Ask HN: Review our app, typd.in (a web-based Japanese IME) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review our app, typd.in (a web-based Japanese IME)

typd.in

34 pointstr4nslator37 comments

Before kicking off work together on a startup, my cofounder and I have built two test projects to make sure that we have a good technical fit.

If there are any Japanese typers out there, we'd love you to check out our first project: typd.in. It's an unobtrusive bookmarklet that enables Japanese input on any textarea/input on the web, even on platforms without a native input method editor.

Any and all feedback appreciated!

Pretty damn cool.

I only used it for about 30 seconds, but two things stood out. One, when I press space (I assume it's henkan like usual), I assume it's doing a dictionary search. The wait is pretty significant for something that needs to be near-instant. Second, triggering the henkan seems to prevent any further input.

Minorly, my phrase didn't henkan: koreha, yamanotesendesuka.

Very cute idea, but it's way too slow. Nobody wants to wait several seconds for the server to return a composition.

I guess this might be nice if you are a Japanese person at a kiosk in the US (etc.), but you probably can't install a bookmarklet in that case anyway.

Funny thing is, this is how Japanese people type in every day life. This is an amazingly useful tool that could potentially make a lot of money from companies looking to internationalize their web apps for Japanese typers who are not using Japanese typing software support.

You missed his point. Normal IMEs do not have the huge latency that this one does.

you should license this to Rosetta Stone immediately. not kidding.

This sort of thing is not that complex to develop to be suitable for licensing.

I never wanted to type Japanese but if I ever needed to... now there is a handy web service - good idea and work!

How about adding Chinese too?

I don't really know much about Japanese, but this is awesome! I know there's a song called "Kaze Wo Atsumete" that I like, so I just typed that in and the various symbols came up.. I copied and pasted it, and bam.. I was finding music videos on YouTube I wouldn't have seen otherwise - and it was the right song! Big thumbs up.

いいですね。このこんぴゅたあは日本語のIMEがありませんが今私はTYPD。INでしますよ。

すごいよ

でも私は少し日本語をできません。一年ぐらい大学に日本語を勉強しましたけど五年前でした。

Did you have trouble converting the characters for "computer" to katakana, or was that just an oversight?

Technically, it's a misspelling for こんぴゅーたー (konpyu-ta-), which converts correctly into katakana.

But I really got a kick out of seeing someone use the tool itself to give us feedback...

Ah, you caught me. I'm way out of practice ^^;;

"コンピューター"

Sure enough, it's my spelling which was at fault.

Some documentation on the key commands available would be handy - I was able to figure out a bit about the space bar and arrow keys but I'm sure I'm missing some features. I'm on my Ubuntu/Firefox box at work currently so that's the environment I'm working in. I don't currently have an IME set up here. I did have difficulty trying to type romaji, such as "typd.in" in the midst of the kana. A shortcut key to transpose directly to katakana would be handy. Trailing 'n's didn't convert directly to hiragana while typing in most cases - I had to follow with another character to get it to take, which was kind of jarring.

The bookmarklet is very clever. I'm going to post it to a message board I frequent which has lots of aspiring Japanese students, if that's ok. I'm sure you can get some good feedback from them.

One thing that would be a killer-app to someone like me whose writing is atrocious would be a feature to display definitions of kana in both english and japanese when displaying possible readings. Sort of like an on-the-fly rikaichan.

Anyway, very cool app. Good luck!

This is pretty cool. I can even see using it on Linux, because I still haven't figured out how to get the Japanese input method to work there decently.

My one issue is that selection is a bit odd. If you type a word, the whole word looks selected, even though it doesn't act that way. If you hold down the delete key, it deletes one character and stops. It works really well if you already know what you're typing and make no mistakes, but slightly less well otherwise.

I really like what the Mac does here: use underline to indicate "still working on this word", so selection still means selection. But that might not be feasible (portably) in an HTML textfield.

One of the trade-offs of using an unobtrusive approach (no DOM insertion) to maximize compatibility is that we're limited to the decoration offered by a vanilla text control. Otherwise, the flow of insertion/deletion/selection was based on OS X, so I think you'll find it familiar.

