Last week, Glen organized a group of people who had little or no Spanish language ability.  They played ¡Dígame! and had a lot of fun.  With a QR Code on each card, linked to a video of a native speaker saying the phrase expressively, sometimes with gestural hints, plus having the translation into English , the “fear factor” of being immersed in this new language was greatly reduced.  Each person was challenged to teach a phrase, acting it out like Charades. Even if that person had to learn from the English translation in the video, the rest of the group learned through the immersive quality of the game, decoding meaning by watching and using their own gestures while only hearing and saying the phrase in Spanish.

The feature of QR codes linked to expressive videos on the phrase cards has been a big success so far and adds a fun dimension to the game. This week we’ll be recording our latest revisions of the game phrases and creating links and QR codes for each phrase.  Today is the last day to pre-order the game on Indiegogo:
http://igg.me/at/digame/x/550786

One afternoon I was prototyping various mobile designs for Mightyverse user experiences and as a non-technical person, I needed some simple ways to embed videos with subtitles into the UX ideas I was working on. Oddly enough, it seems that Apple disables subtitles when playing back videos embedded in iOS browsers and I was trying to find a work around.

We recently recorded some basic conversation phrases with Becky Z and so using the video for “No, I cannot speak English” in Chinese Mandarin, I created 3 .srt files using the free subtitle creation app called Jubler. Jubler has a relatively simple interface for creating subtitle phrases in a perplexing variety of formats. I chose to make .srt files with UTF-8 encoding. I then took the video into Handbrake and tried muxing the Jubler created .srt files with the video in order to make an MP4 file with subtitle tracks to play on my iPhone. No luck after an hour of playing around.
Then I thought to try adding subtitles to the video in YouTube. Five minutes later I had a linkable, embeddable video with 3 subtitle tracks applied!

The basic steps are:
1. Open Jubler and Choose “New File”
2. Open Jubler and then click the “Closed Eye” icon on the top right of the toolbar.
3. Navigate to your video in the resulting dialogue and select it.
4. Select the part of the waveform to subtitle in the resulting display, then type the corresponding text at the bottom of the frame in the gray area.
5. Save as “SubRip (.srt)” and “UTF-8”.
6. Upload your video to YouTube
7. In the Video Manager, choose the Captions tab for your video (top right of the options)
8. Click the “Upload Caption File or Transcript” button to the right of the video player
9. Choose your .srt file, name it and your done!

The resulting YouTube video still doesn’t show the closed captioning in Safari on my iPhone 5 (with the latest iOS update). It does however play with subtitles in the native Google YouTube app. It’s interesting what Apple feels is superfluous to their users, I wonder that it’s not been more widely criticized, especially for people with hearing impairments. I’d love to hear from people who have figured out a workaround to Apple’s limiting of closed captions on videos played in Safari.

You can see the “No, I cannot speak English” in Chinese Mandarin video on YouTube here.
And the original video on Mightyverse here.

Japanese Relief App loading page

Japanese Relief Phrasepack is developed for all of the victims of the Tohoku Pacific Ocean coast earthquake that occurred on March 11, 2011.
It’s free. We were driven to do something for the people of Japan and this felt like a small effort that might help. The Japanese-English version is now available here.

Please Pray for Japan and the safety of the people.

– Mightyverse team

ジャパニーズ・リリーフ・フレーズパック（無料）は、2011年３月11日に起きた東北地方太平洋沖地震で、被災された外国人と日本人の皆様のコミニケーションを少しでも手助けできればと思って開発させていただきました。 日本語から英語の翻訳版の「日本救援」アプももうすぐ、アップルのアプストアーで入手できるようになります。(日本語から英語版の「日本救済」アプできました。)

被災された皆様、そのご家族の方々に、心よりお見舞い申し上げます。皆様のご無事と、一日も早い復興をお祈り申しあげます。

マイティーバース・チーム

Ruby Kaigi 2010

８月２７日からつくばで始まったRuby Kaigi 2010のオープニングで、Rails 3 やRuby 1.9などの新しいコードの話と一緒に、言葉の壁が話の話題になったのは、びっくりしました。RubyとRailsというプログラミングのコードは、コミニケーションし合っても、それをコーディングするプログラマー同士が、上手くコミニケーションできないのは、とても残念なことです。

お互いにお互いの言葉を勉強しましょうということで、言葉の壁の問題の話は終了しましたが、プログラミングのような専門的な言葉を使うコミケーションは、一般のコミケーション以外のボキャブラリーや、専門的な言い回しが必要になってきます。

Mightyverseでは、そんな問題をなんとか解決できないかと思い。プログラミングのフレーズリストをつくりました。

Pair Programing Phrase List
また、８月２８日の午後に、サラ・メイさんペア・プログラミングのワークショップにも、Mightyverseのフレーズが使用されるとのことです。

Mightyverseをとおして少しでも、皆様の意見の交換にお役にたてれば光栄です。