Yamli Releases Beta Of Their Official Firefox Toolbar

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YamliYamli, the startup that specializes in smart transliteration technologies for the Arabic Web, just unveiled its new official Firefox browser toolbar.

A Yamli toolbar or extension has been a user request for quite a while now, and Yamli has answered with this toolbar that extends the possibility to use Yamli’s Arabic transliteration technology to any site or web application a user might need to type in Arabic in. By just going to the website and clicking on the ‘Enable Yamli’ button in the toolbox, all text input areas get the Yamli functionality activated for them. Another option is to just right click on the textbox you need to use and activate Yamli for just it.

Basic text input boxes and areas as well as rich text editors are supported and can be made to use Yamli with the toolbar.

The toolbar also includes a search box, enabling users to launch searches on the web using Yamli’s smart Arabic search functionality; Search is available for Web, Images,Video, News and Wikipedia.

Another interesting feature available through the toolbar is the possibility to send updates to Twitter and Facebook directly, using Yamli’s transliteration to write the updates in Arabic.

Yamli Toolbar

The toolbar is currently in beta, and is still being tweaked with more features to be added with the final release. It’s available for Firefox only at the time being; but an Internet Explorer version should follow soon.

On another note, other than the official toolbar by Yamli, the Arab Techies Code Sprint 2009, that was held in Cairo, has resulted in a couple of unofficial Yamli related projects: A Yamli bookmarklet that can be added as a link in any browser and used to yamlify any text inputs on a page, as well as a Firefox extension that automatically yamlifies all text inputs on visited web pages. All this possible through Yamli’s open API.

17 thoughts to “Yamli Releases Beta Of Their Official Firefox Toolbar”

  2. oh that's really cool, but i was wishing for the yamli search box in the toolbar to be yamlified too 🙁 i think it's a limitation

  6. I know what is good about Yamli, but what is bad about Yamli? Could you give your opinions?
    Here is some of what I believe to be bad about Yamli

    1. It is for Arab Americans. Arabs don't type short vowls. For example, Marhaba is wrong, mrhba is correct.

    2. Yamli is slow
    3. Yamli flashes too much. It is ideal for short sentences but not ong paragraphs.
    4. Their editor is too simple
    5. They display ads that are offensives (girls want to socialize with boys kind a ads)
    6. Sometimes erasing stuff is confusing.

    What are your thoughts?

  7. Actually Yamli is great for Arab Americans, arab arabs and all the people who would like to surf the Arabic web. Thank you yamli, and yamli team for your continuous innovation, and making it easier for us to search the arabic web.
    @ Mar Ed i hope you are kidding with the points you mentioned, because honestly i have been using yamli since it was initiated and what you said doesn't reflect the reality (if you are joking then lool it is funny good one)

  8. Yamli is great, and the team behind it have been continuously providing new tools.

    @Mar Ed 1. not true 2. not true 3. not true. 4. i think this way is best as it reaches out to all users not matter how much internet and computer skills they have 5. 🙂 i am sure you are joking 6. I might agree with you on this point still it is not annoying 7. i think the positives highly outweigh the negatives that is why i find yamli suitable for my arabic searches

  9. Congrats yamli for the firefox toolbar! Great addition to the site.

    @Mar Ed

    You can try http://yoolki.com/editor/, which solves most of the problems you have with yamli.

    1: You can type vowel and have them displayed “as harakat” or you can turn off harakat and type without vowels.

    2 If you know the letters to type is is blazing fast, to test the speed copy the following sentence”akala el waladu eltuffaa7ah” (or any longer sentence ) and paste it there, it is transliterated instantly with no delays what so ever.

