One minute you’re saying ‘Happy New Year’ and another minute, it’s the month of March already! It’s been rather quiet from us for obvious reasons. Sometimes, it helps to focus on the real deal – develop language-learning apps! Thankfully, we have now completed the first design for our conversational Igbo and Yoruba language-learning apps. What that means is we have programmed all 11 conversational topics complete with sounds and texts. We’ve also been testing them out on mobile phones and tablets.

Presently, we have both conversational apps on a single app. We’ve bundled both Igbo and Yoruba conversational topics into one app without breaking the size. On the iPad and iPhone, it’s average size is 40mb without any content downloaded. In our new design, users get to download content on the go. This way, you have complete control over the space consumed on the device. To tell the truth, we’re still contemplating merging both and subsequent languages into a single app or sticking with what we have where all languages have dedicated apps to themselves. There are pros and cons to both. So far, we’ve complete the following

• Sound recording ✔
• Programming (first run) ✔
• Texts ✔

Where does that leave us? We have the following to go:

• Illustrations
• UI – the interface design
• Localisation – translating from Yoruba and Igbo into Portuguese, Spanish, French…
• Testing/Programming (second run)
• Launch

For the Illustrations, we have to select from a host of existing characters in our Yoruba101 and Igbo101 apps for the paired characters to use. We’ve narrowed them down to the four below and currently seeking input from you on which to go with.

Phew! It can feel like a long way to go before we formally release the new app. But that’s why we’re writing this. It’s one way to stay accountable to our commitment also. Stay tuned!