Sup guys,
I made a little Android app for reading news from NHK News Easy.
Work-in-progress! Expect missing/incomplete features and/or bugs.
Kantan News features:
- Furigana readings in Hiragana, Katakana, and Romaji;
- Color-coded names of companies, people, and places;
- Listen to the news narrated by a native speaker (or text-to-speech);
- 4 color schemes: Light, Sepia, Dark, and Black (OLED);
- Serif and Sans Serif font options;
- Adjustable text and furigana sizes;
- Link to the original full article from NHK.
With others planned for upcoming versions (see below).
Screenshots
Why?
I got initially inspired by this other client (props to the dev), but I thought I could do a better job around the UI, as well as general features.
Roadmap
The current version (v0.1) is still very barebones in terms of features, so here’s a list of things I want to (hopefully) achieve by v1.0 (in no particular order):
Click to expand roadmap
- Offline support
- Search
- Dictionary support (lookup words on click)
- More list view options (list / grid / hybrid, compact / comfy, different card styles…)
- Handwritten font (Klee?)
- Calendar view (?)
- A better mirror server with proper caching for faster loading / downloads.
- Notifications on new articles.
- Read vs. Unread indications (and filtering)
- WaniKani integration (to limit furigana to unknown items)
- Allow to only show furigana on click.
- iOS build.
- Better large-screen support.
- Going open-source!
- And other little things. Suggestions welcome!
Ads
Kantan is ad-supported for now. There’s a single AdMob banner at the top, to keep it as unobtrusive as possible. I hope to remove them in the future.
More on ads
I know, I know, ads aren’t my favorite thing either: they feel cheap, take space, and are a privacy nightmare… I don’t expect them to make much, but I hope they somewhat justify the time investment.
I love working on this, but life’s a bit tough nowadays. I hope to remove them as soon as I can.
Download:
Kantan is available on Google Play as an open beta:
It’s about 18MB, most of which is just fonts (Noto Sans and Noto Serif are bundled). The app code itself is probably less than 4MB, as it’s a native app built with Jetpack Compose.
Suggestions welcome!
This is a very early version that I gobbled up in a couple weeks, so I’d love to hear your ideas on how to improve it. Don’t spare anything, from features, UI, behavior, to branding (icon, name, store description, etc…).
