Original iPhone comes with 3 Chinese input methods: Handwriting, Pinyin and Zhuyin. zhim! support more input method: Boshiamy, Cangjie, Dayi, Pinyin and Pinyin.

zhim! is not a native input method on iPhone, therefore you have to share text between applications via Clipboard, which support by iPhone OS 3.0+

How to use:

After installed zhim!, or you want to change input method later, tap setting button then select the method you want.

Tap on the blue indicate button to view/search all words in the dictionary of the input method.

Then after finished your article, you may choose to copy all text to clipboard then quite zhim!, go to the another application like Text.app and paste the text. Or if your are going to write a new email or search somewhere from google map, you can select send text to Mail.app or map.app

When send text to Mail.app. zhim! would copy the first line to subject, this could save some time for switching between zhim! and Mail.app or another cut and paste process.

When typing Chinese with some English sentence inside which is very common. You don’t have to switch between different keyboard, you can just type the English word then tap it from matched words area.

FAQ:

Q: Do I have to jailbreak my phone?
A: No. you don’t have to.

Q: Can I send text to Text.app (SMS)
A: No. Unfortunately Text.app only accept phone number as parameter from 3rd party app.

Q: Does zhim! support iPhone OS 2.x?
A: No. It could be, but without clipboard support, it would not be useful as it should be.

Q: Does zhim! support lanscape keyboard?
A: No, not really. After using awhile, I don’t feel nay benefit typing with lanscape keyboard. It take too many place for keyboard for keyboard and reduce the vision, so I decide not to enable lanscape keyboard in current version.