WaKan Project Website

wakan · Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 12:33 pm Post subject: I'm back - sorry for my absence

Hi everybody,

I'm sorry I was absent from this forum and from developing Wakan for such a long time. I had many changes in my personal and work life and simply did not have the time or spirit to be working on Wakan. However my situation seems stable again and stable enough to resume interest in things Japanese and Wakan in particular.

I regret that maybe several people might be turned off by the non-development of past few months but according to my web traffic log, the interest in this project is still large enough for me to continue working on it.

Anyway, thanks to everybody who is still here on this forum Very Happy

I'm now going to scan the most recent posts and then try to finalize the beta of 1.70 which is laying on my hard drive.

Filip

tony · Co-Admin Joined: 27 Nov 2003 Posts: 750

Hi, Filip!

It is great news that you are going to be making some time for WaKan again. I will look forward to new developments. Please let me and others in the forum know if there are things we can help you with.

--Tony

kenkyuushin · Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2006 1:51 pm Post subject:

Welcome back Filip!

Thank you again for your great work!

kne · Joined: 11 Dec 2004 Posts: 11

Welcome back! I'm looking forward to the next version...

wakan · Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 3:42 pm Post subject:

It's great that you guys haven't forgotten me... Smile

Thanks a lot, I'm really grateful.

Next version should be ready soon, but to estimate the release date I need to do a list of necessary bugs-to-fix together first (which should be this week).

kne · Joined: 11 Dec 2004 Posts: 11

It may be rather ancient, but I'm still using 1.67. Any chance we'll see the new version any time soon?

It's still the best dictionary software out there, by far!

tony · Co-Admin Joined: 27 Nov 2003 Posts: 750

Filip,

Would it be possible to make the 1.70 beta you mentioned last December available just for testing? It seems inefficient to be testing 1.67 still when you may already have fixed some of its issues.

Thanks,
Tony

kyashi · Joined: 07 Sep 2007 Posts: 2

It's an honor to meet you here, Filip! Thank you so much for Wakan! And bestluck on everything! Smile

xoxo

_________________
キャシー
かわいい！xoxo

wakan · Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 10:31 am Post subject:

Thanks!

I'm ashamed though that I weren't able to produce next version yet however all is not lost Smile

Thank you for your interest and support!

Filip

sandras · Joined: 29 Nov 2008 Posts: 12

So, how is version 1.70 going ?

Seriously, do you have any intention to continue the development of this
wonderful program ? If you don't - due to other work, illness or loss of interest - will you let anybody else at least fix a few bugs ?

Wakan has been an enormous help to many people and is awesome from a pure programming standpoint. It would be a shame if it just died the typical death of many a one-man pet project.

Oh well, probably talking into a void here...

tony · Co-Admin Joined: 27 Nov 2003 Posts: 750

There is a more recent program named "zkanji" by another author who built upon many of the ideas of the Wakan user interface. It doesn't do everything Wakan did, but it includes some improvements on many things that WaKan does-- for example, when it reverse-inflects a verb or adjective, it tells you which inflection was typed in, and when example sentences come up for a word, it is easy to navigate to definitions of other words in an example sentence.

zkanji is available at http://zkanji.extra.hu/.

kne · Joined: 11 Dec 2004 Posts: 11

Zkanji looks nice, but it's still no wakan. Sad

tony · Co-Admin Joined: 27 Nov 2003 Posts: 750

I was just letting Sandras know that there is an alternative which shows more signs of still being actively worked on.

sandras · Joined: 29 Nov 2008 Posts: 12

thanks for pointing out zkanji, but this is currently not a satifactory replacement for wakan. The showstopper is it's inability to import wakan vocabulary lists and filter by user-defined categories. My list has about 10k entries and 100 categories. Tatoeba...hashiru is categorized as vi/v5/mov/jl4, mure as zoo/astro/jl2, shakuhachi as mus/sex, rongi as suru/lang/bigW/jl1, gisen as relig/mil and so on. BTW, anybody interested in a thread about thta ?

It may be none of my business, but does anybody know WHY Filip has given up on wakan ? It's a crying shame !

tony · Co-Admin Joined: 27 Nov 2003 Posts: 750

sandras,

If you'd like to share any of those lists, I would be happy to post them on the WaKan download page.

Filip has not said anything about giving up on WaKan; he simply does not seem to have made time for it recently, and presumably has other priorities in his life.

WaKan can export lists in comma-separated format, retaining the category information if that is desired. I will talk to the zkanji developer about importing such files, which would be a very easy thing for him to implement, I think.

--tony