Niwango[J], the owner of Japan’s most popular video sharing site “Nico Nico Douga[J]“, released its iPhone/iPod appon Monday. The app is for free and available only at Japanese AppStore.
With 3G or WiFi connectivity, the app allows you to search/play videos and leave your comment on Nico Nico Douga, however it does not cover the livecast category called “Nico Nico Live[J]“.
According to the app’s developer lead Mr. Masahito Mizoguchi, the iPhone/iPod app is developed based on Nico Nico’s mobile edition which has been introduced for NTT DoCoMo / au / Softbank handsets since 2007. Unlike the mobile edition which were developed on Java based technologies, the iPhone/iPod app needs to be coded in Object-C language. Such a gap of the development environments caused the developer’s suffering in adjusting image quality on the app. Also, it seemed so hard for them to deploy the service’s symbolic feature that overlapped subtitles run on screen in synchronization with video.
Niwango started developing the iPhone/iPod app last November, and it already completed in early March. But the company was forced to take longer time than expected, to make it pass Apple’s approval to put on the AppStore. Niwango doesn’t disclose the reason why it has been delayed, but reportedly it seems to have violated AppStore’s guidelines especially in terms of how Niwango manages the video contents.
via CNET Japan[J]
Masaru IKEDA
When I first ran across this article I was a little lsot as to how I could get the app. After quite a bit of searching I found how. I have made a simple guide for others to follow and posted it here: http://blog.warll.com/2009/how-to-download-the-nico-nico-iphone-application-outside-japan-for-free/
沒有台灣版ㄉ嗎???
似乎沒有台灣的版. There are no mentions on other languages.
http://live.nicovideo.jp/iphone/
how can I get Nico Nico Douga on US iTunes?
hi there the nico nicp app on itunes for iphones and ipod touch is called inico and the ipad version is called inico hd