As some of you may know, we released a preview of our Firefox add-on last week. We didn’t go out of our way to publicize it, since we mostly wanted to get everyone’s feedback regarding the functionality, and bugs of course The response was very enthusiastic, but many of you wrote back suggesting to offer another non-toolbar mode.

Obviously many people have been traumatized by toolbars that popped out of nowhere after installing an unrelated piece of software, and especially with smaller resolutions people prefer to have a clean browser interface that maximize the browser content area .  On the other hand, toolbars can be very useful with the proper set of tools and added functionality.  So we decided to offer users the option:  You can choose to keep the full functionality of the toolbar, or you can go with a lighter and minimalistic option that we call the “mini mode”:

After you install the Yamli add-on, you will get to make the choice.  You can change the mode anytime later by clicking through the options.

I hope everyone who removed the toolbar will re-install the add-on (here) and give it a try.  I also want to let everyone know that we’re not done with Yamli for Firefox, and are open to everyone’s ideas and suggestions.  We have a few things that we think you’ll all enjoy that will progressively get included as we implement them.

Let us know what you think!

Welcome to the official blog of Yamli. We are very excited about the launch of this blog and look forward to share with you our products, thoughts and hear your feedback.

About a year and a half ago, we launched Yamli with the vision of empowering the Arabic language and users on the Web and thanks to your support and suggestions we are inching forward towards our goal, and we would like to thank you for that !

We also want to take this opportunity to present a preview of our new gadget, the Yamli Firefox toolbar. Many of you have asked for an easy way to type Arabic with Yamli on any site, including email, social networks and instant messengers. Thanks to your feedback and suggestions we have been working on providing this functionality through our most recent gadget.

The Yamli toolbar enables users to type Arabic on any site with a simple click of a button. The main trick was to get it working right with Rich Text Editors, which are usually found in webmail sites such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and others.  The toolbar also allows search and provides comprehensive search results.

We also thought it would be a cool idea to add a Facebook and Twitter feature so that you can directly update your status from the toolbar.

You can download the toolbar preview from here. This is the first version and we’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on what we can add or do to improve on it. What do you think ?