Typing in Hindi becomes easy!!
If you’d remember, sometime back I posted a link to an online Hindi keypad which allowed you to type hindi in unicode using your mouse. But that’s still a bit of bother as you’ve to be pretty handy with your mouse & still it’ll take some practice to get used to the onscreen keyboard.
But now you can type in Hindi right from your keyboard(yes your real tangible keyboard) and you don’t even need to know hindi typing. 
In comes The Phonetic Hindi Writer by Devendra Parakh. (via Shahab) Its a keyboard map which when activated, will convert your english characters into hindi using a phonetic conversion mapping. And the text will be in unicode. So you’ll need have a unicode supporting version of Windows(the software is only for windows), like Windows 2000 or above but I’d recommend WindowsXP or above. And you’ll also need a unicode supporting browser like IE6(not sure about older versions) or Opera or FireFox.
Installation & usage instructions can be read on Shahab’s blog.
Now this sounds very cool, as this software is free. I came across two similar softwares in the past year which let you type phonetic hindi using english characters & which would then convert that to proper hindi but they firstly didn’t do it in unicode(a hindi font was required for them) and secondly those softwares were 30 day trials with no purchase information on their websites. But this is not the case with this as this software is both free & outputs in unicode, so its better.
I’m pretty impressed with the software so far, so much that I’ve decided to blog in hindi on my WordPress.com blog using this beauty. :tup:
So, hindi anyone? 
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Lol .. I am trying to port that HindiWriter keyboard layout to Urdu for my friends ..:P ..
Yaar .. but it doesnt gets displayed in Win9x .. thats why I dont use it much .. Its nice to use it in Yahoo Messenger’s chat window though ..:P
Win9x doesn’t support Unicode as far as I know. It was put in Win2000 & above, that’s why I said that Win2000 & above is required.
Um, how many hours does it take for a single long post ? I think it’ll be much, much slower.
Well, it depends on your typing speed as well as your familiarity of typing Hindi phonetically in English(called as Hinglish by some). So people who are used to typing Hindi in Roman Script(English chars that is) are likely to be faster than those who don’t use that(like me). But it takes just a few minutes of getting used to. After you’ve typed a page or so, you’ll feel pretty comfortable & will get faster each time.
Look at my other blog at http://itsme.wordpress.com/ and you’ll see it, the first & second posts took a bit of time, but when I posted the third, I was in the groove of it, no problems at all.
Though one thing is that since Hindi is much more vast language than English with a whole lot of more sounds etc., you’ll need some practice to work with them, it took me some time to write “australia” in Hindi!!
This is all assuming that you don’t know Hindi typing at all. If you know Hindi typing(in whatever format), you’ll have a little edge over guessing the right combination for the sound.