Feather, a One-Handed Steno Theory

The ingenuity of the Open Steno community never fails to amaze me. Check out Feather, an attempt currently in progress to make a workable one-handed steno theory! How cool!!

Jarne Firmware Update

Tharelia says:

Further update for Jarne users: April 6 evening build will now automatically migrate your user dictionary from on-chip flash to external flash, and update to the latest dictionary storage version at the same time.

This has several advantages:

* The external flash is rated for 100k writes, instead of 10k writes.

* The external flash is much larger. The user dictionary on the Jarne has expanded to 1MB instead of 256kb (compare with 512kb on pico boards)

You can see it's worked as you'll be on version 3 and have larger hash and data block usages available after.

Froj!

StenoHarri made Froj, a shorthand dictionary generator:

Froj converts Edinburgh's pronunciation dictionary into stenography outlines using theory rules and brute force.

Every rule depends on four things:

Spelling

Phonetics

previous keys

Prefixes/roots/compounds/suffixes

Every rule outputs three things:

chord

ambiguity (for conflict resolution)

description (for FrojBot)

Typey-Type Updates!

Di has done it again!

Better suffix hints: Typey Type's now a bit smarter at suggesting longer suffix translations over shorter ones. For example, to write "suitors", Typey Type will now suggest `SAOUT/O*RS` instead of `SAOU/TOR/-S` because the `^ors` suffix is longer than the `^s` suffix. Typey Type now also ranks affixes a bit like how it tries to show better stroke hints and hide misstrokes. This means that even when using personal dictionaries, Typey Type should give you better stroke hints when there's no exact dictionary entry for a word and it suggests using affixes to write it out.

Better fingerspelling behaviour: I updated lessons and the Typey Type dictionaries to help fix a rare issue that sometimes causes issues with stray spaces while fingerspelling. Props to JRJurman, Monniasza, Paul Fioravanti and others that have helped with various parts of that.

Added links to steno demos: I added links on Typey Type to interactive steno demos so it's easier for people to try steno straight away in the browser without setting anything up. Props to Waldir for sharing their experience about exploring steno.

Links and more details here.

Rate Limiting in Javelin

Tharelia writes:

People have asked for a way to slow down Javelin's output multiple times, to support software that cannot handle the default output rate. There is now an initial mechanism to do this; though it will likely change in the future. Firmware's 2025-03-16 and later have this ability, and it'll show up in the Settings Tool too. The pico builds work to these timings already, even with the hacky implementation; so going to leave that as is for now. Get a firmware 2025-03-19 or later for these features + some important fixes recently. Note: The rate limit is the rate that keyboard packets are sent to the computer, not the rate of characters. e.g. A character with a shift will send a shift-press, a letter-press, then a letter release, then shift release.

Javelin Update!

Tharelia writes:

Javelin Update
Firmware
Fixed retro_toggle_asterisk
Fixed sendText() on Jarne / Jarne Blade
Added a number of new fonts
More performance improvements
Added support for Cirque Touchpad, with auto-detection for all existing modules on Halcyon Kyria
javelin-steno-rp2040 repository renamed to javelin-steno-pico and can now build for rp2040, rp2350-arm and rp2350-riscv Added Game of Life screensaver to Halcyon Kyria layout
Javelin is making progress on multi-language support
You can now run Javelin with another layout, however, it only supports a single language on a device at a time at the moment.
This also supports defining extra parsing even if you want to just use standard English/extended English - for example, you can define "J" to be SKWR, then add dictionary entries such as "JET" -> "jet", or "JAFL" -> "javelin"'


Web Tools
Added Condition and Set Value action in Visual Editor.
Added Double Press activation in Visual Editor
Added code to visual editor generated scripts to prevent sticky steno keys when ModTap keys are used on the steno layer.
Added hesitation times to paper tape export
Added support for building firmware for other languages
Added support for working with other languages in various tools

JSON dictionary to Anki Deck Script

Warren has made a Python script to turn a JSON dictionary into an Anki deck so you can study it flashcard-style!