I’m not in Japan at the moment but am trying to relocate there.
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I’ll buy it before I try it! You guys gotta make a living too. And I get how money will actually help app development rather than the other way around. People always want free this, free that. But I see it as an investment. The price as listed on Play, for me, is €1,89. That’s not expensive; that’s almost equal to a bottle of Dr. Pepper!
Sooo I would say ignore the people who want things for free. Even if you’re just starting out. You are putting in the work. Work isn’t free. Convenience isn’t free. Heck - if I want to fill the tires of my car with air, at most places here they charge me 50 cents. For AIR! Although some places do provide it as a free service. But that’s because they also sell fuel which isn’t cheap around here.
I’ll gladly pay you some money for the app. In fact, I’ll do it right now.
That’s very kind of you! Please let us know if you think you’ll find it useful, as well as any features you’d like to see in it, we hope to make an update in a week or so! We are looking into a way of making a free version too (and our first game which is in development is planned to be released for free, although it will only test hiragana and katakana, which I believe most people in this community will be past this level!)
You’re free to spend your money however you want, but the air thing was a joke right? You think air compressors are free? Obviously it’s gonna cost money. You’re not paying for air.
People are free to make whatever they want and charge any price they want. And we are free to tell them what they made doesn’t seem to be worth what they’re asking for. I don’t think they want negative feedback though, so I’m not holding my breath for a response.
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It’s not about people wanting things for free. It’s about asking people to do you a favor while paying you for it.
The whole point was that the free version would limit the scope of functionality enough for them to get their testing done and for us, out of goodwill, to do the testing at no cost.
Indeed, work is not free, but it is not a tester’s responsibility to compensate developers.
Either:
- You pitch it as a final product in which case people are likely to ask you not to shamelessly advertise your product without prior consent, or
- You pitch it as a test subject, in which case people do you a favor by testing it and you don’t charge them for it (good for marketing and free testing), or
- You pitch it as a final product which has a free version (ad-supported or limited functionality - good for marketing), in which case product acquisition of the paid version is based on a consumer’s perceived value of your product relative to its cost (sales are good to figure out current pricing structure’s suitability).
But don’t try and milk your testers if you want good advertising and sales. Consumers who feel used are encouraged to recommend not using a product.
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With the blunt approach “work isn’t free” I predict they will earn a mighty total of like 10$ for this.
In the modern world of software a lot of really good, quality things were made for free. In fact the very same tools they used to make the app, and the very same data they use are available for free (in fact I am currently writing a free application using this data. Which is a clone of Houhou, which was made for free, too, and used the same free data).
I am currently writing it using an operating system which was in development for more than 2 decades and is available for free, along with free browsers and other free things.
Do you see the forum we are currently in? GitHub - discourse/discourse: A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.
Freely available, open source.
So yeah, “they put work in it” alone is a really poor reason for paying. It will not sell just because you made it.
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I wonder how long this will be useful if it’s mainly to search WK radicals… because there is a big overhaul being done on them currently. “Boob” and “boob grave” among other made up kanji parts may no longer exist in a few months.
Also I agree 100% with those saying “why should I pay to test?”.
Finally, if this is just a radical search (which is what it sounds like to me in your OP), then I don’t personally see a use for it… I’m confused about what the app is really meant for.
(You mentioned the Apple Store… So it’s for iOS, is there an Android version? If not then basically everything I’ve said is moot. I’m an Android user.)
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As a professional software developer, I agree it’s pretty unconventional to ask folks to pay for a beta version in cases like this. But I assume this is just a technicality as you figure out how to make a free version.
That said, I suggest if you’re able to get people to beta test for you then you should allow them to use the full version. Build a stripped down free version for when you’ve completed your first production release (to allow non-testers to try before buying) but let beta testers get an unrestricted free version since they are doing you a favor. A full version also enables testers to give you a greater range of feedback.
One thing you could do is include multiple prompts for feedback in a beta version to help remind people to actually provide you feedback. Repeated prompts in the beta version may also incentivize them to upgrade to the paid version once it’s available if they like it and want to use it for everyday purposes
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お断りします
Also you made a commercial thread of a competing product. Kinda funny.
Edit: wait, it’s different. Sorry.
We currently have the data for the radicals hard-coded, however we plan to use the API in the future to automatically update this data, so if WK changes their radicals, it will be reflected in the keyboard too.
As for its use, there was a point in my learning where I had been studying radicals heavily (using the heisig method). I knew the kanji around me by radical but didn’t know how to say them, so could only look it up via a radical search (which is time consuming, needing at least several taps and a search through a list). So I made something that lets me type a radical word, and get a kanji out. I use it a fair amount at the 区役所 when trying to work out what is written on forms (I can recognise and put an English keyword to many radicals). I figured if I found it useful others might find it useful too (or might indeed have requests on how it could be made to be useful for their particular use case). If you’ve heavily studied radicals (particularly via the Heisig Method), then you might find it useful too. If you don’t, then that is valid feedback too.
And yes, you can’t put ads in a system-wide keyboard I’m afraid. Nor is it trivial to implement any kind of iAP in one either, which limits options. So for the moment, it is a paid app. I do appreciate actionable feedback (particularly if it’s polite and useful - and if you look at the Trello board you’ll see that there are cards to follow up on some of that feedback, including how to make a free version) but I’m not particularly interested in getting into any philosophical argument about what it means to pay for something.
