iShodo: Try calligraphy on your iPhone

Serkan Toto

Dr. Serkan Toto is an independent consultant and advisor focusing on Japan’s web, mobile and social gaming industries. Based in Tokyo, he works together with financial institutions and startups worldwide. Serkan has been the Japan contributor for TechCrunch.com since 2008. He is sept-lingual, holds an MBA and is a PhD in economics. → Learn More

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

ishodo

Tokyo-based Ubiquitous Entertainment has developed iShodo, a calligraphy application for the iPhone (the user interface is completely in English).

Japanese calligraphy in particular takes years and years to master and is widely considered as a form of art. I wrote “CrunchGear” in Japanese on my own iPhone using iShodo and you can see the result in the picture below (believe me, my handwriting is bad – even in Japanese).

crunchgear_in_japanese

The app should be especially interesting for all students of Japanese (and Chinese) who want to practice writing all those complicated letters on Hanshi, “virtually original” Japanese paper.

Users can choose between pens/brushes in three different sizes and thin or condensed ink. It’s possible to save your works of art as pictures in a gallery (examples) or to send them directly to a Twitter account, which is a cool idea.

iShodo is available for $0.99 in the App Store.

The video below shows iShodo in action.

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