A lesson we’ve learnt and you’ll learn today

Posted by Rifat Nabi on January 4, 2011

This post is targeted to developers.

Before I start, there should be a little introduction. May be you have heard that Bangladesh Election Commission has used Avro Keyboard in National ID card project. Before deciding to go for it, they knocked us with a “problem” that they cannot programmatically control keyboard mode (Bangla/English) of Avro Keyboard. They can generate F12 keystroke by an external software, Avro just ignores it. In their application there were many fields to type in, some requires Bangla, some English. If these fields could automatically control keyboard mode of Avro Keyboard, change it automatically when it needs Bangla or English without manually pressing the hotkey, the operators life would be much easier. Although what they reported was quite intended behavior in Avro Keybord and not a bug, we agreed to them and delivered them what they needed.

But still today, if you try generating F12 (say in your c# application) you will see that Avro just ignores it. Why is that? Haven’t we learned something from the past?

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What’s new in Avro Keyboard 5.1.0

Posted by Rifat Nabi on January 1, 2011

What’s new in Avro Keyboard 5.1.0

  • The whole project has been rewritten from scratch for better performance
  • Avro Keyboard is now Open Source, licensed under Mozilla Public License 1.1
  • New Bangla Spell Checker. Both for plain text and rich text (through MS Word add-in).
  • New Kalpurush Bangla font. Siyam Rupali is updated and now Windows 7 ready.
  • New ANSI typing mode. Avro Keyboard can now be used with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and what not! New ANSI version of Siyam Rupali and Kalpurush fonts are provided, they are completely compatible with fonts from Bijoy 2000 version.
  • New Font Fixer and iComplex. They now work right inside the installer. The installer also can update usp10.dll if it is allowed and the dll already installed is faulty.
  • New Dictionary based typing mode in Avro Phonetic.
  • New Unicode to ANSI (Bijoy 2000) plain text converter tool.
  • New Keyboard Mode switcher key – Ctrl+Space. Ctrl+Alt+B option is removed.
  • New cool splash screen and windows 7 ready icons. Showing splash screen at startup is now optional. New icon in system tray.
  • System tray menu now has everything of the Top Bar.

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Avro Keyboard 5 (beta) will be released soon!

Posted by Mehdi Hasan on September 10, 2010

Well, the title says a lot! After 3 years of hard work, we are going to release a major update of Avro Keyboard (version 5, beta) at the end of September, 2010.

It has been hard three years. We’ve made some ambitious plans and to accomplish them we had to rewrite every line of code from scratch. That’s rewriting whole fifty thousand lines! To make typing Bangla even simpler, things got extremely complex under the hood. Good news is that we have finished our work lately!
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