Technical Links

Quick Links: Language Resources | Chinese Texts | Chinese Culture | Recommended Software | Pocket PC | Macintosh | Chinese Fonts | Cantonese DVD's | Ego Surfing | Kung Fu

Recommended Software

NJStar - essential software for inputting Chinese characters, helping view Chinese on some webpages and converting between traditional and simplified characters. FREE DEMO AVAILABLE

Webbrowsers

  Firefox browser for Windows, Linux and Mac OS - free and open source. Now at version 1.0 and is looking extremely nice indeed.

Opera - extremely fast and easy to use web browser. Free to use but you get ads if you don't register. I find that Opera is still the fastest browser available (although Firefox isn't far behind).

Mozilla - this is the project Firefox is based on and is also completely free (Open Source).  The latest version I tried (0.9.9) worked flawlessly with this site with no tweaking to the default install.  Well done all the coders on the Mozilla project!

Language Resources

Talk Now / World Talk Cantonese - Eurotalk Interactive publish two Cantonese CD ROM's that I know of.  They are both fun to use and are excellent for improving your spoken Cantonese.  They also display many Chinese characters along with the exercises although writing is not really the focus of this series.

HanConv / HanDict - Aaron Chan's fantastic freeware Chinese utilities.  HanConv  allows a multitude of options when converting between different Chinese encodings.  HanDict allows offline searching of some established Chinese dictionaries.  Highly recommended. 
Aaron is called icycloud on our forums by the way, and is also an editor for the site dictionary.

Software I haven't Tried

KuaiXue, A Tool for Learning Chinese - Loz writes: "decent free reader/dictionary to help read big5, gb text files offline although the installation is fiddly - make sure the ini file goes in your windows (or winnt) directory"

Free Chinese Dictionary - An offline dictionary.

Macintosh

Chinese Mac Frequently Asked Questions

Pocket PC

AvantGo - another Palmtop PC service which works with this site.

CE-Star - fantastic Chinese handwriting recognition for your Pocket PC.  Includes Chinese viewing software and utilities. FREE DEMO AVAILABLE

Partner Dictionary English-Chinese - reviewed on this site.

Pocket PC Thoughts - essential daily news site, if any new language software is released you will hear about it at PPCThoughts first!