Word Tracer - Learn Chinese is Apple's Staff Favorite!

Word Tracer - Learn Chinese just got featured on App Store as a Staff Favorite, ten days after it got approved. If you pay attention, the most recently released app on this list is in May. So perhaps Apple fell in love with Word Tracer at first sight? Regardless, we are honored.

This is the first iPad app we have created and the second app from our company to be featured on App Store (the first was our iPhone app Idea Organizer) and we feel incredibly fortunate and honored. It goes to show that if you put your heart into making a product for your users on App Store, it has a chance to be recognized. Word Tracer - Learn Chinese was a labor of love for us. We have no idea what the market is like and how many it would sell but we know an app like this will help a lot of people learn to write one of the hardest languages on the planet. With Asia rising, Chinese has become increasingly more relevant. Case in point, we have an office in Shanghai and we constantly witness the huge influx of people coming to China for business, for long distance relationship and for the rich culture.

In the coming weeks, we will blog about our experience developing this deceptively simple app (or as I call it - the complexity of simplicity) and the enormous pain we went through - from preparing the massive amount of data for the 1500 characters to keeping the app size under 20MB down so our users can download the app over 3G. Even little thing like the app icon has taken multiple iterations to get to where it is now.

For now, we urge you to check out the app and start introducing Chinese into your household. If you have kids, be sure to introduce them this important language early on. They will thank you for it. Even if you have no interest in doing business in China, learning Chinese will give you unexpected side benefits. Scientists have found that learning Chinese can be beneficial to your cognitive development and increase your musical talent.

As an interesting side note, fame investor Jim Rogers moved to Singapore precisely for this reason - to allow his daughters grow up learning Chinese.