    3 It flashes less, and (soon enough) you'll be able to turn off the flashing completely 😉

    4 The editor is also very simple … Sorry, it doe not solve all the problems (yet)

    5 No ads.

    6 Erasing stuff is never confusing, you erase the English letters you type and the Arabic is erased automatically.

    We also have a firefox addon that has been downloaded over 40,000 times…. And yoolki stilll works as fast when you go offline in your browser 🙂

    As for the negative points:
    1 – it is not as famous 🙂
    2 – yoolki is not as accurate as yamli IF you don't know how to type a word, (related to previous point, less people use it, smaller database for word correction)

  10. Pat,
    You are entitled to your opinion even though when I think it is wrong.

    1. Let me start with the speed issue: Do a search on http://www.google.com, you will get response in a sub-second. Do the same search on Yamli, you get the results in whole seconds (typically 2-3 seconds). Direct google search is at least 20 times faster than Yamli. That's not just my opinion, that's a fact! try it.

    2. Ads points: Yamli does post ads from time to time and most ads have been offensive to the public and yes they do post ads showing half dressed women wanting to make friends. That's a fact!

    3. Flashing point: If you type this sentence ” ana ba7eb balade” just three words, you will get flashed 14 times, at least. Once per letter. Now imagine if you had to type a paragraph made up of hundreds of letters! You will be flashed hundreds of times. Again, that's a fact. It is not just my opinion!!! People, type one letter at a time. They don't type a full sentence at a time.

    4. Firefox browser point: FireFox specific development is a waste of time that could have been used somewhere else. Most people use IE and very few use FireFox , that's for one. also, most users are not keen to add toolbars to their browsers. It introduces issues/bugs.

    5. Architecture: It is not a scalable scheme of writing or scalable architecture. You cannot expect ajax requests to be sent across the atlantic to the server for each letter and still expect perfopramnce to be high. Also, you cannot expect one type a word and view all possibilities for that combination of letters for large paragraphs.

    I think Yamli, is a step in the right direction. I give these guys credit. But, I call upon innovators to compete with this product and get us something superior that we make us use the web the same way English speakers do. Also, we want a site that's clean of non sense ads that are offensive to Muslims and dignified Arabs. Money is not every thing

  11. Mar Ed
    كلام مقنع . أنا أعتقد يملي فيها مشاكل وبطيئة وفيها فلاشات كتير. لو في خيار تاني ممكن أجرب

  12. I tried yoolki.com and here is my critique

    1. Its mapping makes it difficult to write many words. For example,
    khl is translaterated to “خل” when what I meant was “كهل”. So, it is not well thought of mapping between latin and arabic.

    2. The 2 text boxes UI makes different than what English speaking users have. They have a single text box for search.

    3. In the lower text box , user types left to right. This makes no sense. Arabs only write Right to Left

    4. It is buggy: If I search on images, then go back and try to do search on web, it is sticky. It still sends back images only.

    5. Logo and navigation is left to right, that's wrong.

    6. I cannot write with ease!

    7. Finally, why do you have the lebanese flag there? It turns non lebanese off using the site even those who like Lebanon! This site should be for all Arabic speaking people and having the lebanese flag there is a way of unwanted pride showing. Google does not display USA Flag, does it?

  13. @Mar Ed,
    Thanks for taking the time to test the site and report your critique.
    Some points are easier to fix than others, but hopefully most of them can be addressed!

    btw “khl” you can write k-hl to indicate that k and h should be separate, but you are right, there should be an easier way.

    Have you also taken a look at http://www.eiktub.com/ ?

    Thanks again for your comments.

  14. I think eiktub.com is another step in the right direction. No flashing, right to left direction, clean.

    My critique is that while I understand the difficulty of establishing latin-arabic mapping especially for lettters like ain,kha',etc.. one should not expect the user to remember the mapping and therefore there needs to be something like an introduction of syntax that is consistent for these exception letters that people study once and move on to use it.

    My other critique is the name of the site: eiktub is difficult to rember, see if you can get a more memorable name.

    Third, there are certain letters that people expect to map to certain arabic letters like e maps to “ya'” this is deficient in the mapping.

    Good Luck

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