Arabzi is an extension for Messenger Plus! Live uses Yamli.com technology, allows users to typing Arabic using Latin characters, and send queries to Yamli.com search engine.

Sometime when you try to install new programs you get the following message:

If you are using Windows Vista, a required component, DHTMLED.OCX, is no longer distributed with the operating system, however it can downloaded and installed from Microsoft download center

Iconty is a new niche Arabic search engine, specifically created for web designers and developers, to provide them with an easy way to search for and find icons to use for certain functions on the websites they are building.

Iconty aims to be a central repository for icons, where users can come and search for icons using Arabic keywords, or even English ones, to find the ones best suited for their needs.

Users can sign-up to the service for free and start uploading  their own icons to share on the site so that other people can download and use them as well.

Users can add icons individually through a simple form where they specify the file, the owner and the tags; or upload a zip file with a whole icon set, and then input the details for each icon.

Iconty is still in beta; work on it started in February 2009 by a team of three family members: Mahmoud, Mohamed and Alia Rida. The team are currently working on enhancing the organization of the platform and how icon result sets are displayed, as well as making it even easier for users to find icons.

Microsoft has gone on and launched a new application called ‘Maren‘, making its entrance into the Arabic transliteration space.

Microsoft Maren was developed to be a Windows extension that allows you to type Arabic in Roman characters (Romanized Arabic, Arabizi, Arabish or Franco-Arabic) and have it converted on the fly to Arabic script. Maren integrates seamlessly with Windows and works in most Windows applications and websites.

Users around the Arab world widely use romanized Arabic in instant messaging and on social networking sites, and Microsoft’s Maren is following in the footsteps of Yamli and Google’s Ta3reeb in offering these users the possibility to have whatever text they type converted into Arabic.

Up to this point Yamli has been the user favorite in the region, with a number of portals integrating their service, a Firefox toolbar extension that many people were glad to get and even an unofficial Yamli extension called Arabzi that exists for MSN Messenger. Yamli also uses its transliteration technology as a basis to enrich and provide better Arabic search online.

What Microsoft’s Maren offers as a plus is the possibility to integrate the transliteration technology into Windows, and use it everywhere, not just online through a browser; so basically users can use Maren while typing in a Word document or on Instant Messenger or any other Windows application.

The fact that the tool is installed on the user’s machine also means that the solution is available to the user even when he’s offline, and it could even be a bit faster than other solutions that have to send requests back to a server.

It should be really interesting to see how much user adoption Maren will get, but however that works out, this is quite a good effort from Microsoft.

Microsoft Maren was developed by the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC), a Microsoft group representing the company interest in applied research and development initiatives in the Middle East and Africa.

Nokia just announced that its Ramadan applications for 2009 have now become available on Ovi Store. The updated free mobile applications tailored for the Holy Month of Ramadan can now be downloaded on the compatible Nokia devices directly from Nokia’s Ovi Store.

Nokia 2009 Ramadan Applications include the following:

allows users to read, search, bookmark and listen to Quran recitation

provides prayer timings and Qibla direction for 1000 cities in 200 countries, along with the ability to add, remove, update and edit any location using the GPS.

gives an easy and convenient way to read the Honorable Hadeeth from Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Riyad us-Saliheen, Holy Hadeeths and Arba’in An Nawawi.

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Mo3jam is a new interesting service which aims to build a user generated dictionary of colloquial Arabic. (Mo3jam is an Arabic word that means lexicon or dictionary.)

The idea of the website is that users from all around the Arab world will be able to come in and share the different spoken terms and expressions used in the various accents and dialects available in all the Arab countries.

Mo3jam hopes to create a central, multilingual knowledgebase of colloquial Arabic, emphasising ease of use and breadth; with the service open to anyone to contribute without any limitations.

Terms can be defined using Arabic (which is the preferred language), English, or French. And even if a term is already defined in the system, users can still their own definition for it, with the best quality definitions bubbling up to the top through users voting on them and adding them to their favorites.

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