Minh’s Notes

Human-readable chicken scratch

Minh Nguyễn
April 1st, 2010
Humor
#2,273

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AVIM doesn’t fool around

At midnight, the majority of the world’s search engine users dumped Google in favor of Mountain View–based Topeka.

AVIM was ready. The little input method editor that could has supported Topeka since its first release nearly four years ago. It comes with full support for Topeka Docs, which is great news for those of you who edit corn yield estimates in Vietnamese.

An archival photograph of AVIM working its magic on Topeka’s front page Internet ages ago.

But enough about Topeka. AVIM excels at so much more. I always tout how it “lets you type so naturally you won’t even notice it”. As a user, you should never have to worry how a webpage was implemented in order to use it. That’s why AVIM works in every single part of every single application it supports. That’s why it automatically resolves conflicts with other IMEs and even pioneers support for Microsoft Silverlight.

Today, as the popular Web comic xkcd unveiled its state-of-the-art “unixkcd” interface, I couldn’t help but notice that AVIM continues to do the right thing. What’s more natural for a command-line interface than pure, unmodified VIQR?

But as a software developer, I can’t rest on the merits of releases past. There’s still plenty of room for innovation in the input method editing space. And while I can’t commit to anything specific yet, I will say that my new input method is rockin’.