I can’t wait to see what they do with egword on macOS and iOS. There is lots of work to do but it’s great that Norihito Hirose and Kenta Arano have their baby back.

Believe it or not egword Universal 2 still runs fine on macOS Sierra. Hirose san announced the complete transfer of all Ergosoft assets to Monokaki-do on September 4 for what Hirose san said was “a reasonable price.” The first order of business will be releasing a patch for egword Universal 2 to run on High Sierra. A few years later he negotiated a deal to release the venerable Japanese text input module EG Bridge which he relaunched as Kawasemi ( Kingfisher) but egword assets remained out of reach…until this week. At the time he wanted to continue programming for macOS but Koei KK would not sell him the product assets. I talked with Hirose san in 2010 just as the first iPad hit the market. Norihito Hirose and Kenta Arano, the very talented lead programmers of Ergosoft set up with own company Monokaki-do in early 2008 and created some of the first hit Japanese iPhone apps such as the Japanese dictionary Dajirin. iPhone had not been released in Japan yet and the app economy had not materialized. Unfortunately Ergosoft parent company Koei KK closed down the subsidiary in late 2007 and killed off the entire product line seeing no future in macOS. Clean, fast and rock solid, it was, and still is, the best Japanese work processor I ever used. egword Universal 2 was the first OSX/macOS app built ground up using Apple’s then brand new CoreText framework. Ergosoft had just released a spectacular upgrade to their Japanese word processor “egword” which had been on the Japanese market from 1984. In 2007 I visited the office of Ergosoft near Yokohama for what turned out to be the last time.

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