Recently I received a mail from Christopher Walker, who launched the Tibetan Portal website where you can obtain many great informations about Tibetan softwares. I am very glad and feel honored that my work, the Tibetan Input Method Module for OpenVanilla Chinese Input Method Framework, is included on the website. OpenVanilla is a software for Mac OS X, and you can use four keyboard layouts: Sambhota Keymap 1, Sambhota Keymap 2, TCC Keyboard 1 and TCC keyboard 2 with the Tibetan Module.

我最近接獲 Christopher Walker 的來信，得知他設立了一個藏文入口網站，您可以在這個網站上<，看到相當豐富精彩的藏文軟體相關資訊。而我也相當高興我之前在 OpenVanilla 這套中文輸入法架構下實做的藏文輸入模組，也被列入在這個站台當中。OpenVanilla 是一套供 Mac OS X 作業系統使用的軟體，而您可以透過當中的藏文輸入模組，以 Sambhota Keymap 1、Sambhota Keymap 2、TCC Keyboard 1 以及 TCC keyboard 2 等四種鍵盤配置，輸入藏文。

Mr. Walker also worked on Tibetan keyboard. He created keyboards for Keyman, a multilingual software on Windows platform, and he created Extended Wylie (EWTS) and Dzongkha keyboards for Mac OS X, too. Thanks Mr. Walker spent so much time and his effort on the softwares, I think it indeed help those who need Tibetan Inputs and make there are more and more alternative choices.

By the way, after pausing about 3 months, the developers of the OpenVanilla project such as Lukhnos D. Liu, b6s, gugod and I recently started reworking on the project, we are now focusing on the very next release of the project, the version 0.7. Developing a new version is not merely for letting the software be compatible with the new version of Apple Computer’s new operating system, but also for reaching a goal and an ideal. The goal is that we believe that the Chinese Input Methods could be better and more amazing than what we ever see, and we want to realize some fascinating ideals into practice. Comparing to the very last release, 0.6.3, we can say that the next release is a brand new version, Lukhnos had redesigned and simplified the APIs of writing a module, and the way to load each module.

Lukhnos grabbed most old Carbon based codes into the trash can, throw them away, and rewrite the core with Cocoa API and the Objective-C programming language, the codes look more simple, clean and elegant but Lukhnos spent more than ever. Programming with Cooca has many benefits, the user interface is much improved, we can use many fancy Cocoa objects to extend the usability and offer more eye candies, for instance, you can change the color schema of the candidate window under the last version of OpenVanilla, and now setting bitmap background images, window animation and so on are all possible.

And I would like to introduce the idea of “Filter”modules. What is a filter in a Chinese Input Method Framework? Well, as you know, a Chinese Input Method software is not a way to input something but output something indeed. A Input Method is to handle with the keyboard events and then translate or transform the keyboard events into a Chinese character or a phrase, then send them to applications. A filter is used to add more processing during the process of translating, you can convert the Traditional Chinese characters by a Traditional Chinese Input Method to Simplified Chinese, or convert half-width ASCII characters to full-width characters.

Indeed, OpenVanilla 0.6.3 has included such functions and converters, however, it was a hack of the code of the input method framework. You can not disable them or add more similar functions. Now we adapt them, to let them be dynamic libraries, the modules or plug-ins. Filters are not only converters, but also functions to notify you the Unicode, phonetic symbols or romanized PinYins of the character that you just type. Filters can be used to filter out something should not be typed, too, and it is as easy to write a filter as to write a input method under the OpenVanilla framework.