This is the first time I publish a review, but since I am learning japanese and this game is so much fun and so much useful I think it deserves visibility.

NihongoUp is a japanese learning game developed in Adobe AIR by Philip Seyfi.
It is structured in four main categories:

• Kana (Hiragana, Katakana, All kana)
• Kanji (JLPT 3, JLPT 2)
• Vocabulary (JLPT 4, JLPT 3, JLPT 2, JLPT 1)
• Grammar (particles, counters)

There are mainly two kinds of games, a typing one, used in the “Kana” section where lots of balloon comes down the screen with a japanese symbol attached. You have to type the translitterated kana before the balloon disappears to gain score points and raise the level number. It’s simply funny and perfect for someone at the beginning of the studying process.

The other kind of game reuses the concept of the falling balloons but you simply have to choose between four possible answers to the question located at the bottom of the screen. This game concept is used in the other sections, where you can train your Kanji knowledge, grammar skills or the richness of your japanese vocabulary.

What else to say? It is well coded and the database is huge with 8000 10000 (!) records filled all the JLPT Kanjis and training sentences, so this game could really help the willing student to become a japanese language master, with fun.

So if you are studying japanese and you are a flash developer (likely as you are reading this…), support this valuable work. A license serial number costs only $4.99 and before buying you can trying a free trial to test it out.

http://nihongoup.com/

I’ll soon be back posting lots of new actionscript stuff. Have a nice sushi day

I am back from a week in Prague.
My 6th time there (my wife is czech) but the first time just for tourism.
Prague is awesome but prepare to walk a lot.

A picture to let you enjoy my best side

Got to get back to work now. And complete my lightning class.. which is almost done.
Posting soon.

After some time not posting, finally here again with a brand new twitter account:
http://twitter.com/pantaa

The main reason for which I registered with twitter was to have some fun with the guys @ the Tweetcoding challenge. The rules are simple and well explained here: http://gskinner.com/playpen/tweetcoding.html

Follow me on twitter if you whish. About the blog I’ll be posting soon some (more) serious stuff.

Hi there, sorry for not posting for a while. I am not in a lack of ideas, but in a lack of hands!
Yeah really… 28 days ago I wrote this draft, and never published it cause quite depressed an cause with one hand only I tried to stay afk as long as possible (but didn’t manage to do it… the only thing I managed to do has been working 12hrs a days to try to stay up with deadlines).

Sorry for the title, but this is me this morning.

My fifth finger broke yesterday night in an accident. Obviously my right hand had to be completely enclosed in this plaster cast, I’ve got two “free” fingers but they are so tight together that seem totally unuseful. Will have to keep it for a month and then if I am lucky (usually I am not), no chirurgical intervent will be needed.

Arghhh, cannot figure out a month without driving and 30days of one handed showers.

And, off course, lots of stuff to do and I can’t even move the mouse. At least I am kinda good in using left hand for the mouse, and I will try to code with 5 finger only, the real problem is…

…if I only had a curly brace key on the keyboard!!!

p.s.: Don’t look at the facial expression lol, I woke up 5 minutes before taking the picture

However 28 days passed from this draft… 6 more days left and then my plaster will be removed. One the good side Ican say I learned a lot in this month: now I am totally ambidextrous with the mouse (but can’t even do a cross with a pen), I learned how to use japanese chopsticks with the left hand, and how difficult can be to tie your shoes.
Somebody also told me (but hey, it’s not my case ) that a hand can start to smell like a foot!!

Usually I don’t post about personal facts or thing not related to the Flash platform, so let’s get back to something inherent.

In this month I managed to complete my 25lines.com entry with one hand only, but didn’t made it to the 12 finalists. I will write a post about it as soon as it will be published on the contest site. I will wait cause I still dunno if some of the dirty tricks I used was considered legal, and if don’t, will remove them and resubmit for the next month . (Yeah I am a lazy ass, but justified by a lot of work behind schedule).

I personally appreciated a lot 11 of the 12 finalists entries (how bad am I, but I will not make any name ), some of them are really mind-blowing, and I am so happy that the winner has been the incredible SmilieBounce by Marius Heil.

Be back soon, bye.

I just uploaded a Gravatar plugin to this blog and it works .

A Gravatar is a Globally-Recognized-Avatar… It means that you just need to register to the Gravatar service and once you uploaded a picture of you.. it will be globally appearing on every gravatar-enabled blog.

But the coolest thing is the simple gravatar API (well more than an API it’s just a formatted request).

I am preparing a really cool experiment about Gravatars… however it’s 1.20 here now and tomorrow will be a heavy day , so I need some sleep. Please just be patient and check back in a few days (maybe tomorrow).