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.

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.