At long last, I'm glad to announce that Tagaini has reached the 1.0.0 milestone! This release is more symbolic than practical, even though it does bring a reasonable amount of bug fixes, new translations and updated Japanese data.

Why symbolic? Well, Tagaini has been in development since a while now, and the computing landscape has greatly changed since its inception. Initially, the choice has been to build Tagaini around Qt and SQLite to ensure portability across the main desktops. In that respect, this has been a great choice. But now, even though desktop machines remain relevant, tablets and smartphones have become the platforms of choice for a language learning assistant. This means that new features such as transparent network synchronization are becoming a necessity, but not only.

User interfaces on smartphones and tablets are significantly different from what is expected on a desktop. The languages in which these devices are programmed are also different. C++/Qt is no longer best possible choice for portability.

After thinking it though, it appears that web technologies are the only ones that can support such a wide range of platforms, so from now on Tagaini is going to use HTML/Javascript as much as reasonably possible. This does not mean that Tagaini is becoming a web application. UI layers written in Qt/Java/Whatever will still be used, but the core of the program will be Javascript and as many layouts as possible will use HTML. The opens up a lot of new possibilities for the detailed view and kanji stroke orders. SQLite will likely still be used as a database.

This switch is going to require time and energy, and any help is welcome. Since I suppose web technologies are more widely used than C++/Qt, I hope this will boost the amount of external contribution and that Tagaini will finally be able to switch to a one-man hobby to a project with its own life and an active development team. If you share this vision and can help, please manifest yourself on the mailing list!