Online Amharic Word Processor for Mobile Phones
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2013-03
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Nowadays, accessing of web information and services at anytime from anywhere is becoming
realistic using WAP enabled mobile devices. Mobile device users become rapidly growing from
time to time. In this thesis, an online Amharic word processor for mobile phone is designed and
developed by considering the physical screen size, scripting language, text entry method of
mobile phones and nature of Amharic script. In order to design and implement the OLAWP, it is
necessary to obtain the visiting mobile phone capability attributes information first. The
attributes that are used in this study are mobile phone physical screen height and status about
whether the mobile phone supports client-side scripting language or not. These capability
attributes are obtained from the WURFL DDR in the cloud which is used to detect and return the
mobile phone capabilities to our site. The returned values are stored and used as an input in the
design of the word processor interface, to select the type of the virtual keyboard and style sheet
used, and to decide the scripting language used. The OLAWP site is designed and implemented
to enable users to prepare simple Amharic documents wherever they go as far as the WAP
enabled mobile phones exist at their hand and the Internet infrastructure exist. In the design of
OLAWP, the major activities are device detection and redirection to the compatible page, user
and file manager, designing of the word processor interface by loading appropriate virtual
keyboard. In this work, the mobile phones are categorized into three groups: small, medium and
large, and the Amharic virtual keyboard is grouped into small and large based on the mobile
phone screen height. Small mobile phones used small type of Amharic virtual keyboard and
other groups used the large Amharic virtual keyboard. Finally, the OLAWP prototype evaluation
is conducted through questionnaire by participating 15 different users in various types (in screen
size, text entry method, browser and brand) of mobile phones. The evaluation result showed that
better satisfaction and performance on some mobile phones which are touch based, and UC and
Android browsers mobile phones compare to keypad based and Opera mini browser mobile
phones.
Keywords: Amharic keyboard, Amharic word processor, mobile cloud service, mobile Amharic
word processor, mobile virtual keyboard, online word processor, Wireless Application Protocol
Description
Keywords
Amharic Keyboard; Amharic Word Processor; Mobile Cloud Service; Mobile Amharic Word Processor, Mobile Virtual Keyboard; Online Word Processor; Wireless Application Protocol