Ghana Keyboards History

Project Nyalasi Timeline

Project Nyalasi (the Keyboard support project which produced winGlass ) has had an interesting history which has been chronicled here for the sake of posterity.

September 23, 2006

Third anniversary of the live launch of winGlass. Cheers! On a sadder note, we were unable to acquire the domain for winGlass's successor, dubbed "altKey"; we might need to rename it. Any ideas?

July 19, 2006

GhanaKeyboards.Com revamps the look of the site with the new "Chill" Theme.

June 16, 2005

GhanaKeyboards.Com mentioned on GhanaThink.

January 15, 2005

GhanaKeyboards.Com goes live on ComputingHost's servers

October 28, 2004

First known online recommendation of the keyboards made on ClubGH. Yay!

October 16, 2004

First recorded response from a keyboard user received. Yay!

September 24, 2004

GhanaKeyboards.Com goes live (virtual domain redirect to Stanford.Edu hosting server).

September 22, 2004

GhanaKeyboards.Com domain name bought.

April 4, 2004

GhanaWeb carries an article about Opoku-Pong Kyekyeku and Isaac Quarshie's hardware keyboard prototype. Apparently, there are other forward-looking people working on the same problem.

September 23, 2003

Project Nyalasi, which is now GhanaKeyboards.Com goes live on a Stanford.Edu server. First known download of a keyboard takes place.

September 22, 2003

Distribution license obtained for Keyman Developer Standard version.

September 20, 2003

Original GhanaKeyboards site (Project Nyalasi) created.

August 28, 2003

The Akan, Dagaare, Ga-Dangme, Kasem, Nzema keyboards created and tested.

August 24, 2003

The Ewe sub-segment of winGLaSS was tested using demo Keyman Developer version with positive results on an MSN messenger chat with Winston Okraku. It required (and still requires) that a Unicode compliant font be present on both computer being used.

May, 2003

Assessment of various tools done.

  • Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) would only support Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
  • Janko Stamenovic's Keyboard Generator would not support any Windows operating system beyond Windows 98 SE.
  • Keyboard Layout Manager, developed by Milan Vidakovic and Igor Milijasevic, came in too many versions for me to easily and successfully offer support for any keyboards developed with it.
  • Tavultesoft's Keyman (then called Tavultesoft Keyboard Manager) seemed the best tool out there.

Meanwhile, work was being done on the placement of the characters of the respective alphabets on the keyboards using admittedly scarce resources, and not-so-sophisticated statistical considerations. The text resources analysed were:

  • the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and
  • a fragment from the Bible (John 1:1 - 10) in Ewe, Fante, Ga, Dagbani
  • Language Guides, published by the Bureau of Ghanaian Languages.

January 5, 2003

Phone conversation with Dr. Bemile, Director of Ghana Institute of Languages about keyboard layout standards for Ghana. He says no standardised keyboard layout exist for any Ghanaian language, thinks Nyalasi is a good idea.

January 1, 2003

Mawusi goes offline after 16 hours because of the following reasons:

  • Mawusi was diacritics-challenged: it could not support accented characters with accents
  • Although it handled Ewe, Ga and Akan, Mawusi did not offer complete support for the Ga language (for example, the spot of the letter "j" on the keyboard had been sacrificed for the letter ɛ ). This suggested the need for a more elegant systems that truly caters for the needs of other languages, as well.
  • Mawusi was a kludge. It did not conform to any international standards. In some instances, there were no standards.

January 1, 2003

Mawusi font available online.

December 31 , 2002.

Mawusi, a quick and dirty font to facilitate typing in Akan, Ewe, and Ga created using the late Dave Emmett's Softy.

November, 2002

Conception of idea after a harrowing attempt to write the (unreleased) song, "Jama," in the Ghanaian language Ga using Microsoft Word and Windows Character Map