Ever since I started to learn Japanese, I've done a lot of studying on the train to and from work. At first this meant carrying around home-made paper flashcards and a big English to Japanese dictionary, but these days an iPhone can replace both of those and help you do much more – there are apps for flashcards, for learning the stroke order of kanji, and even fully fledged dictionaries.

I've downloaded and tried loads of apps, and even created a few, but here's my personal top five covering everything from basic kana to kanji-lookup.

1 & 2) For learning Hiragana and Katakana

I learned hiragana and katakana before the iPhone existed (sadly – it was a pain), but still need to brush up on my katakana every so often. There are dozens of kana apps, but the best I've found come from a Japanese independent developer called Kenji Hioki (hk2006).

They are rather large to download, but this is because they're packed with audio: the app spells out a word (in the screenshot above right, the audio says: "ku – ku – kuruma… kuruma"), while you tap it out using the kana shown on screen. This helps to build up recognition between the sound and forms, while also teaching you basic vocabulary at the same time.

The hiragana and katakana apps are completely free – I also like his Kanji apps as a quick way to revise basic kanji.

3) For learning Vocabulary

For vocabulary, I've found that nothing works more effectively than flashcards: English on one side, Japanese on the other, so you can learn from Japanese to English first, and then the other way around. There are dozens of flashcard apps, but for me the key thing is ease of adding cards: you need to be able to add them quickly, in bulk, and in either kana or kanji.

It's much easier to do this on a computer, and for that reason I recommend Touchcards 2. This relatively simple flashcards app has one great trick, shown above and to the left: it can import vocabulary from a Google Docs spreadsheet. This means you can easily create and manage huge lists of vocab, then sync them onto the iPhone to learn when you're out and about.

That function aside, it's simple and to the point: you can study cards in both directions, customise the size of the text, study in order or at random, and enable a scoring system when you want.

4) For Kanji, and as a Dictionary

Only a few years ago I had a big, heavy paper dictionary and was tempted to buy a Canon Wordtank. Now, I just use the appropriately named Japanese, by CodeFromTokyo. This great dictionary app is ideal for looking up words by sound (as shown above, you can type phonetically in roman letters), or kanji (by component, SKIP, or handwriting).

It also has a handy lists function (shown above, right), and an extensive flashcard system for learning those. I use this for drilling through kanji – it works for vocab, too, but you can't set kanji or kana display per item or add cards that aren't forms in the dictionary. The app costs $10, but that's ridiculously cheap considering just how much it can do.

4) For Verbs

A huge disclaimer here: I made, and I sell, this app. But the reason for that is that there wasn't a good one available before. There comes a time – after you've picked up kana, and a bunch of vocabulary – where you'll need to start learning various verb forms beyond the simple masu / masen / mashita / masendeshita ones, and I wanted a way to learn these in a flashcard-like fashion. So, here's my Japanese Verbs app, which does just that.

The app is free, with ten basic verbs included, and teaches the masu, dictionary (plain), nai, ta, and te forms of each, along with English translations and classification (Regular 1, 2, irregular). You choose the verbs you want, pick the front and back of each card – English to Dictionary, say – and then drill through the flashcards. A 99c / 69p in-app purchase unlocks 35 more verbs, covering most basic tasks. A second app teaches transitive and intransitive pairs.

So those are the Japanese apps that never leave my iPhone. If you've got a recommendation for another I should try, please leave it in the comments below or tweet it to @tomroyal.

Something I'm working on – an app to download and view nautical wind forecasts for Greek waters.

Use the front page to select an area and time, and you can download either one map, or a whole day's worth:

The maps are stored offline for use when sailing and out of range of the internet. They can be browsed by forecast date:

.. or viewed full-screen, with pinch-zoom controls and the option to browse through the folder:

This is a work in progress.

Since the launch of the newer, shinier iPad, some people are unhappy with iPad magazines. Here's an example that's been floating around Twitter:

One of the limitations of The New Yorker app for iOS becomes even more apparent while reading on the new iPad’s high resolution retina display.

I’ve noticed in the past that the first few articles (Talk of the Town, etc.) in each issue are text selectable and therefore able to be copied, words can be defined using a built in dictionary, and these pieces can be emailed and tweeted. The rest of the magazine is like a tiff or jpeg — everything is baked into page and there is nothing you can do with the text.

This has always been annoying and I suspect is part of the reason each issue weighs in at hundreds of megabytes (a magazine of mostly text mind you). … For some reason they don’t use rendered text for their main articles as they do for their first few shorter articles. And the baked in files, whatever they are, aren’t high res enough for the retina screen. And what’s terrible is that if they fix this, the file sizes of each issue will get even bigger. Perhaps twice as big.

