Bangaliana -- all about going Bangla savvy

An explained Bangla conjunct menu makes it easier to understand

Interactive dictionary 'Bangaliana' is a digital Bangla-to-English dictionary designed to give one more aptitude and reliance than a paper dictionary. Moreover, it also has the ability to find out any of the 30,000 words it has in a second. And it costs only Tk 180.

The demo of 'Bangaliana' was first displayed at BCS Computer Show 2003 and the first version was released at Computer Mela 2003, Comilla The present version 'Bangaliana Interactive Dictionary BE 1.50' was released in August 14, 2003 and comes with many new features.

The concept, design and programming of the dictionary has been done by Omaar Osman, managing director of Bangaliana along with his four friends Amanullah Siddique, S.M. Aneyet Kobir Faisal, Joshimuddin and Mohammad Kawsar.

"In 2002, I did a survey of our local software and realised that they are poor in quality which makes most of the user lose interest in Bangla software. So I decide to form a company, which will be dedicated to Bangla computing and give the users some international standard software. Thus Bangaliana was born," said Omaar.

After finishing his diploma in multimedia from Hi-tech Professionals in 2000 Omaar completed Web Master course from World Wide Web Institute in 2002.

Visual Basic 6 was used to create 'Bangaliana'. Omaar also used some high quality utilities to make the software powerful, which cost him almost $2000.

All words have been arranged alphabetically for easy searching. There is also a search engine for the alphabetical list. 'Banglaiana' has built-in Bangla interface to write Bangla. No third party Bangla software is needed to write Bangla in interactive dictionary. Writing tools such as a virtual Bangla keyboard and an explained Bangla conjunct menu are also included. An advanced Note Pad is also included to keep personal notes with each Bangla word.

Bangla words with its English meaning and corresponding notes can be saved as PDF. To find out accurate pronunciation of English words or sentences there are six animated characters powered by Microsoft Agent Control. These characters read documents or English word(s)/sentence(s).

The dictionary has a standard User Interface (UI) for all version of Windows. Recently it has been noticed that the dictionary sometimes cannot produce sounds while reading texts but after some attempts it reads texts normally. This problem occurs on some computers running Windows 98/ME, but the problem does not occur in Windows 2000 or Windows XP platform. Omaar said that is not a programming flaw and hopes to fix the problem soon.

Bangaliana's website, www.bangaliana.com invites its users to share their experience and ideas. Bangaliana also wishes to make their website a recourse for Bangla computing. They hope to publish Bangla software for both personal and commercial uses.

System requirements for Bangaliana:

Processor: Pentium II or Later

RAM: 64 MB

Disk space: 50 MB

CD-ROM Drive

Sound Card

OS:Windows98/Me/NT4/ 2000/XP

Database Components: Microsoft Data Access Components 2.6 and Jet 4.0 sp3 database engine (comes with the software)

Speech: Microsoft Agent Control 2.0, Lernout & Hauspie TruVoice American English TTS Engine (comes with the software).