Monday, March 15, 2010

Numbers are working. Now what?

I just had a great Python session with my tutor, and we've gone about as far as we can go with our current dumb terminal version of Plover. Everything is translating properly, including numbers. The new version of the dictionary contains all the entries I use with my proprietary software. It's all very exciting.

But I'm still the only person using Plover. It's very useful when I'm outputting my CART display to one computer using my proprietary software and echoing it on another computer using Plover. That's a pretty specific activity, and if there's anyone besides me who thinks it would come in handy for them, they haven't said anything to me about it. No, in order for this thing to do what it needs to do, it has to output to the operating system, just like any ordinary qwerty keyboard does when you plug it in and start typing.

My first volunteer beta tester uses Fedora, so whatever I use to rig the output has to work on Linux. I'm on XP, so we need a Windows version too. I wish I could use the same code for both -- and if anyone reading this has an idea of how to do that, please let me know -- but from the brief research my Python tutor and I did before the end of today's session, it looks like we're going to have to use something like SendKeys for the Windows version and... I don't know. Whatever GOK uses in Linux? This is all very much uncharted territory for me, so I'd love advice from anyone who knows how to get input from a Python program and use it to emulate keyboard output. If you've got any ideas, comment here or email me: plover@stenoknight.com.

No comments:

Post a Comment