I think they are scared of people being able to copy and paste their content and share it. But if they want to win over converts to the digital version of their very fine magazine, they need to get over their fear and make the best possible magazine for the iPad.  Not cripple it in order to try to lock it down.

Similarly, notable Apple fan John Gruber and co on The Talk Show* podcast: "It looks like total ass. It's a really, really stupid way to put a magazine on screen."

Both are commenting on The New Yorker for iPad, which is made by The Condé Nast publications using Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite platform. But the same applies to many magazines using rival technologies, too, including ones that I work on.

At this point, a disclaimer: this post does not represent the views of my employer. It represents the views of a guy who's spent well over a year worrying about iPad magazines every single day, to the point of near obsession. To my knowledge, my employer does not have an official position on this issue.

Rasterising text is not DRM

With that out of the way, here's the thing: I very much doubt the people who make The New Yorker have ever considered rasterising text as a method to prevent copying-and-sharing. Preventing the copying and sharing of magazine content is depressingly difficult once you've printed it***. I'd put money on them having chosen it for the same reason that many others have: because they're working on a magazine.

Let me elaborate.

There are, broadly, three ways to put text onto an iPad screen: native, HTML and rasterised. Native text is rendered by the iPad inside a textview, HTML is rendered by the Safari webkit engine in a webview, and rasterised text is rendered as an image containing text. There are very obvious benefits to the first two options: both native and HTML text can be selected, copied, dynamically resized (given the option is coded in) or even read aloud. And, if Apple releases a newer device with a higher screen resolution, it'll render out beautifully with no amendments to the issue or app required. Over at Tap!, one of very few magazines to use native text, editor Chris Phin summarises the benefits neatly here.

And none of this is possible with rasterised text. So why do we use it?

Layout and text control.

Use native or HTML text in an app and you're at the mercy of the engine that renders it out onto the screen. In many cases – including my own non-magazine apps, incidentally, which use a combination of the two – this is just fine. If the text is relatively short and principally functional, and you don't really mind where the lines break, or if paragraphs end up with orphans, then it's OK. Text in columns is a particular pain, although CSS3 has made some strides towards improving matters on this front, and we've managed to come up with usable solutions for news-based text.

If you're working on a magazine with long format text, however,  where the layout of the words on the page is fussed over to a frankly obsessive degree in order to give the very best possible experience to the person reading a 4,000 word feature, this borders on the unthinkable. Let the device handle text layout and you'll end up with nasty line breaks, widows, orphans, the works.  And if you want to wrap it elegantly around image runarounds, or tweak the tracking on headlines so that they're exactly right, you can forget about it (obviously, giving the user text size control makes this even worse).

And this matters. If you've ever been distracted by a nasty break in a poorly set book, you'll know why. Well set text is invisible, badly set text is not. It's one of the reasons why it's more comfortable to read, for example, an article in the print New Yorker than it is an online version: websites, which of course are entirely dependent on browser text rendering, have precious little text flow control.

Raster, man.

And so, rasterisation. You set the text perfectly in a tool such as InDesign, run that down to bitmap images (not Jpegs, in our case, as it happens, but still bitmaps), and you put it on the screen. And it gives readers the experience of a magazine, with the perfectly honed reading experience they expect. And we care about this stuff – I've even seen a grown man break out a type depth scale on an iPad screen to check the leading.

The iPad 3 arrived with a screen that's twice the resolution and, yes, text rasterised  on an assumption that it'll be shown on the iPad 2 screen doesn't look perfect – the images used to hold text are being scaled two times by the iPad. Many magazines will have to update. You can bet that, like us, they've been stockpiling retina-resolution art for some time in preparation for this, and no, it's not always going to double-to-quadruple issue filesizes (each page is not a single flat image). And we plan to deliver retina-quality images only to retina-capable devices, of course.

So while rasterising text is not a perfect system – to state the blindingly obvious, there is no perfect system – and for a few weeks after the launch of a new iPad product it's one that can be troublesome, but there's a simple reason that we do it: an iPad magazine should look as good, if not better than, a print one. And those who see only a few jagged edges and declaim it as the stupidest thing ever, and so on, are seeing only the technology, and missing the point: in a magazine, it's not only the words themselves that matter.

* There's some odd stuff said in this podcast, incidentally. "There's a reason why the New Yorker was not included in the Newstand by default", it says, suggesting that this was an Apple call – Newsstand status needs to be flagged by the developer. (UPDATE – Thanks to @bobrudge and @wmerrifield, who both tell me that J Gruber is referring to the titles pre-loaded, or not, on an iPad given to him by Apple).

**  Previously there was a moan here about pixel doubling. I checked with a loupe, and that is indeed what's going on. My error.

