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.