[Wikita-l] Typing in Indic Languages from mobile phones made Easy!

Hi all, 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). In rounds of testing and bug fixing finally it is here: http://yuvi.in/indic-typing/index.html Right now it works online for most smartphones having Indic and rendering support. Someone can use it online from the same link above. The offline version works fro iPhone and Yuvi is working on fixing bugs for Android. The offline app will soon be available for Android. Once it works perfectly with Android it will be made available for free in Android market. We are still to test this for Symbian, Blackberry and Windows, 3 other market leaders. Please test and give us feedback and report bugs on Meta<http://goo.gl/sBiaF> (http://goo.gl/sBiaF). I am still in the pipeline to persuade to add a feature for searching on Indic wikipedias from this app. Please join me clapping for Yuvi for this amazing tool and persuading him for adding the search option for Indic wikipedias which will enable a user to search in a respective language wikipedia by typing a particular word in this tool! *Quick links:* *-> Link to the tool:* http://bitly.com/indictyping *-> Tutorial to use it online and offline (For iPhone):* http://goo.gl/HdVJW *-> Quick links:* - Source code: https://github.com/yuvipanda/indic-typing-tool - Test the app and report the bugs directly on GitHub<https://github.com/yuvipanda/indic-typing-tool/issues> or on Meta <http://goo.gl/sBiaF>. - App credits: YuviPanda <http://yuvi.in/>, Subhashish Panigrahi<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Psubhashish> , Santhosh Thottingal<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Santhosh.thottingal> ->* Blog post about the tool<http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/typing-in-indic-languages-from-m… *: ( http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/typing-in-indic-languages-from-mobiles) -- Best! Subhashish Panigrahi