Thursday, April 28, 2011

Free Chinese language lunar calendar app

One of my coworkers told me about this free Chinese language lunar calendar app (has ads):

万年历免费版 (wànniánlì miǎnfèibǎn; 10,000 year calendar - free edition)
(萬年曆免費版 in traditional characters)

You can find it at the App Store by searching for "Chinese calendar".

Although the app's name is in simplified characters, it has a setting for traditional characters, which is what I use (although the "quality control" on simplified versus traditional characters is not always perfect). I also chose holiday and vacation settings for Taiwan; China (the default), Hong Kong, Singapore, and USA are other choices.

Now, I cannot read Chinese quickly enough to rapidly absorb all the Chinese text that introduces the app.  However, aside from the fact that my coworker was already using it, I felt "safe enough" that Apple is a "large enough" company   :-)   to have reviewed the app, including its instructions, before making it available in the App Store, and I installed it. While certainly some bad apples (pun intended) could get through their review process, there should at least be more supervision there than at the Android Market, about which news stories like this 6/13/11 one already seem a bit too common.

As my coworker said, this app provides yet another opportunity to learn a little more Chinese, even if you are not big on consulting the lunar calendar for, e.g., good days to get married or what have you.

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