Find a restaurant in any neighborhood quickly, book tickets on the Taiwan High Speed Rail, look up a word in Chinese or English, or pretend you’re a chicken crossing the road — it certainly seems there’s like an iPhone app for everyone and everything.
Here’s a look at a few notable apps spotted in Taiwan’s iTunes Store this month. All apps listed work both on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
GETTING AROUND TOWN
If you’re in an unfamiliar neighborhood and want to find a place to eat quickly, Taiwan Food Lite (台灣美食地圖) will do the job. This free app, which has been hovering around the Top 10 in the iTunes Store, uses GPS or WiFi to find your location and lets you search for neighboring restaurants within a range of up to 10km. Searches can be tailored to find, for example, the closest vegetarian restaurant or cafe. Click on a result and it shows the address on Google Maps. Tap the information tab, and it takes you to a Google search page with results on the restaurant.
RailTaiwan (HSR) (US$1.99) lets frequent travelers on the Taiwan High Speed Rail check train schedules and make reservations on the go. The interface is intuitive and easy to use — search for available tickets by date, tap on the desired train, and the app opens the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp Web site within the embedded browser. The app, available in Mandarin, English and Japanese, also offers access to maps detailing the latest highway traffic conditions.
Get your bearings at each Taipei MRT station with Taipei Transit. This free app compiles all digitized versions of the official maps posted at all Taipei MRT stations to store in your iPhone or iPod Touch. The home page is a map of the entire MRT system. Tap on the station you’re going to, and a map of the neighborhood pops up. Though the app lacks any deep interactive features (such as integration with Google Maps), its simple design makes for an easy and useful reference.
CHECK YOUR LOTTERY NUMBERS
Going through a pile of receipts to see if you’ve won any of the cash prizes from the bimonthly Uniform-Invoice Lottery (統一發票) can be a tedious chore. Two apps from Taiwan’s iTunes Store ease the task of checking your numbers and add a little amusement.
I Love the Uniform-Invoice Lottery (我愛統一發票) connects to the Internet to retrieve the latest winning digits and then displays an input screen to punch in your own receipt numbers to see if you’ve won. The app doesn’t save that much time, but it relieves the eyesore of scanning back and forth when comparing numbers.
A cutesy female voice reads the numbers out loud and chirps “you can throw it away” (可以丟掉囉) if you don’t make the minimum threshold of three matching numbers. If you win, it’s cheerful ringing bells. Both the free and the paid versions (US$0.99) have sat consistently in the Top 25 among apps in Taiwan’s iTunes Store this month.
Tongyi Fapiao Duijiang (統一發票對獎, Uniform-Invoice Lottery Receipt Prize Check) does many of the same things, but replaces the cutesy voice with a loud collective sigh when your numbers don’t match. Winning numbers are greeted with the sound of trumpets.
CHINESE AND ENGLISH DICTIONARIES
Inventec (英業達) touts its Dr Eye program (US$9.99) for iPhone and iPod Touch as the “most powerful English-Chinese and Chinese-English mobile dictionary.” Though it makes good use of the iPhone’s platform with an easy-to-use interface, this popular program is the same old story for those familiar with the Microsoft Windows version.
Beginning Mandarin learners shouldn’t bother with this one as the dictionary favors native Mandarin speakers. Even though it has a Chinese-to-English dictionary, the quality is only passable and there is no listed pronunciation in either Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號) (commonly known as Bopomofo) or Hanyu Pinyin.
Those who prefer to search for words using Hanyu Pinyin could consider Murage Inc’s iCED Pro Chinese/English Dictionary (US$29.99), which uses a digital version of the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary from the University of Hawaii Press, one of the best dictionaries around for non-native Mandarin speakers (or hold off for the iPhone version of the beloved Chinese-English learning software Pleco, which is currently in beta). The free version of iCED uses the open-source CEDICT dictionary, which is maintained and edited by users.
ALL-IN-ONE TOOLBOX
App Box (US$0.99) is the Swiss Army knife of apps for the iPhone. It is actually a set of 18 apps in one. There are the standard tools including a currency converter, battery meter, flashlight and ruler, but you also can impress (or bore) your friends with some unusual functions: measure angles of inclination with the clinometer, which uses the iPhone’s accelerometer, or use pCalendar to help track your menstrual cycles. Hint: Give the “Lite” version a try first, as it already has many of the basic utility apps.
FUN AND GAMES
FingerPiano Lite, a mini piano for your iPhone, responds surprisingly well to the touch. Play along with pre-programmed works of Chopin and Beethoven by following visual cues that appear above the keyboard. The paid version (US$1.99) offers even more masterpieces to learn.
Why did the chicken cross the road? To get her chicks to school. In Cluck it! (US$0.99), a chart-topping game in the iTunes Store this month, you play a mother hen whose goal is to safely usher your chicks across a busy street to school. It’s simple, addictive and full of cheesy, hard-to-resist puns that pop up when the hen gets hit by a car (“chicken roll,” “grilled chicken”). Have fun trying not to cluck it up.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and