Sinhala Metro UI for Live mail
Metro UI is lately a hot news at Microsoft with the release of Windows 7 phones and Windows 8 Developer preview. By this October official Windows 8 release will happen. Microsoft keeps their expectation high on this release.
Along with Windows 8 release, Microsoft is changing most of their products into Metro UI enabled products. You can see this in many places including new Office and Live / Hotmail.
Recently Microsoft enabled Metro UI for their live mail service. To get the Metro UI, you have to just go to http://outlook.com and login with your live / Hotmail username and password. You will see nice (well not for me) Metro UI.
Lately Microsoft is releasing language packs for Sinhala language for various platforms with the help of Sri Lanka government and Microsoft Sri Lanka. Now you can use Office and Windows in Sinhala. Addition to that you can use live mail with Sinhala Metro UI. Sounds cool huh?
Just login at outlook.com and change the language as shown below.
Once the language is changed to Sinhala you can see the whole interface in Sinhala Language. I’m sure this will enable people who doesn’t know English to use email.
Sinhala Metro UI in Hotmail
Sinhala Google Transliterate Now Available
Filed under: Google, Internet, Localisation, Sinhalese, Sri Lanka
On several posts I wrote about Google Transliteration. First they introduced it to Hindi then later other Indian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada also supported. Few months later they started to support more scripts such as Arab, Hebrew etc.
Today I found something interesting. Yeah now Google Transliterate supports Sinhalese too. Basically Google Transliterate is knowledge based phonetic translator.
Sinhala Transliterate in Action
Personally I don’t recommend anyone to use Google Transliterate as it’ll spoil your typing speed as well as you’ll become so dependent on Google, which is not good at all.
Anyway it’s good to have Sinhalese support. Soon this transliteration service will be available for Sinhalese in other Google’s products such as Gmail, Orkut, Google Search, Blogger etc. Especially the desktop IME client Google Transliterate IME will also be available soon.
Also Check
Adios amigos.
Google Transliteration with Brand New Look
Google has announced their transliteration service with a Rich WYSWYG editor. Currently it’s supporting major Indic languages such as Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and also it has support for Arabic.
HTML Support
New rich interface allows you to do most of the stuff you wanted to do in a word processor such as formatting, colouring etc. Also it lets you see the HTML code of the stuff you typed, which you can use for HTML web pages.
Google Dictionary
Google Dictionary also integrated with this site so you can easily search the meaning of words between languages. Most of the popular languages are supported in the Google Dictionary. Tamil, Hindi and most of the Indic languages supported in the dictionary but Google is yet to add support for Sinhala.
Insert Unicode Letters
You can insert Unicode letters with a simple mouse click. As I said above most of the languages are supported including Sinhala and Tamil.
Google Transliteration is available in Blogger, Gmail, Knol, Orkut and as a bookmarklet. You can also enable it on your website using the transliteration API.
Vista and Office 2007 in Sinhala
Windows Vista in Sinhala
Microsoft has released Sinhala interface for both Windows Vista and Office 2007. This is the happy news for Sinhala windows users.
I think this is the first time Microsoft offering their products in Sinhala. This pack will help most of the rural area people. Those who don’t understand English, those who can understand only Sinhala can get the benefit out of this product.
Those who already adapted to English interface will have hard time adapting to this Sinhala interface.
PS: Windows XP, Vista and Office 2003, 2007 Tamil interfaces are already available online and users can download it.
Firefox 3.5 is Ready!!!!
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Here by I’m giving you the happy news “Firefox 3.5 is available for download”.
Happy news is it’s available in both Tamil and Sinhala 
Firefox giving us five reasons why you should upgrade to Firefox 3.5
1 Security
2 Performance
3 The Awesome Bar
4 Better Bookmarking
5 Password Manager
Why still waiting?? Go grab your copy of Firefox 3.5
Do you know Google Chrome is now available in Tamil?
BBC College of Journalism in Tamil & Sinhala
College of Journalism program is launched by BBC in Sinhala and Tamil. They’ve already launched this program in many languages including Russian, English, French, and Arabic etc.
