eKalappai 3.0 Beta3 released.

eKalappai 3.0 beta3 is released in our project code page - http://code.google.com/p/ekalappai/

Features available in "eKalappai 3.0 Beta3 version":
1. Contains following 5 keyboards:
Tamil99 , Phonetic, Typewriter, Bamini, Inscript
2. Single click installer/uninstaller
3. Keyboard shortcut (F2 key) to toggle between English and Tamil keyboards.
4. Users can change the shortcut key

It contains 5 keyboards, has option for the user to change shortcut keys to toggle keyboards. Other than these visible changes, there is a major improvement in the code.

The keyboard logic is re-written to handle scim-tables format which is used by scim project.

All the 5 keyboards available now are in scim-table format. They all reside under keyboards folder inside the installation directory.

This means, users who like to tweak the keyboards, can directly open the keyboard files in a notepad and edit! The format of the keyboard files are very simple and self explanatory, you can view them here.

This scim-tables support opens up possibility to support any language easily. We have to just write a keyboard file using notepad and few changes in source code. So next releases will support more languages !

Keep watching http://code.google.com/p/ekalappai/ :)

eKalappai 3.0 Beta1 released.

eKalappai 3.0 beta1, first beta version for Open-source ekalappai 3.0 series is released in our project code page - http://code.google.com/p/ekalappai/

It contains Phonetic and tamil99 keyboards. Users can try this and let us know the issues/feedback.

Features available in "eKalappai 3.0 Beta1 version":
1. tamil99 and phonetic support
2. Single click installer/uninstaller
3. Keyboard shortcut (ESC key) to switch between English and Tamil keyboards.

It can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/ekalappai/downloads/list.

Its an open-source project and anyone with c++ knowledge can participate. I request C++ programmers help to improve this product. Write to me if you are interested in this project.

eKalappai OSS source code released under GPL v3 licence

I have released the source files for the new eKalappai under GPL V3 license. Its available at this location:
http://code.google.com/p/ekalappai/source/browse/

After spending a long time researching and learning in the net I have managed to bring out this opensource version of our popular ekalappai software. I request intrested C++ programmers to play with this code & give feedback. Also you are welcome to join the project and contribute in whatever way(coding, testing, documentation, writing about the project and spread word) possible.

My primary objective was not to use any commercial paid compilers. Also I wanted this code to be as portable as possible so that in future we can get this working in other operating systems. The current working ekalappai is created using Qt(opensource) & VC++ express (this is a free version provided by Microsoft).

It will be possible to remove VC++ express dependency by creating the required dll using Qt. But I havent figured this yet. Hope to do that in future.

I will write a detailed developer documentation on building ekalappai using the code soon. Keep watching the ekalappai project page http://code.google.com/p/ekalappai for updates. Also join our discussions in our mailing list (FreeTamilComputing list).

Google supports tamil now :)

Its great to know google now supports tamil language.
More details here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/google-in-tamil.html

Tamil Song Search

Recently thro one of my friend I got to know about this website: http://www.s-anand.net/tamil
Its a wonderful service. Using this we can search for a particular song and start hearing it. The search can be made based on the song name or movie name.

For example, I am great fan of late MGR's songs. When I typed MGR in the search bar, it brought me some of the MGR's songs as below.

There are thousands of tamil songs around, its really very useful software.

I wonder why no tamil techie has thought about this earlier (including me :) ) !

Great work! Thanks a lot Anand for creating this.