Coming to America

I'll be moving to Seattle, Washington with my wife in a couple of weeks as I've accepted a position at Amazon! I will be joining the AWS team to work on the Kindle's cloud-powered browser Silk. Needless to say I'm super excited to get into it :)

This is the reason for my being a little quiet on the blog recently; organising everything to move overseas. I hope to continue blogging after moving, though probably not quite as much as I have been over the last year. I will also be able to start up my Korean study again which I took a little break from to focus on work stuff.

Korean Vocab Widget

I released my first app on Google Play yesterday!

As some of you may know, I'm learning Korean in my spare time. Being a software developer I'm always thinking about how I use computers to increase my productivity, and that's exactly what happened. I was looking at my phone and thought about how many times a day do I look at this thing. What if I was also doing something productive when I checked to see if I have any emails or what the time is?

So it hit me, a lock screen widget to supplement my Korean vocabulary study. I went searching for something fitting my needs on the Play Store and found very little, so I decided to make one!

It's a customisable widget that shows Korean words and English translations. There are only just over 100 words right now, but that number should increase pretty soon. Especially considering it's built for me! It's up for free (and ad-free) on Google Play.

Apply fonts based on language using CSS3

You can apply fonts based on unicode character codes using the unicode-range CSS3 rule. Fonts with a unicode-range rule will only target the specified range and fall back to other fonts with characters not in the range. Multiple ranges can be used by separating them with a comma.

@font-face {
  font-family: FancyJapanese;
  src: local('KaiTi');
  unicode-range: U+4E00-9FBF, U+3040-30FF; /* Kanji, Kana */
}

@font-face {
  font-family: FancyKorean;
  src: local('Batang');
  unicode-range: U+AC00-D7AF;
}

.serif {
  font-family: FancyJapanese, FancyKorean, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

Here's an example, firstly with a regular block:

English 日本語 한국어

And now with the rules serif class applied:

English 日本語 한국어