Since more people are learning about the Ancient Maya App it seems like a good time for posts about our history. This first post highlights features added to the Ancient Maya App over its three year history. Future history posts will be more personal. The Ancient Maya App first appeared in the app stores in …
With the Ancient Maya App’s Write Feature you can easily create glyph blocks. But if you create enough text, you’ll run into the “missing glyph” problem. There are a couple phonemes for which we don’t have ancient glyphs. In some cases it is for ancient phonemes where we haven’t identified ancient glyphs. In other cases …
Update: this bug has been fixed. My friend Memo is an expert epigrapher. He found a bug converting the Latin alphabet Maya text “Ko’ox kanik u masil maya” to glyph blocks. Here’s what the app currently does: As Memo points out, the first glyph is incorrect. Here’s his comment: First, I want to point out …
Now you can convert Mayan text to glyph blocks. Type in a word like “otoot” or a sentence like “Ko’ox kanik u masil Maya” and have it instantly written in phonetic glyphs in glyph blocks. Here’s a an example: You can share the glyph blocks over email, WhatsApp, text messages, etc. This is a preliminary …
A previous post discussed how the app creates glyph in some detail. This post is meant to address likely questions and highlight the app’s limitations. Does the app implement all glyph block types (called quadrats) defined in the proposed Unicode standard? No. The proposed standard defines 189 quadrats. We implement the 13 most common. Currently …
As the team behind the project grows it becomes useful to document how things are done. This post reviews how we provide both an English and a Spanish user interface. The app is built in Dart and Flutter. Flutter is an application framework supporting smartphones especially well. Application frameworks provide many features, one of them …
The Ancient Maya App converts text input as a Maya transcription written in latin letters to a glyph block transliteration. Here’s what it looks like if the user types “otoot” and presses the “Convert” button: This process requires several steps. Below is a description of the steps followed by a specific example. First, each input …
Tommy and I are working on a new feature that’s based Tommy’s earlier work while in Mérida. It will allow users to type in a word and convert it to a glyph block. For example, the user might enter “otoot” which is the ancient Mayan word for home. The app would then try to convert …
How do highly syllabic languages work on smartphones today? This is a bigger research effort than I have time for right now so I asked ChatGPT. This post begins with ChatGPT 4’s summary, suggested videos, and then a more detailed breakdown. The videos highlight system level custom keyboard implementations for syllabic languages including Japanese, Korean …
A new release of the Ancient Maya App is available for iOS and Android. Release 2.4.0 allows the user to change the Long Count calendar origin date. It defaults to August 11, 3114 BC. Just click on the origin to change it. You can choose any date for the origin between -3200BC and -3100BC. This release will …