Also BBC says “This is just the first step, we would like to see these pages grow and become a more detailed introduction to the language of Journalism.”
Most annoying thing I found is BBC Sinhala’s site is in English while Tamil, Hindi sites are in respective languages. Even this College of Journalism is launched in English by BBC Sinhala while BBC Tamil launched in Tamil.
When I roughly go through, I came across many interesting stuff related to journalism such as pronunciation, choosing correct word etc.
Quote from Tamil Site
பிபிசி ஊடகவியல் கல்லூரியும் மற்றும் பிபிசி உலகசேவையும், ஏழு ஆசிய மொழிகளில் சிறப்பு மொழி வழிகாட்டிகளைக் கொண்டுவருவதில் பெருமையடைகின்றன. தமிழ், சிங்களம், ஹிந்தி, வங்காளி, பர்மிய, நேபாளி மற்றும் வியட்நாமிய மொழிகளில் இந்த வழிகாட்டிகள் தொடங்கப்படுகின்றன.
Quote from Sinhala Site
The BBC College of Journalism and the World Service are proud to launch special language guides for: Sinhala, Tamil, Bengali, Burmese, Hindi, Nepali, Tamil and Vietnamese.
Colombo wata – Sri Lankan Game
Filed under: Entertainment, Internet, Mobile, Movies, Sinhalese, Sri Lanka, Tamil, Video Post
It’s so nice to see finally Sri Lankans have taken initiations to make localized games for Sri Lankan market. First such game I saw is, Operation Thopigala where Army soldiers is getting into LTTE base in Thopigala and confront them in commando style.
Later I found there was a game release followed by success full movie ABBA. ABBA was a mobile game, and many people are pleased to see Sri Lankan heritage on mobile as a game.
Recently Sri Lankan game developers have released a new game in Sinhala. Colomba wata (Around Colombo) is a mobile based game where you’re a taxi driver and need to drive around Colombo. Check out the cool video that I got from the site.
Colombo Ride (“Colomba wate”) : The first Sinhala mobile game of its kind has finally arrived. The game is available for free download on any network anywhere in the world. So join in and play the most anticipated mobile game in Sri Lankan history.
This kind of initiations should be encouraged and people should support these people. Atleast download and play the game and report errors, therefore they can improve the quality of the game. One day we can introduce our games to international market.
Enable & Write in Sinhala Unicode
There are many of my friends who study with me in university are happy with English and they don’t wanna read or write in Sinhala, over the internet. They keep on asking “how did you type in Tamil machang?”, but they’ll never make an attempt to write in Sinhala over the net.
Soon lot of people, who don’t know English will also come to computer especially for internet. In that time they should have a proper support or a proper base in their own language. Comparatively in Tamil, there are many communities working actively to accomplish these kinda tasks.
In Sinhala, I hardly see a community that work with a will. I think at least now you guys should start to work on this matter. First of all, you should be able to read and write in your own language.
In Vista, it has a built-in support for Sinhala but in Win XP you need to install an extension pack. . Don’t ignore it. Follow the link and activate the Sinhala Unicode in your computer.
http://www.siyabas.lk/sinhala_how_to_install.html
Good luck
On Screen Keyboard for Tamil and Sinhala from Google
How many of you know that even if you don’t know the keyboard layout for Tamil or Sinhalese still you can type in Sinhalese or Tamil. Google has developed an on-screen keyboard where you can click and type.
Using this gadget you can search the internet on Google. Amazing isn’t it. Then why are you waiting?? Go and grab the gadget!
Harry Potter in Sinhala???
Image via Wikipedia
Today I was reading Wikipedia and I found that they have mentioned that translation of Harry Potter
I’m just curious to know whether anyone know about this book(ISBN 9555732866). Also some trivia says Tamil translations are expected to hit the market around 15 January 2008.
There is no doubt; it’ll bring pleasure and happiness to our local children, if we can get these books in Tamil and Sinhalese. One of the reasons I learned or in other words improved my English is by reading Rowling’s work.
Even if there are some companies to translate this book, they have to have many problems, specially the black market problem. Nobody seems to care about intellectual property in Sri Lanka. Hope soon we can get these books in our languages. 
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