Zekr: Multimedia Quran Study Software / News: Recent posts

Zekr 1.1.0 is the final release of 1.1.0, which is available just before Ramadan 1433 (2012). This release has a few bug fixes compared to previous 1.1.0 milestone 1 release.

This release is deeply devoted to the Muslims of Rohingya, Myanmar, world’s most prosecuted people who are expelled, killed and oppressed as a daily routine in their own country. Please pray for them in this holy month of Ramadan.

After two years of inactivity in Zekr development, I'm happy to announce a new Zekr release. Zekr 1.1.0m1 is now available for download. We tried to implement features which are widely needed by users. It includes the following new features:
Multiple recitation support.
Show translation under search results and allow user to toggle translation/quran under search results.
Native support for media keys on Windows (play, pause, next track, etc.).
Zekr is now shown on the system tray icon (if supported).
Search scopes are now persisted, so they will kept if Zekr is closed.... read more

We are happy to announce availability of Zekr 1.0.0. This is the most major release after about 6 years of development. Our 0.1.0 version was released in the early 2005 and now by the Ramadan of 1431 (August 2010), Zekr 1.0.0 is ready for download.

Please pray for Muslims around the world, specially people of Gaza. In order to promote Zekr, please give us back a link to htttp://zekr.org on your website, weblog, network using a logo from Spread Zekr page (http://zekr.org/spread-zekr.html). ... read more

I'm happy to announce general availability of Zekr 0.7.5 final version. This version has a lot of enhancements over previous release 0.7.1, most notably, the new audio player.

The next version of Zekr will be 1.0.0 and will be out in a few weeks after
0.7.5, as I received feedbacks on current release. 1.0.0 will not have any
major change with 0.7.5.

Release Note: http://zekr.org/wiki/Zekr_0.7.5
Download: http://zekr.org/download.html
Regards,
Mohsen

After weeks of heavy development, I'm happy to announce that Zekr 0.7.5 beta 4 is available. This release comes with a number of new features and enhancements as well as bug fixes. Here is a selection of new features:

- Audio player enhancements: player scope, play mode for special items, pre-fetching, seeking support, shortcut for seek and volume control, quick import for complete recitation pack files (.recit.zip), audio player form enhancements.
- Key-binding redesigned: some new attributes added to shortcut.xml for more flexibility.
- Go To form enhancements: more flexible sura name filtering, syncing other inputs when Review button is pressed.
- A number of Mac Cocoa enhancements, including support for Application Menu.... read more

Zekr 0.7.5 beta 3 is just released. This release introduces the following new features:

- A new advanced Goto dialog introduced with a number of options. You can activate it with Ctrl+G. One may navigate to Al-Fatiha:3, simply by typing al-fa:3 and pressing enter.
- It's now possible to play (recite) a search result aya using a small play icon near each aya.
- In order to ease Debian packaging, Zekr code base was made compatible with Lucene 2.9.x and 3.0.0.... read more

Zekr 0.7.5 beta 2 is now available shortly after 0.7.5 beta 1. New features are:
- Old audio recitation files are auto-converted to the new format.
- Keyboard shortcuts can now be customized through a file res/config/shortcut.xml.

No need to mention that in 0.7.5 beta 1 we fully redesigned audio player scheme and are not able to play more audio formats. We also support more control on playing, repeating and pausing between each aya. We compile against Java 5 and our Mac OS X package is now using Cocoa.... read more

Zekr 0.7.1 is available for download. This is a bug-fix release over 0.7.0. There are some bug fixes and a new feature introduced in this release.

Online recitations are now playing more smoothly, as a buffering scheme is added to prevent lags between playing two subsequent ayas. This pre-fetching method is mainly inspired from Tanzil.info JavaScript pre-fetching code.

Download: http://zekr.org/download.html
Changes: http://zekr.org/wiki/Zekr_0.7.1

Happy Ramadan. We are so pleased to announce general availability of the final Zekr 0.7.0 release just before Ramadan.

Zekr 0.7.0 is the also known as Zekr Ramadan Edition 2. The previous Ramadan edition was 0.6.5, in which recitation support was firs introduced.

Release notes and screen shots:
http://zekr.org/wiki/Zekr_0.7.0

Download:
http://zekr.org/download.html

We are happy to announce availability of Zekr 0.7.0 beta 2. This is the second (and probably the last) beta release in 0.7.0 branch. God willing, we will have the final 0.7.0 before Ramadan. We have many changes and new features as well as bug fixes in this version. Here is
a short list of new features introduced in this release:

* Search (basic and advanced) through Quran translations, supporting customizable analyzers and localized text replace patterns for searching in different languages;
* Quran root and stem database, supporting search through Quran roots, and sorting results based on relevance, aya size, revelation order, or natural order;
* Support for a wide range of different paging modes: juz-by-juz, sura-by-sura, hizb quarter-by-hizb quarter, fixed aya count, and custom (Uthman Taha for example).... read more

We are happy to announce the availability of the first beta release in 0.7.0 branch of Zekr.
Ze
There are many changes and new features as well as bug fixes in this release. The main focus in this release was on the following features:
- Automatic and manual check for updates
- Revelation pack support (revelation order of suras or ayas)
- Verifying if a resource (translation or revelation pack) is authentic.
- Translated and transliterated sura names
- Full screen display
- More options for sorting search results.
- More advanced basic search. See this post on the mailing list.
- Display sura names in a tree.

