TUNE (Tamil Unicode NEw) is a proposed 16-bit alternate encoding scheme for Tamil developed by TVU (Tamil Virtual University) and KTS (Kani Tamizh Sangam). You can download the CD Content from here (24MB Zip File), that was distributed.

After nearly two decades of intense efforts by its members, Unicode is the single, universal character standard for all digital text. It has widespread implementation and usage. It is considered by technical experts as a fundamental technology that the digital world is very dependent on the stability and future extensions of the standard, even though it may not be apparent to you.

All major computing platforms today use only Unicode as the default encoding for all of their world-wide (including Indian Language) implementations in their latest releases. Popular Microsoft Products today have 100% support for Tamil texts based in Unicode, this includes Windows XP, Office 2003, .NET Framework, SQL Server & more. Other vendors too support Tamil in their latest products including Apple in OS 10.4 and Redhat in their RH 4.0. From a developers perspective Unicode is the only character coding standard support in all major technologies including .NET, Java, HTML, XML, Web Services, Regular Expressions, WML and more.

This state of maturity of Unicode took 2 decades of development. Today all languages co-exist in a single universal encoding without overlapping.

In this background, it is important to understand why TUNE is unnecessary.

1. It is important to understand that Unicode is only a character coding system designed for Interchange, say through file systems or through Internet. Almost all of every day applications like Web Browsing, email, Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Mobile Applications and Database works very well in Tamil (Unicode) just like in English using Unicode.
2. It is possible to do all computing tasks (Document creation, Printing, Searching, Sorting, Calculations, Spell checking, Database and more) in Tamil Language using present Unicode 4.x.
3. President of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, in his letter to Tamil Internet 2004 conference last year (and to the conference in 2003 in Chennai), suggested Tamil search engines and internet application architecture as two key areas for the consideration of the language experts in the country and that these initiatives should adopt Unicode as the standard. It is heartening to note that today Popular Search engines including MSN Search, Google and Yahoo today support searching of Tamil Texts based on Unicode in the World Wide Web. Apart from Unicode they don’t support any other coding system used anywhere else in the world.
4. TUNE efforts has been solely limited to Tamilnadu (TVU/KTS) and hasn’t had any visible interest shown by rest of Tamil speaking nations. Any Global Tamil Text Standard has to have the endorsement of not only MNC’s but the various Tamil speaking country’s governments as well. This includes apart from Tamilnadu Government, Government of Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia and others. We should remember that for these nations apart from Tamil, any coding scheme has to support their primary native language and say English. Even in India, Tamil needs to co-exist with other Indian languages. This is possible only with the usage of Unicode.  
5. The biggest challenge facing Tamil Computing world is not Unicode, but the fragmentation into groups of incompatible encodings. Many of the users are so confused with the plethora of 8-bit encoding schemes for Tamil (TSCII, TAB, TAM, ISCII and other proprietary schemes).
6. World-class software development companies (including those from and in India) rely on a time-tested standard (Unicode) that is governed by a body of Industry experts who are supported by leading vendors who implement or incorporate this into their products. With TUNE, the Tamil community will be made to depend on few developers – thus limiting access to the pool of world-class software.

So there is no need for “yet” another coding scheme. A new scheme will only further alienate Tamils in the Digital Era and will delay their integration into the world wide. What is needed is for all Tamil speaking nations to actively promote the usage of Unicode and encourage research on further refinement of the same.

You can post your comments by becoming a member to the yahoo groups here. 

Many times you have images or photos and you want to do some quick work on them - like crop the image or edit the color, resize, etc. Over the years, there were many tools I found useful to do these.

1. Adobe Photoshop Elements - This lite version of Adobe Photoshop is the best tool in the market and it cost only US$99
2. Irfanview Photo viewer - This is a popular free image viewer, support virtually all image formats. Also supports basic image cropping, few effects and allows batch processing for resizing, format change and more. Highly recommended!
3. Image Resizer - This is part of Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP, which are free add-ons you get from Microsoft.com website. This one allows you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.
4. Paint.NET - If you are frustrated with the Windows MS Paint application, then this is the one for you. It is a free graphics and photo manipulation software based on Microsoft .NET Framework. This one has lot of commercial quality features including Layers, History, Plugins and more. Best part is it comes with full source code, which can be worth a read if you are working on Windows Smartclient applications. There is a video here from MSDN about how they build this application.
5. Picasa - This free software from Google is good if you only want a software to effectively manage photos and share them. The beauty of this one is that it is simple and looks awesome. 

I haven't added in the above list Microsoft Acrylic because it is in beta and not released. Acrylic is based on Creature House Expression, a product Microsoft acquired in 2003 from a HongKong company. The current CTP release of Acrylic supports export of XAML, which is a new markup language used in Windows Presentation Framework (Avalon) of Windows Vista. As a sidenode, I noticed Paint.net uses couple of third-party softwares. Following a link from one of them, I came across this company Skybound who seem to be making available for reasonable price good .NET Winforms components for functionalities like Windows XP Themes, Rebars and Autocomplete. Check them out.

Though it is 5 years old, the spectacular failure of hundreds of dot coms in 2000 is history worth remembering. It showed how Market, Media, Investors, Promoters and Public can all go wrong at the same time. It once again proved that there is no shortcut to success and that Money never comes Quick, never comes Easy. It showed to Businesses that there is no substitute to a solid revenue roadmap. In this connection today I read an interesting Chronology of the Top 10 Internet Dot Com Burst. Check it out here.