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!

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.

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.

How about adding Chinese too?

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。

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

"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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Thanks!

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

seems to fill a needed role