Announcing Zabaan, Powered by McKoi

[George Jahad <brunskills@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Compadres:

I wanted to announce Zabaan, www.zabaan.org, an opensource Multimedia
Database of Human Languages, I've written, which uses McKoi.  (More
details below.)

Many Thanks to Toby for making such a great product, without which
Zabaan wouldn't be possible.

Toby, I've got a link to your site on www.zabaan.org.  Take a look,
and see if there is anything else you like me to put there, (a png
perhaps?)

Thanks Much,
George Jahad



What Zabaan Currently Does

Zabaan is software that manages a multimedia database of human
languages. It provides the flash card functionality people often use
for learning foreign languages. You can enter words, (both text and
sounds,) from multiple languages and have Zabaan sort and play them
back to you in multiple ways.

Typically, people use Zabaan in conjunction with a foreign text that
they are studying. For each lesson, they enter the words or phrases of
interest, then play them back as they wish, in order to study
them. The database provides a kind of electronic bookmark of where you
are in your studies, so that if you put them aside for a year or two,
(like I do,) you can easily get back to where you were, by playing the
words back again.  


The Long-Term Goal
The long-term goal of the Zabaan project is to create an open-source
multimedia database of human languages. We hope to get thousands of
our friends all over the world to contribute a little of what they
know about their own languages. Piece-by-piece, we'll assemble a
powerful resource freely available to everyone.

That's an ambitious goal, and isn't going to happen any time soon. The
first step is to provide the tools to help people create their own
personal databases As the tools improve, and the personal databases
become comprehensive, we'll start looking for ways of merging them
all.

Current Features

      Support for many different alphabets

      Support for audio record, playback and compression

      Configurable Autocycle with Audio Playback

      Shuffle mode to rearrange the order of playback.

      Finds with regular expressions

      Configurable Keymaps

      Support for user generated lists

      Open Source

      Computer Aided Language Learning

      Sample database contains Swahili, Farsi, Hebrew, and English