When I first visited Japan, I bought an electronic dictionary. This saved me from looking up kanji (the complex characters borrowed from Chinese) by counting strokes and identifying radicals (the root component of a kanji character) to index into the enormous tome that I had been using. The dictionary was much lighter, and had a stylus that could be used to draw kanji. Using this sort of input method, the order that you draw the strokes still matters, but it’s much faster than flipping pages. I used this dictionary for getting around Japan, studying, reading manga, and playing video games. Years later, after the Nintendo DS came out, I upgraded using a cartridge called Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten. It uses the same stylus input method, but the results are marked up in color and it has a nicer interface, including a history of recently looked-up words, which is extremely useful. One of the other tools that I was using at the time (and still use today) is a plugin for Firefox called Rikai-chan. When enabled, this plugin allows you to hover the mouse over a word and see the definition in a pop-up.

Rikai-chan also has dictionaries for German, French, and Russian, and similar tools may exist for other languages too, so make sure to look for this kind of plugin for the language that you study if you like to read online material in the original language.

My favorite dictionary now is Japanese for the iPhone. You can look up words by typing roman characters with the default Qwerty keyboard, or by enabling the Japanese and Simplified Chinese Handwriting keyboards in the iPhone settings you can enter a word using the Japanese input method (which presents you with possible kanji as you type phonetically), or by drawing kanji. It includes expressions, proverbs, conjunctions, and interjections, and has an impressive catalog of example sentences. As if this isn’t enough, it also has a vocabulary list feature. I like to create a list of new words for each novel, manga, or video game that I’m into, and then study them using the flashcard feature wherever I am when I have a spare minute. The flashcard feature uses an algorithm based on a series of steps.

When you identify a word correctly, it advances to the next step, and eventually into a “Known” category. Usually there are about twenty or so items between the “Unknown” and “Known” categories that you’re working on, but occasionally you see some items that are in the “Known” category as well. I’d highly recommend an app for your language of interest that has this sort of system for reviewing vocabulary.

In fact, I recently discovered Smart.fm, an online tool/community that’s based on a similar system. There’s a video on the home page that describes how their system automatically determines which material you need to be presented with at a given time to have the best chance of remembering it. I actually recall reading an article a while back about a man who was living his life according to this sort of algorithm. One of the other interesting things about Smart.fm is that in addition to the Goals (sets of material to study) curated by Smart.fm, the user community can create their own. So you can find Goals for varying grades of vocabulary for Japanese, Spanish, and other languages, as well as Goals consisting of the capitals of the world or the names of stars and galaxies. For Japanese, the system does a good job quizzing you on the phonetic reading of a word, the meaning of the word, and the kanji. Some of the goals include sentences, which serve as examples and are also presented to quiz your knowledge. From what I’ve read, images can also be incorporated into the material for a Goal, so the system has the capability to support many areas of study. Unfortunately, their main quiz interface is a Flash app and they dropped the iPhone app that they had developed, but I suspect that they’re working on a new HTML5 solution that will work both on their site and on multiple mobile platforms.

On their own, the tools I’ve mentioned really only help review and expand vocabulary. Without a solid foundation in grammar, even Rikai-chan can only help so much. I have a few books and dictionaries for grammar reference, but I haven’t come across any nice apps or plugins to help in this area of language study. My best suggestion here is to take classes to build your foundation, keep your books, and seek out interesting material at your level to practice with. I’m currently trying to figure out if there’s a good way to get manga in Japanese on the iPad. If you can build some friendships with native speakers, that’s another good way to explore new grammar, and maybe even learn a regional dialect.

And of course the ultimate boost for your language skills, once you have a good start, is to immerse yourself by living abroad. You’ll learn more about the culture, customs and lifestyle, which will reinforce your understanding of language and vice-versa. You might even gain some new perspective and learn more about yourself. And you’ll always have an urge to go back someday.

Ever wondered how web designers make those little icons up in the address bar? Can’t figure out how to make a glossy button, complete with faded out reflective web 2.0 goodness? Or how about how to create those little badges and buttons you see gracing the sidebars and footers of your favorite blogs? I’m here to help.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to own an $3,000 software package and a bleeding-edge beefed up computer. In fact you can pass as a pro without even opening up Photoshop… for, dare I say, free! Thanks to the advancement of web technology and all of the love being spread by the web design community, you should have no problem convincing your friends you’ve spent back-breaking hours creating a pixel-perfect masterpiece.

I’ve compiled a list of 10 great online tools to help you become a web design (insert musical genre of choice here) star.

favicon.ico Generator
This tool is great for creating favicons. You have the option of importing an image to trace over with a very intuitive user interface making this task a snap. Favicon.cc even gives you the ability to create an animated icon! What more do you need? I’ll answer that, nothing.

Button Maker
This Button Maker by Adam Kalsey is the perfect tool for creating your own zany badge & button images. Choose your own custom messages, colors, and crispy pixel perfect positioning options.

Websnapshot 1.0
This is an Adobe Air application, which means you have to download and install it, but it’s free. This tool takes snapshots of any given website and creates 3 different sizes on your command. Perfect for bloggers and web content publishers.

Photoshop Express
Did you know Photoshop has an online web application that let’s you “Upload, tweak, rotate, edit, share and store your photos” for free? I’ve used this in a pinch a few times, and it’s very handy. There are a few filters as you see in the thumbnail.

Silk Icons
This set from famfamfam.com has over 700 icons you can use for any purpose, and make any changes you like. We use these on our in-house project management system, Athena. This is the most expansive free icon set I’ve seen.

stock.xchng
I can’t stress enough how great this site is. Users get hundreds of thousands of high quality, hand picked stock photos and graphics – all free! It’s also a great way for you to share your own self-produced stock art as a way to give back to this wonderful community.

Squidfingers’ Patterns
The web design community truly is a sharing bunch these days. Squidfingers has been sharing these beautiful pixel patterns for years, before it was trendy to be so giving. If your looking for web page background ideas, don’t sleep on this site.

Web Developer Firefox Extension
This tool comes in pretty handy if you dabble in html and/or CSS at all. It gives you easy access to actions such as: validating html and css, displaying image information, clearing your browser cache, viewing outlined css page elements, and much, much more.

ColorZilla Firefox Extension
This tool is perfect for grabbing a color for inspiration in your own designs. With two clicks you’re armed with the HSB, RGB, and Hex values for any given color on a webpage.

MeasureIt Firefox Extension
All too often we need to know the dimensions of areas on a web page. This is the rich man’s version of “print-screen, fire up Photoshop, paste, selection marquee”. If you understood that last sentence, congratulations, you are just as geeky as me.

I hope you find these gems as useful as I have. Feel free to share your favorite tools I left out in the comments!

Instead of continuing with our speculation, I thought it might be cool to ask you, our readers, what you think. So tell us, what is most compelling about our blog, and what is lacking?

We began with a few writers and over time have added more in an effort to up the quality of the content, diversify the topics we cover and well represent many areas of work at IMA.

Over time we have noticed our Google analytics numbers going steadily up. This makes people happy, in the simple “more is better” way. But we know that this is not always true…sometimes less is more. Right?

So, lately we have started getting feedback that the voice of the blog has become too fractured by the large number of regular contributors. This feedback was unexpected at first, and seemingly in opposition to our growing readership, but as we grapple with it, the juxtaposition makes more sense now…

So before we go and change things again, we thought we would ask you to weigh in and let us know if you are dying to read more from a particular author, want to see more in-depth category pages, or if you just want us to shut up about it already and write something good. So let us have it!