work!

  4. Asher Says:

    FANTASTIC!! already saved as a button on my main screen Thankyou!!!!

  5. Kevin Says:

    Will a non-web based version of denshi jisho be release for the iPhone via the new SDK? It’s incredibly frustrating that an app as useful and efficient as denshi jisho requires a web connection (which remains painfully slow) to operate on the iPhone.

  6. Kim Says:

    Ben: It might be slow to load at first. Give it a few moments to load. Otherwise I’m not sure why that is.

    Kevin: That is definitely something I’d like to do. But I can’t make any promises.

    Rick, Asher: Glad you like it!

  7. GDL Says:

    Tim,

    that’s great. I know what I am going to use on my iPhone after 11th July :)

    Thanks for a very useful (and good designed) site.

    Keep the good work.

  8. Adam Says:

    Hey,

    What a wonderful resource this site is. I just have one possible feature addition that I think everyone would love and appreciate:

    A firefox search engine plugin.

    My thoughts is that you could easily create a plugin (much like the current ones in Firefox for google, ebay, etc.) to search at this website. My idea is that the engine should detect (to a reasonable extent) if the input is Japanese or English, and look up the right entry accordingly.

    Wouldn’t that be a great idea? Just make for much faster browsing and ease of use….

  9. Kim Says:

    GDL: Thanks!

    Adam: Actually, this feature already exists. You should be able to add Denshi Jisho as a search engine by clicking on the menu in the search box when you are on jisho.org

    It doesn’t autodetect though, so you will have to add one for Japanese-English and one for English-Japanese.

    Hope that helps.

  10. Ken Says:

    Any plans to add a “Search for this in plain form” option that the main site already incorporates?

  11. Kim Says:

    Ken, that is just something I completely forgot to add to the iPhone version. I’ll try and put it in in the next version. Thanks!

  12. Ken Says:

    Thank you very much!


  13. Not that I’m impressed a lot, but this is more than I expected for when I stumpled upon a link on Delicious telling that the info here is quite decent. Thanks.

  14. Trejkaz Says:

    This is pretty neat, but I have some minor suggestions:

    1. The iPhone capitalises the first letter of the word, but if you enter the japanese word in romaji then it doesn’t find the word (it must be case sensitive.)

    2. I think it would be neat if it converted romaji into kana after submitting the form, like the full web interface does.

    3. It would be nice if the keyboard went away after hitting Search, but I’m not sure how feasible this is (maybe it would happen automatically if the text field lost the focus? just a random thought, could be completely wrong here.)

    4. It would be nice if jisho.org could take advantage of the new iPhone OS 3.0 home screen features, in particular launching without the browser chrome to make it appear more like a native app, but also the preloading placeholder image is a nice thing to have.

  15. vivogram Says:

    Hi ^^ I was wondering if you plan to build something for the search engine function of Firefox 3.5. That would be a great addition to your already awesome functions.

  16. Kim Says:

    Trejkaz, those are very good suggestions. Thanks!

    Vivogram, there is already support for this. Denshi Jisho search options should appear in the search bar in Firefox.


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