Google Japanese Input App

[Mulboyne]

[YT]RXPWAARghmY[/YT]

Here's the Google video explaining the company's new Japanese language input app (in Japanese). As you are typing in Japanese, the app will offer auto-complete suggestions, much the same way the Google Japan search function offers search suggestions when you input a word in Japanese.

[Cortana]

[alicia454]

Unfortunately the Google Japanese Input method requires an Internet connection, so it would not be practical on a traveler's laptop.

But with an Internet connection, it does work quite nice for me.

However, with my very limited Japanese (I am still learning), it does not appear to be that much better than Apple's built-in "Kotori-Hiragana" Japanese Input that comes with Snow Leopard and works offline.

Thanks Cortana for your feedback. I would also appreciate hearing from other Japanese fluent Mac users about the specific advantages of Googles Japanese Input over Apple's built-in "Kotori-Hiragana" Japanese Input.

[gkanai]

Let us not forget that Google China launched an IME in 2007 by taking data from Sohu's IME...

http://asia.cnet.com/member/willmoss/blog/?v=post&id=62003778

[Western All Stars]

Unfortunately the Google Japanese Input method requires an Internet connection, so it would not be practical on a traveler's laptop.

It doesn't need an internet connection.

[alicia454]

It doesn't need an internet connection.

Thank you for finding that response from a Google employee that it works offline. But when I tried, it did not work for me.

When I turned off the WiFi on my laptop, and did not have any other Internet connection at the time, the Google Japanese Input stopped working. It completely froze, and only worked when I turned my WiFi back on. Please try it yourself, and see if you can get it to work offline.

Maybe there some setting that you need to do to get it to work offline? If so, please let me know.

Alternatively, maybe it has some type of caching mechanism that reduces network overhead, and provides some offline support. If you have been using it for a while, you might already have a hefty cache. Try it again offline, but with some new obscure pattern that your Google Japanese Input has not seen before.

Note that Google Earth also uses a local cache that allows you to revisited places offline that you recently visited before, so a caching mechanism for a Google version of a Japanese Input method may not be far-fetched.