A bug report. Bookmarklet doesn't work correctly in a textarea with a vertical scroll bar.

Just fill a textarea with lots of text and click on bookmarklet. First, the indicator will be hidden by the scroll bar. Second, try adding anything at the bottom of the text and you'll see the problem.

You may want to have a look at http://translit.ru for some ideas on how to overcome the scrolling issue.

Thanks for the good feedback. I think we'll need to move the indicator to the left side and pad the input to offset it, so that it's more visible.

Correcting scrolling is less trivial, and will have to wait for v2.

Hey the idea is cool! I recalled a similar tool for Chinese. It's actually a Firefox extension, allowing ones without a native IME to input Chinese chars in text fields. However, both typd.in and that plugin share a similar limitation: it's unusable OUTSIDE the browser :|

Plus, what's your target audience? Anyone serious enough to type Japanese should have some native IME installed, right?

I'm guessing it would be great for anyone using a computer on which they don't have administrative access, like people in internet cafes, jobs, or schools. It would also be good for people who want to enter some text but don't want to go through the hassle of setting up the operating system's IME, like a first-time language student eager to jump in or a person who just needs to reproduce a few characters of foreign text. I suppose it may also be useful in contexts where an IME isn't available (some mobile devices?) or where cross-platform IME instructions are needed.

Great idea, btw. I have found myself looking for something like this in the past.

This is exactly what we had in mind. The latency of hitting the server for each kanji conversion would make it difficult to compete with a native implementation, but this is just a hack to fill in the holes when no such implementation exists.

Aside from other language support, we're thinking of eventually implementing a passive feedback mechanism that would tell the back end about conversion preferences, so that users could teach the system merely by correcting suggestions.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/yamli-makes-it-easy-to-...

If you come out with this web application first, then, you may be featured on Techcrunch before Yamli.

Yamli enables you to type arabic on the net.

Why is this better than me right-clicking in any GTK text widget and selecting the appropriate input method from the drop down menu? (note that Firefox doesn't have that because it's not an actual GTK app -- it's only pretending. I'd say it's a better idea to fix Firefox though...)

The app was neat, but I think anyone that has a need to type Japanese already has an IME. The latency of the app was irritating enough to make me not want to use it for anything more than typing a couple of characters. If it was faster, it would be much more useful. Nice job.

This is brilliant. I _hate_ switching my OS IME when I need to type in Japanese.

I don't know how you'll monetize this particular implementation but you've come with a fantastic technology. I'm sure you'll do very well. Congrats.

Really? Usually I have to do on Windows is push Alt+` to switch between English and Japanese. Sometimes I might have to press Shift+Alt first. It isn't very intuitive but it is very quick to do.

Yup. I'm on the Mac and it's one of the things I haven't found a good keyboard shortcut. Drives me up a wall.

Awesome idea! One criticism: You should provide a button that allows people to select hiragana they already typed and have it processed into kanji. You might want to include a pure text mode and allow a non-realtime "compilation"

日本語ユーザーです。変換のするときにIMEみたいに変換候補が出てこないのが不思議ですが、それを除けば使い勝手はとても良いと思います。頑張ってください。応援しています!

I like how the UI is very clean and straight forward. Not sure if this technology will be used by the masses in the US. It would be a lot cooler if you allowed your users to type in special symbols like copyright or emoticons.

That's pretty excellent. I was in a Japanese class and wondered why the systems for typing were so app-centric. This seems like it could work anywhere (though, out of curiosity, does it work on IE6?). Well done.

Perhaps you could use HTML5 client-side storage to speed up the conversion to kanji. Cache the most common right off the bat and every one after that.

Love it! My only suggestion is to check the hoverstate style for the bookmarklet. A normally resized browser window completely hides the arrow.

I'm pretty sure I'll find a use for this at some point.

Thanks!

this is pretty fantastic. のほんごああかりません、いごねがいします。

that it can be turned on and off with the same click is great. double-plus good.

This would be amazing as a Chinese IME.

i can't type japanese, but i think this is a great ... thing you have here ^_^

seems to fill a needed role

I agree. From a technology perspective, it is very clever.

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