Ever wondered how you could type in your own language and do much more fun with your phone; browsing Indic language wikipedia articles to commenting on friend's facebook posts to tweeting? So, here is something exciting coming on Open source!
Recently we had a guest, YuviPanda, a former developer with Wikimedia Foundation and an open source geek. Yuvi spent spent some with us and I got a chance to explain how problematic it is for a mobile user to type in Indic languages. Though most smartphones have sound font support and rendering typing in Indic languages was far from reality, at least to me. While explaining the problem which many others would be facing while posting a status on facebook or tweeting many end users would like to have few major things in a new typing tool:
- A simple interface and easy navigation
- Options to switch typing schemes/languages (Indic
↔ English)
- Readability: Font size should be made to be read properly. Based on the jQuery.ime (https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.ime) for Indic languages Yuvi created a prototype (http://goo.gl/jH3TO).