Taking a small break from my break to introduce:

KanjiBox for iPhone

By far the best way to spend your Summer while improving your Japanese (whether at the beach or on a crowded Tokyo subway, wedged between two sweaty salarymen). This application works on all iPhone and iPod Touch models (provided they run iPhone OS 3.0 or later) and is entirely offline (doesn’t use any internet connection at all).

More info and screenshots on KanjiBox’s website…

And of course, for our ipod-deprived brethren, there is always KanjiBox for Facebook: free and full of fun multiplayer goodness!

One little-known feature of the Japanese Input tools on OS X is the ability to easily access a whole lot of unicode symbols without having to go dig through the Character Palette each and every time. If you enable Japanese Input (also known as Kotoeri) on your mac, hitting a keyboard shortcut (apple-space by default, I think) will toggle kana input on and off, whereby you can type japanese words in kanas and press the spacebar to pick a matching kanji (followed by ‘enter’ to validate the transliteration).
The nifty bit comes from the availability of UTF-8 characters that are not kanji, but nonetheless useful in a lot of situations. Just as any other kanji, typing a kana sequence (usually the name of the symbol in Japanese), followed by a press of the spacebar, will automatically let you insert the desired symbol.
Note: Apparently, most of these work equally well on Windows Japanese Input system, but I haven’t tested it.

For example, any Japanese girl knows all too well how to obtain the following cutesy icons:
おんぷ[onpu]　→　♬♩♪♫
ほし[hoshi]　→　☆★

On a more pragmatic note, you can also choose from a very complete set of arrows:
やじるし[yajirushi]　→　↑↓☝⇔ etc.

And one of my personal favourite: european currency symbols that would otherwise take half an hour to find on a standard US keyboard:
ゆーろ[yuro] →　€
ぽんど[pondo] →　£

Another very cool set for your scientific paper-writing needs:
すうがく[suugaku]／えんざん[enzan]　→　√∃∀≠±∇

Not to mention the entire greek alphabet:
あるふぁ[arufa]　α
べーた[be-ta]　β
がんま[ganma]　γ
でるた[deruta]　δ
しぐま[siguma]　σ

etc. etc.

You will find even more of these in this large (albeit probably not exhaustive) list of special character shortcuts.

So you have decided to learn Japanese? Perhaps you have even signed up for this year’s JLPT and parted with their robber baron’s fees in some foolish hope that it will motivate you for the month-and-a-half revision time that is left until then (oh wait, that’s me. never mind).

Now, there are many ways you could go about harvesting the Web’s boundless resources to help you in that quest.

You could for example do aerobics while watching awkward multicultural multilingual 80’s lesbian action:

…

Or you could sign into your Facebook account and add my latest online realization.

Kanji Box will fulfill your most secret kanji fantasies: it does absolutely everything, short of showing up for the test for you (gory details here). To top it all, it will let you compete against your friends: nothing like a bit of competition to get you worked up on the kanji skills (cue uplifting karate training montage).

[for all Facebook-haters out there: I feel you. I am not myself overly smitten with the concept. But I must admit Facebook sucks marginally less than its competitors, and its 3rd party API took most of the drag out of developing Kanji Box’ multi-user features… so do not expect a standalone version too soon, sorry]