Start page: ARABART home

الفن العربي means “Arabic Art”. It is the name of ARABART, his engine for writing Arabic.

Yasser Awad taught a PC to write Arabic.

Port Said, Egypt, 1991. This is his code, ported line by line, drawing every letter you type.

Type in Arabic Run his programs
  1. Arabic letters join their neighbors. Pull a word apart and each letter stands alone.
  2. So one letter needs up to four shapes: alone, at the start, in the middle and at the end. Here is ع. He drew every shape by hand, for five fonts.
  3. His engine looks at each pair of neighbors and gives every letter its shape. The whole rule is 13 instructions of assembly. In JavaScript it is one line.
  4. His name, drawn by his own engine: ياسر عوض, Yasser Awad. Port Said, 1991.
  5. Fifteen of his programs survive, and every one runs in your browser on a real DOS emulator. Pick one.

Fifteen programs from Port Said

1991 to 1993: 282,675 bytes of his code in all. Pick one and press Run.

Cairo, 1993. Arabic comes to Windows.

Sakhr, in Cairo, made the first Arabic version of Windows 3.x. He joined in 1993 as a project leader. He built core parts of its Arabic office software, the programs people used to write, print and publish in Arabic.

Open each one to see what it did.

Read his whole career
Program Manager

Sakhr Arabic Office

Click me!

Open each icon to see what he built at Sakhr.

Printing core

Arabic on paper, exactly as it looks on the screen. His printing core laid out each page right to left and sent it to the printer. Think of the print engine inside your browser, written for Arabic.

Kanata, 1996. The networks of phone companies.

He moved to Canada and joined Newbridge Networks, which Alcatel bought in 2000. For ten years he was a senior designer and team leader there.

He was the architect of the CORBA interface of the 5620 Network Manager, the control room of a phone company’s network. Through that door, an operator’s own systems read alarms and inventory and order new connections. In today’s terms, it is the network’s public API.

Read the patent, explained
US 7,603,377 Properties

One number for every port.

In 2005 he filed the idea that became US patent 7,603,377, granted in 2009, with Yasser Awad as first-named inventor. Each part of the network gets one 32-bit number, and the number spells out where the part sits.

Where is it?

Key 21,246,097

Everything in shelf 2 of node 5 has keys from 21,233,664 to 21,364,735. Sorted, they sit side by side, so the database finds the whole shelf in one read. A subnet works the same way: 10.1.0.0/16 holds every address that starts with 10.1.

Node 10 bits · shelf, slot, card 5 bits each · port 7 bits

Kanata, 2002. His own company.

In November 2002 he founded DinarSoft, and with his co-developer, Hosam Aly, built six apps for Pocket PC and Windows Mobile phones, the smartphones of the day. Reviewers called MemMaid “the Swiss Army Knife of PPC utilities”. Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine named HandySwitcher the best task manager in 2007 and again in 2008, and TapText the best Misc. Utility of 2007. His apps earned 22 nominations from 2003 to 2008.

Visit DinarSoft
Solution Explorer

Solution ‘DinarSoft’ (6 projects)

Click me!

Pick a project to run it on the Pocket PC.

MemMaid

Total Found:0 Bytes

Properties

MemMaid

The Best Maid for PocketPCs

DinarSoft’s flagship: it finds everything that fills a Pocket PC’s memory, clears it in one tap, then hands you the controls for the rest of the device.

First
1.0, June 2003
Latest
2.3, June 2008
Price then
$14.99 in 2006, $19.99 in 2008
Runs on
Pocket PC 2002 (version 1.73), Windows Mobile 2003, 5 and 6. Portrait, landscape and square screens
Awards
Finalist, 2005 to 2008Nominee, 2004
Reviews
28 archived
Today
Free, with a free unlock key
Open MemMaid

Still running.

He wrote these programs in Port Said with a few books and no internet. Today his son has put them back on a screen, so anyone can run them, type with his engine and see how he built them.

Run his programs See how ARABART works A note from his son