"Greann Clock" Irish language (Gaeilge) clock: free download for iPhone & iPod Touch

Greann is proud to announce our first iPhone/iPod Touch application!

It's a fun little app that will allow you to practice telling the time as Gaeilge.

Just open it up and it displays the current hour, along with a translation, such as "Tá sé a hOcht a chlog". Tap the "Abair é!" button, and it will speak it for you, so you know how to pronounce it.

It's a free download at the iTunes App Store. Just go into iTunes, click on iTunes Store on the left, then enter "Irish Clock" (or "Greann") on the searchbar on the top right and press [Enter]. Choose "Greann Clock" from the search results, and you should see the screen at top left (click to enlarge). Click the "Get App" button next to "Free", and it'll download for free. Then sync your iPhone or iPod Touch, and you're all set!

You can give feedback on the Greann Forums: there's a new subforum just for Greann apps there. Slán!

Book Review: Basic Irish, by Nancy Stenson

I'm writing a short book review of Nancy Stenson's new-ish book "Basic Irish: A Grammar and Workbook". I'll post the review in the Greann forums soon.

My short take? The book is fabulous!

iPhone now does fadas!

Good news and bad news.

First the bad news. I don't see any international keyboard selections as predicted in my earlier post.

Now the good news: It doesn't matter! According to Daring Fireball, you can now press-and-hold a vowel and get a fada with iPhone software 1.1.1! Yay. I tried it and it works.

"Tivo for radio": Listen & record Raidió na Gaeltachta

A fantastic new application.

It's called Radio Shift. Just click on the link to go to Rogue Amoeba's web site and download a free trial.

Here's a screen shot (click to view full size):



Of course, it's only available for the Mac. :-)

iPhone as Gaeilge?

As much as I love my iPhone, it has one drawback: You can't type in Irish. Well, you can't include fadas. Well, it will display them fine if you go to a web page or get an e-mail with fadas in it. But there's no way to enter them on the keyboard when you're typing.

iPhone Atlas is reporting that the new iPod Touch does support non-US keyboards (and, thus, presumably accents and fadas and whatnot). So the hope and expectation is that an iPhone update will get the iPhone up to the capabilities of the iPod Touch.

"Podcast #2: Irish Alphabet" is out!

Want a handy reference to the Irish alphabet? You got it--in a PDF, even!

Yep, podcasts don't have to be audio--they can be video or even PDFs. And the most logical format for a podcast on the Irish language alphabet is none other than PDF.

So enjoy our latest podcast (including details on seanchló fonts) now!

While you're at it check out our new podcast logo. We hope you like it; it ties into our blog, forums, and web site much better now. (Thanks to Cionaodh for help in finding some confetti for the logo :-) ).

How to subscribe to our Greann.com Fun With Irish podcast:
http://www.greann.com/podcasts/index.html

Web page for podcasts 1-5:
http://www.greann.com/podcasts/podcasts001-100/podcasts001-005.html

Greann.com undergoes facelift

You may have been wondering why it's been so quiet on Greann.com, including this blog and my podcast.

Well, I've actually been busy as a bee, creating a new logo, making the various sites (web, forum, blog) look more similar, changing how Hints work on the forums, updating the forum software, changing the web site from RapidWeaver to DreamWeaver CS3, etc., etc.

You should see all the changes now. Let me know if you notice any problems.

Unfortunately, moving from RapidWeaver to DreamWeaver means any bookmarks you might've had to the main web site probably don't work any more. However, the new links make much more sense than before (URLs have logical names like /fun/crosswords instead of /page2/assets, etc.).