*** Don't ask. I'll become even more boring.

Newsworthiness is hard to define. Web traffic is simple to measure. I wonder if the Telegraph website has run anything about the iPad 3 launch?

Telegraph, 9th Feb: Apple iPad 3 announcement 'in early March'

Technology blog The Verge, citing "people familiar with the product", says that the new iPad will have double the screen resolution of the iPad 2 and as a result will be about one millimetre thicker. It will probably be powered by an A6 chip – the iPad 2 is powered by the A5 – but The Verge says that chip will be dual-core and not quad-core as had been suggested elsewhere.

Telegraph, 1oth Feb: Apple in 'crunch mode' as iPad 3 approaches

The new tablet is expected to have double the screen resolution of the iPad 2 – enough to show a Blu-ray movie in its native resolution and still have pixels to spare … It will probably be powered by an A6 chip – the iPad 2 is powered by the A5 – but one technology blog yesterday claimed that the A6 chip will be dual-core and not quad-core as many had predicted.

Telegraph, 14 Feb: Apple 'to announce iPad 3 on March 7'

A flurry of rumours, from a range have sources, say that the new iPad will have a 'retina display' – that is, an improved screen resolution delivering 2048 x 1536 pixels … Even the name is in question, with some suggesting that Apple could choose a name that reflects the improved screen resolution, such as 'iPad HD'.

Telegraph 28 Feb: Apple announces March 7 event

It is thought that the new iPad will have a vastly improved display, with double the screen resolution of the iPad 2, and a faster processor.

The iPad 2 is powered by an Apple-designed A5 processor but it is thought that the new iPad will feature an A6 processor, which is either a new dual-core chip or a quad-core chip depending on which rumour you choose to believe.

Telegraph, 2nd March: Apple iPad rumours increase as event approaches

The latest rumour concerns the name of the next Apple device. Though most people are assuming that the successor to the iPad 2 will be the iPad 3, bloggers have speculated that it will be called the iPad HD – a reference to the higher resolution display that the device is thought to have.

(Note: see 14 Feb, above)

Telegraph, 6th March: Apple iPad 3 event: A guide to the rumours

The new iPad will almost certainly have a much-improved display compared with its predecessor. It is expected to have a so-called 'retina' display and be capable of full 1080p HD. That has led some to suggest that the new iPad will be called the iPad HD, rather than iPad 3 or even, as others have suggested, the iPad 2S.

Whatever the new iPad is called, it will probably have a faster processor than the iPad 2. The current iPad is powered by Apple's A5 chip. The new device is expected to have an A6 chip, which might be a quad-core processor, though some sources suggest that it will be a dual-core chip like the A5. Leaked photos purporting to be iPad parts (see above) also suggest a smaller space for the logic board and more room for a battery.

Telegraph, 6th March: Apple event poll: which iPad upgrade do you want most?

Last night, Apple sent out a press invitation for what will probably be the announcement of the iPad 3 on March 7th. This could be reported with something like the following:

"Apple has invited journalists to an event, likely to be the launch of the iPad 3, on March 7th. The new model is likely to include a screen with twice the resolution of the older models, and a faster processor."

.. which comes to about 40 words. But, when it comes to Apple, tech writers hate to use 40 words when 400 will do, so I set out to find out who achieved the single most overblown report on the subject. And, because every overexcited blog post needs a diagram EXCLUSIVE INFOMGPONIESGRAPHIC, there's one at the top for you.

Methodology

I checked all the major news websites appearing in the front pages of a Google News search for 'iPad launch march', and counted the words in the body copy – excluding captions and headlines. Fifty bonus words were added to the score of any article padded out with some text about Steve Jobs, and bonuses were also appointed for particularly ludicrous errors or overexcited outbursts. The entire scoring table is available for inspection here.

Short and Sweet

The best score goes to Wired (US), which posted a short and to the point 168-word blog post with nothing excessive or silly. Nice work. Kudos also to Pocket Lint, although I was tempted to award bonus points for the use of 'purty', and the BBC, which managed to wrap a bit of balance into a short piece.

IPAD 3 OMFGPONIES!!1!

Others, of course, didn't feel the need to hold back. Everyone's favourite content aggregation turbine the Huffington Post put in a strong showing, with over 650 words and a tone so excitable that it inexplicably dropped into serif text half-way through, but the overall winner has to be Mashable.

In a truly Herculean effort, the tech blog somehow managed to crap out over 750 overly-caffeinated words, including a slideshow of randomly selected rumours, plus a complete second piece containing tweets about the launch which I didn't even bother to count. It even managed to work in some kind of nonsense about an ape, rocketing its total score to over 1000 (remember, the baseline is 40).

One can only imagine how it'll cope with the actual launch day itself.