A new RPM package is available for Zekr 0.6.6. This package is assumed to work on Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva, and other RPM-compatible distributions of Linux. This package is contributed by Saeed.

A new Bosnian custom build of Zekr (based on 0.6.6) is available. This build is available for Windows and contributed by Alma Aganović and Nedim Hadžić.

Zekr 0.6.6 is ready for download. This is not only a bug fix release over 0.6.5 and fixes some long awaited bugs, but also introduces some new features:

- Advanced navigation: next/previous sura, aya, juz, hizb quarter (through View > Go to menu)
- Mozilla everywhere: XULRunner can be used on Windows as well as Mac and Linux as the default browser
- Alpha channel enabled splash screen, plus a new splash (thanks to Bandar Raffa)
- Uzbek (Nurali Abdurahmonov), and Tatar (Fareed A. Bashirov) language packs... read more

Zekr is an open Quranic platform aimed to be the common tool to ease access to the holy Quran. It is a non commercial desktop application to ease reading, translating, or researching on the Quran.

Zekr Ramadan Edition is available. This new release mainly focused on delivering online and offline Quran recitation feature, by the begining of Ramadan.

We are happy to announce the new release Zekr 0.6.0beta2. Many bugs are fixed in this release and it introduces the following new features:
* Advanced search now supports fuzzy queries: for example you can search for the term "Allah" and it's 50% similar terms using this query: allah~0.5.
* HTML export for bookmark sets: a new button is added "to Manage Bookmark Sets" form to export any bookmark set into a single HTML file.
* An asymmetric character matching for basic search in order to match Hamza characters better.
* Some command lines added: -index, -clean, -workspace.
* Task pane (the main pane in which you search or choose sura/aya) can be resizeable with the new option added: Resizeable task pane.
* A new language pack: Pashto (thanks to Qudratullah).... read more

Downloads were made inactive due to some critical typo reported in Quran text (both simple text and Uthman Taha text), are again on. We verified the whole Quran twice using a diff script to compare Uthma Taha and simple Quran text. We found about 20 typos in Uthman Taha text and a lot more in simple text. Now the simple Quran text is automatically generated from Uthman Taha text. See this page for typos found in simple text: http://csgradpc05.cs.uwaterloo.ca/quran/code/index.php

Due to some typo found in the Quran text (both base and Uthman Taha text), all downloads are made temporarily unavailable. We are trying hard to update packages and make them available for download as soon as possible. Thank for your patience.

I'm glad to announce a new release the Zekr Project: 0.6.0 beta 1.
This release is a great step forward, because of it's advanced search feature. Here is a brief listing of it's features (over 0.5.0):
- Advanced search using Lucene powerful text search library (Boolean
operators, groups, wild cards, scopes, ...).
- A new "Uthman Taha (experimental)" theme is added. This theme uses me_quran font (designed by Meor Ridzuan: http://arabicfonts.wikispaces.com\) for rendering Quran ayas. me_quran font is distributed with the standard package, with permission from it's designer. Windows installer, copies the font into [WINDOWS]/fonts folder; Linux and Mac basic distributions have this font under
[zekr]/res/me_quran_volt_mark2.ttf, and one should manually install it in order to utilize a full-feature Uthman Taha theme.
- Detailed Quran text added. Each theme may use the property "quran_detailedTextFile", to use detailed Quran text (a very accurate and detailed text very similar to Uthman Taha's calligraphy) is a property each.
- "sky-vertical" theme is now removed; each theme may show ayas side by side, or line by line in custom mixed layout (based on the value of the property "trans_showMultipleSideBySide").
- Minor changes: Progress bar in splash screen, JQuery upgraded to 1.1.2, icons enhanced, search configurations are now saved, ...

According to a typo in sura 4 (Al-Nisa), aya 90, all downloads with this typo, are unavbailable. The updated version of 0.5.0 beta 2 is now available.

Zekr 0.5.0 beta 2 is avilable for download. This would be the last beta release before 0.5.0 release.

Some new features for beta 2 release:
+ Bookmark set group management: add/remove/edit/import/export bookmark sets
+ Find aya references within the current bookmark set (a menu item under bookmarks menu)
+ Custom mixed layout: multiple translations can be seen in a mixed layout
+ Transliteration: there is a built-in transliteration, which is treaded as a translation
+ New icon for Zekr (Vista compatible)
+ Multiple theme/translation import support. Themes and translations can be imported in user home directory (Me-only mode), as well as Zekr installation directory.
+ A number of bug fixes... read more

Mohammad Derakhshani generously contributed an Ubuntu installer package (.deb) for Zekr 0.4.0. The 0.5.0b1 package would be provided soon.

Zekr 0.5.0 beta 1 is out.
The main new feature on this release is bookmark support.
More:
+ Printing enhancement
+ Random aya
+ Current page search enhancement

We are happy to announce the public availability of the Zekr 0.4.0 final release.
This release has a number of new features over version 0.3.0 and works fine on Win32/Mac/Linux.
This release is much convenient, and a lot of bugs are fixed (see [zekr]/doc/changes.txt)

* 4 new language packs (Dutch, Kurdish, Malay, Turkish)
* Navigation bar for easy navigation through search results as well as different suras/ayas
* Scoped search (search items can be added including or excluding): You can have a managed search on both Quran and translations
* Search through translations (with Unicode match case option)
* Application bundle for Mac... read more

The Zekr 0.3.0 final release is now available.
There are a number of cool features in this release + more stability. The SWT graphics library update to build 3232 and the Russian language pack has been added.