Regular
regular. may not (make) sense.
Nepali word-list for User Dictionary Manager for Swipe like keyboard experience.
Last, i ditched Android for a Windows Phone experience was in 2011 with 2.2 (Froyo). Recently I have grown to like the design philosophy of Lollipop, and so have been dabbling in Android experience for a week now. Up until KitKat, Android design and working was similar to the tried and tested Windows XP, rooted to late 90s and early 2000s user interface. Something that works out of box, and yet feels lame. I do hope to get “Material Design upgrade” within 2014.
There are few perks of being an Android user over Windows Phone user, and few that I sorely miss in Android. Two of these are 1) out-of-box inability of Android Contacts/People App to sync seamless with Facebook and get the most recent picture for incoming/outgoing call, and 2) Windows phone keyboard with my saved Nepali vocab words. For the first problem, I resorted to Sync.Me, which takes care of most of the thing. The second problem, long word list in Nepali accumulated in Windows Phone had no easy way to get transferred to Android device.
This made me look for alternate, and I did find a solution. There is a very good Hamro Nepali Keyboard, which is a favorite among Nepali Android community. Its free and it works. However, I do not use so much of Nepali/Devanagari characters from my handheld device. Windows phone has Hindi/Devanagari characters with dictionary words as a system add on, and I rarely used it. What I needed was, English-to-Nepali words like – “hijo”, “aaja”, “bholi” and not “हिजो”, “अाज”, “भोली”.
How to (Swipe-like) type “hijo”, “aaja”, “bholi” and not “हिजो”, “अाज”, “भोली” from my Handheld device.
Nepali Words and Android Dictionary Managers.
- I did some online search and it directed me to User Dictionary Manager, User Dictionary Plus, Tweak User Dictionary. All of them, lets me add custom word list to my device.
- Now, I needed a word list of Nepali words in English Language. I did another online search, and found none. Probably due to a limited knowledge of deep web search know-how. Took me some time, before I got a PDF file format of about 3000 Nepali Words listed in English language together with their definitions and Devanagari characters. Copied it, quickly turned it into MS Excel file, and then a long process of cleaning it.
- Took me few hours to produce my first version of custom Nepali word-list file. It had about 2900 Nepali words.
- I downloaded the one of the apps (User Dictionary Manager) and uploaded my list.
- Finally I had some Nepali words on my Android device, that I can use it in keyboard with swipe-like approach.
- Then I downloaded Tweak User Dictionary. Tweak User Dictionary claimed to have around 4k Nepali words listed (as of November 15th) as opposed to only having handful of Hindi, Bengali, Marathi words. I installed it, and then increased my total word counts to 5700. I also did a duplicate check and deleted them.
- Final file is shared here – wordlist.txt (its rusty, but should work)
I will be updating this file, until I find another bigger version of it (which I am sure is somewhere out there). Now I can swipe my Nepali words (in English language).
November and Material Design
Weather in Charlottesville is on the lower side, with dismal white skies and bleak winds. Winter is upon us, and so is the huge annual shopping season for this place. Nepal usually has it during August/September during Dashain/Tihar. Last year was my first Thanks giving and Black Friday event here, and it was fun.
I saw consumerism at its peak with religiously following flock standing outside the temple shrine of big retail giants. I joined and became one of them, standing in frigid winter for more than an hour before a volley of men and women fought for precious deals. For my shopping, I waited online, up late at night, waiting for that small window of opportunity – and got myself a decent portable computer machine (11 inch, Dell laptop). Thanks Giving however was not fun. Partly because we had no nearby friends and families that celebrated this customs. Hopefully this year becomes different. We did get a turkey, but we didn’t know how to cook it well. I was limited to glass or two of good wine with cooked yet unflavored turkey meat.
This year has been relatively better, and up till this moment, we have not decided on anything particular for Black Friday or the Cyber Monday. Instead of a whole Turkey, we have decided to delineate into making turkey mo:mo. Something we enjoy better.
Waiting for Android Lollipop to be available for the mass devices. My personal feeling, that this may finally be a good looking interface for Android. Looking forward to “Material Design”. Never liked Android before, but things may change in future.
I am a Windows Phone person, however I do think that WP needs a boost in its App Market as well as a system that works more fluid now. I do not need games in my handheld devices, and so my Applications are limited to certain “productivity” range. I love Windows Phone implementation of People/Contacts and its in-sync with Social Networks like Linked-In and Twitter (obviously Facebook is there). Default mail application has still not been updated; and default Music application is still crawling behind Windows Phone 7 Music Application. Social Network and Chat apps like Skype, FB Messenger and Viber still takes a lot of time to load in even 1 GB RAM machines and periodically freezes up. This, in-spite of me manually closing all other back ground applications. Apart from the above few problems, WP is a solid platform. I love it. Outlook.com has been a huge help for my daily routine – mails, contacts and calendar. One Note is my personal library, big importance. There is a rapid development cycle gong on, and hopefully I will see more fluidity in coming days, but for now, Android and iOS just work. This makes me want more.
Somewhere in between it was e-commerce that caught my attention. Next article, I want to explore about how big retail giants could shape a new legal boundaries. Well more of tip toeing this time.