As for it being “beta” - we’ve already gone through a process of testing it via hockeyapp with a couple of interested people, and it does what it’s intended to do, autosuggests kanji based on a radical keyword. In that respect its not “beta”. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any problems with it, and more importantly it doesn’t mean that somebody doesn’t look at it and go “this is alright… But I really wish it did this thing”. The original post was meant to represent our eagerness to follow up on that feedback, and no implication of making someone a QA tester.
More crucially maybe the feedback is generally “I just don’t find this useful”, which is also valid, at which point we’ll probably not develop it any more and move onto something else. Meaning those extra weeks we could have put into working out how to implement in app purchases or anything else would have gone to waste. Therefore the decision was to release first, paid, and see how it worked out.
It’s definitely pretty niche (I’d say its most useful to those who have studied lots via Heisig and live in Japan and have to deal with paperwork themselves), but as with most things, it’s hard to know how niche until it hits the real-world.
There is an Android version and it’s linked in in the original post.
Thanks again for those who have given ideas and actionable feedback!
So, is it meant to help you look up kanji/vocab in a J-E/E-J dictionary like JED or Jisho?
Or to actually type with (instead of Google Japanese Input)? I suppose because I’ve been learning the readings here, I haven’t had much issue with either.
When looking up an unfamiliar kanji by radical (as I do now, with the number of strokes and finding it) I haven’t had any issue finding the recognized radical among the list - instead my problem lies when the kanji I’m looking up doesn’t go by that radical (because in Japanese dictionaries, usually they are only attributed ONE radical to look up with, even though I will often see three or four different parts (or radicals as WK likes to call them) listed within the kanji’s page itself), so I have to keep trying different combinations of recognizable parts or else search through a list of 80-250 kanji to find the one I’m looking at “in the wild”. —> If there was some way to make that kind of search easier, within a dictionary app (as a dictionary app, not a universal keyboard, which to me is weird), I would personally find that very helpful and time-saving. Although, I’ve run into the problem a lot so I’m getting quicker at it, and expect that I’ll eventually get a feel for which radicals/parts to identify to search such things.
And I’ve not studied Heisig at all.
Hopefully, that’s the kind if feedback you’re looking for? (I was surprised to hear you aren’t looking for QA, and that it’s “basically done” - the OP wasn’t clear on that, Liam. You might wish to edit it to reflect that).
As others have said, I like the name “Nekologic” too. It also makes me expect cute anime cats in all your software, though, or at least a cute mascot/company logo.
Hope that’s more helpful for you!
Wait, if the boob radical disappears from WK, does it mean that WK undergoes mastectomy?
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Are you saying that WK has cancer!?
Yikes. Maybe not cancer. Maybe the boob just gets buried in the boob grave and they both cancel each other out like matter and anti-matter.
Wanikani can’t get cancer. It is already cancer. Look!
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Write “がんばってくださいね” on a Facebook post/comment and ask a non JP friend to use the translation tool. You’ll be surprised on what he/she will get 
頑張ってくださいね！
Funny, I’ve input kanji in text messages to my Mom, who isn’t learning the language at all, and since my Japanese is so basic, still, she hasn’t had any issue using Google translate to get my meaning. (Although, she always questions me. “Did you mean X?”)
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Haha yeah I guess that using Kanji makes things easier for translation tools 
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Please check our site Nekologic for the cute mascot 
@AnimeCanuck that is a lot more helpful yes! It is interesting and informative to hear of real-life use cases of other people. Thanks for taking the time to explain your specific use cases.
I have exactly the same problem that I it takes time to go through those candidates to find the one I’m looking for and that is time consuming enough for me to want to write a tool to input characters in a quicker way rather than get better at looking through large lists of candidates. The specific use cases I’ve found it useful in are:
- Trying to type a name of something I don’t know to friends in messages or emails
- Looking words up in a dictionary when I can place the keyword but not the pronunciation (especially forms and when reading paper manga)
I think “radical” is probably a misnomer on my part, my apologies. What I mean is typing something like “fire mountain” and getting “火山” out to make a compound “mellow word” (熟語), rather than typing the individual radicals that make up one kanji (although someone did mention this might be a useful feature to have in it… Where you could type something like one+word+mouth+five and 語 would come out in the autocomplete bar… The problem with this being that a bunch of the radicals in WK and Heisig are made up and aren’t available in Unicode, making that non-trivial to implement)
If you’ve learned through the Heisig method, which advocates learning keywords for all 常用漢字 before anything else, it is especially useful, as there is a stage in your learning where you are heavy with keyword knowledge but light in actual 熟語 knowledge. Wanikani’s learning style is different (and one might say better) in that you learn radicals as you learn words, so that’s definitely one reason WK learners might find it less useful. Still, it’s hardly any extra work to also put the WK radicals in too (and I’m also curating a few useful keywords here and there myself).
The reason it is a custom keyboard is:
a) I don’t have access to the codebases of the apps I want to be able to do this kind of input in, and I don’t want to rewrite a whole app just for this narrow use case
b) I want a way of occasionally inputting characters into any application - a dictionary, LINE, a mail client and so on, rather than a dedicated application
In that respect a custom keyboard makes sense to me. I’m interested in why you think it’s weird? Is it just a general thing to do with the fact that custom keyboards have never really taken off?
Anyway thanks for your feedback, it was useful and informative!