What a crazy past 2-3 months! Almost every day I was working for up to 10 or even 14 hours on my projects about Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese. I’ve produced quite a few projects:

• it started with a grammar book, which then lead to
• several apps,
• several typing and input helpers,
• including a unique, highly innovative typing helper to write in Pīnyīn without numbers and selection boxes,
• a dictionary filter and dictionary interface,
• I even put Pīnyīn diacritics on a font,
• and worked on several algorithms.

Algorithms, algorithms everywhere

For example, my algorithm for coloring vowels (or vowel groups) in HTML containers: what started as a lagging, heavy, cumbersome-to-use prototype (as shown in a previous post), is now a blazingly fast algorithm that can handle tens of thousands of words, on large canvas.

As a surprising side-effect, this unleashed the potential to play with Chinese words and text in an artistic way, in a way hardly ever done before, because the means simply didn’t exist before.

Here’s a list of all 8-letter Chinese words that contain syllables (or words) that sound like »yào« — or at least, all the words listed in the CC-CEDICT dictionary. Sorted with PinyinAbcSort, my algorithm that can sort Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (fast).

This must be the Austrian Viennese blood boiling inside of me, this innovative, unconventional play with language and words, a genetic feature that suddenly, unexpectedly, rose up to get hold of me and my senses.

And I can’t stop. It’s like writing a novel. The story unfolds. The story pushes me, the writer, forwards, manically, unceasingly, like in a fever dream. But instead of plots and chapters, I produce product designs and prototypes.

But to what ends? Where does this lead to? This is becoming far too big for me.