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Steve Schaffran on pre-Adobe Photoshop

February 21st, 2010 1 comment

Friend and colleague Steve Schaffran reminisces about Barneyscan XP and the pre-Adobe days of Photoshop (scroll down for the original English text):

One of the transformations, however, made my hair stand on end: it could flip a color picture from the red, green, blue color space of the computer display to the cyan, magenta, yellow, black color space necessary for exposing printing plates for printing color. That meant that a $15,000 bundle of our scanner plus Photoshop 0.35 plus a Mac II was in principle a competitor for the $1,000,000 to $3,000,000  color scanning and retouching solutions then used in the printing industry.  If we could only strike a deal, we were sure to sell some scanners.

Google Japanese IME

January 16th, 2010 No comments

Google Japanese Input product icon

I’ve started playing with the Google Japanese input method first released last month. Even in beta it is stable and fast enough to use as my primary IME, and the dictionaries built from Google’s search index seem to work well. When I tried inputting my name, the first suggestion it offered after typing 「じょえ」 was French chef ジョエル・ロブション (Joël Robuchon), something that would never have happened out of the box with Kotoeri.

 

ATOK 2009 for Mac does English input

July 3rd, 2009 No comments

At long last, a text input method that brings a Japanese-style Input Method Editor to English:

英語もかしこく便利に入力できる|日本語入力システム ATOK 2009 for Mac.

Phonetic, clairvoyant text entry is what makes Japanese mobile phone typing so fast and popular, but there has never really been anything of equivalent sophistication for western languages.

I’m looking forward to seeing ATOK become a multi-lingual text input system–I remember back in 1990 suggesting to Apple’s Developer Technical Support group that they implement this in Kotoeri so that non-Japanese engineers could test for inline input and double-byte compatibility using their native language.

this looks so very benri!

Categories: Japan, software Tags: , , , ,
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