PunjabiKosh App Released

Posted on 31. Mar, 2010 by Kulpreet Chilana in Blog

The Ravi Foundation is proud to announce it’s first fundraising product—PunjabiKosh.  PunjabiKosh is a full-featured, mobile Punjabi-English and English-Punjabi Dictionary.  It is the first ever Punjabi-English Dictionary for the iPhone/iPod touch platform and is a tool that you can use to easily and quickly look up words in a comprehensive dictionary, ideal for learning the meanings of old song, increasing your Punjabi vocabulary, and learning new and obscure words.

100% of the profits made from the App Store will directly be donated to fund our first project with The Association for the Welfare of the Handicapped and we’ll be periodically posting updates on how much the app has generated.  The introductory price is $6.99 so get it while it’s new!

The app provides for a clean, intuitive and easy-to-use interface that’s both attractive and clean. Features include:

  • 30,000+ Word Dictionary
  • Includes Common Punjabi Phrases and Idioms
  • Full Gurmukhi Unicode Native-Keyboard
  • English & Punjabi Search Capabilities
  • Reverse-Definition English Search
  • Vowel Fuzzy-Search
  • Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi & English Transliteration
  • Part-of-Speech

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to really master your mother-tongue-the easy way!

We are currently working on:

  • Shahmukhi Search
  • Bookmarks & Wordlists
  • Indexed Scrolling
  • History

Out of the box, the iPhone does not fully support the Gurmukhi unicode font. As such, there are certain rendering issues that we are currently in the process of requesting Apple to resolve. Until these are resolved words such as ‘ਪਿੰਡ’ will read as ‘ਪੰਿਡ’. For a full list of rendering issues and possible workarounds feel free to contact us.  These workarounds might require you to modify your device.  Regardless, feel free to contact us with any concerns.

UPDATE: We have now implemented a workaround as of version 1.1 that fixes the Gurmukhi rendering issues. Don’t forget that under the unicode standard the ’sihaare’ character comes after the consonant. (i.e. ਪ + ਿ = ਪਿ)


The Ravi Foundation launches with its first project for The Association for the Welfare of Handicapped

Posted on 31. Mar, 2010 by Sahej Suri in Blog

The Ravi Foundation was created to establish means of raising awareness and funds to benefit less fortunate schools in India. This includes but is not limited to those institutions that treat disabled and handicapped children, as well as institutions in lower income areas of India.

The Ravi Foundation looks to assist in providing resources for purchasing necessary items for the students of the Association for the Welfare of Handicapped. The cost per day per student to run this school is $48. The school depends entirely on donations, since it is a non-governmental organization. We are interested in helping raise awareness of the need for help to underprivileged children. Often we forget that there are so many in this world who have so much less than we do.

The Association for the Welfare of Handicapped is located in Faridabad, Haryana in India. Its purpose is to provide service to hearing and/or visually impaired children from cradle to grave. Speech therapy is also offered. Teachers are all qualified in their specific areas, and the Education Department of Haryana Government recognizes the school. All services are free of charge, including books, uniforms, and other required school supplies. Classes are small with a teacher to student ratio of one to eight.

Any help you can give goes really far. We who are so fortunate should be willing to give back to our community. Anything you can do makes a big difference. A step in the right direction is to help The Ravi Foundation help others. Helping others is not so hard. You just need to get started. It is easy to make a donation through our website.  We have set our first goal of $4000 to this deserving association and have many plans to help reach it