Intellaren

Thank you for you comments so far and thank you for loving Intellark.

To Shareef @54:
Thanks Shareef. You said: "In this English comment box I can not write Arabic words using the above method". Did you press Control-L? That's what you do to toggle between languages. Also, once you highlight a word as bold, italic or underline, the results will show only with you add your comment. We may provide a WYSIWYG editor in the near future. As per your mapping suggestions, you suggested:

i) Shift(h) for ? , which is very reasonable, but Key g is unused in Arabic and is to the immediate left of Key h, it is therefore used for ? , see the discussion of Section 7.1.

ii) Shift + A for ? and Shift+ AA for ? , but Key a is already used for much more intuitive mappings (alif, its three modified forms and the hamza). True, when transliterating or transcribing ? into English we always depend on one of the vowels to do the work, but that vowel is not necessarily the letter a; for example, how would one transliterate عِبادة , and how about عُبادة ? The first would be something like ibaada, and the second would be something like obaada, right?

iii) Shift(t) for ? , please see discussion provided in Section 7.3, where we try to inject some logic behind such an assignment.


To Ahmad @58:
This is just the beginning, we have lined up i) google search in Intellark typing, ii) online web editor, iii) Arabic-2-English name transcriber, and iv) letter and word frequency analyzer, and these are just the beginning before another round of products.

To Abdullah @59:
You are right! As indicated in the introduction, Intellark is suitable the most for typists used to QWERTY and no other layout! If you are already familiar with the current Arabic layout and know where every Arabic-generating key is by heart, then you already have an advantage not enjoyed by the millions of us QWERTY typists, until the advent of Intellark that is. Still, give us a try every now and then. For new learners, Arabic or English, Intellark provides the unchallenged advantage of making you transfer typing knowledge from one language to the other.

Thank you all so far, your comments have helped us greatly in reshaping this tutorial and continue to do so.

To Safa @47:
Indeed, among Intellark objectives is to give typists with no Arabic character stickers similar advantages to those who do, yet without cluttering the keys with multilingual stickers.

To Noor @48:
Been struggling? You bet, that makes ... millions of us typists. Since 2002 I have asked questions and collected surveys about the current methods of typing in Arabic and the main response is ... struggling. I am glad to feel and hear that such a struggle is over. We are working on pleasant editors, online and offline to let you type away as you wish, using the same knowledge you have to type in English to let you freely type in Arabic.

To Noor @49:
I hear this a lot, since you added your comment this tutorial has been reduced in size by about 25%, and counting .

To Tessneem @50:
Precisely, the main idea of Intellark is "we don't have to think about it much!" This is known as Knowledge Transfer, and you can't beat it when trying to learn how a new tools operates.

To Yara @52:
Thank you. In our modest opinion, all type-able letters should remain at the three rows where a touch-typist (TT) feels home (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing); this allows a TT to type to their potential, without removing their hands from the home-position, and without having to travel to the top number row of the keyboard which is seldom memorized even by TTs.

Further, for natural writing from a visual perspective, the focus should be on what is currently being typed rather than what typing is going to flip into! Such tools could be suitable for single scattered words, but not for cohesive sentences, emails or essay writing in general. A great tool should not dazzle your eyes by keeping you guess "what's next?", rather, it should completely remain in the shadow while making everything else work for you.

Timer? You bet, we are working on that and will provide one soon to control the time among consecutive key-presses.

Your comment Yara about the mapping of Keys g, p, and x is true, we therefore did a bit of editing in Section 7 to provide more intuition in such maps, and ended with the statement shown directly above Exercise 8. You should notice also that the first sentence in Exercise 8 lists all those letters in lexicographical order, so all you have to remember is that Key c takes you to ص , and that ص takes to ض , and that since ص and ض are the next letters in order, so is Key x which is next to Key c when going from right to left. That leaves you with one key to learn! Key p. Hey, who said there is such thing as free lunch?