Thursday, May 20, 2010

Update: No Update! (yet)

We are coming down to the wire. My Python tutor has returned from his travels and I'm trying to get as much done on Plover as possible before one of my prospective testers comes down from Boston in six days and borrows my spare steno machine (a Gemini2), so she can bring it home and attempt to learn steno. She's primarily interested because she's had severe RSI problems in the past and still has to do a lot of typing, so I've sold her on the tremendous ergonomic benefits of steno, and of a Gemini split-keyboard writer in particular. That reminds me that I should write part three of my six-part series, What Is Steno Good For?: The Ergonomic Argument. Look for that in the next day or two. In order for her to get much use out of it, though, we have to finish incorporating the serial steno machine protocol into the currently sidewinder-only GUI base of Plover. Then we have to fix the file output so it makes corrections properly. And then we need to figure out the punctuation/capitalization/adfix issue, though at this point I'm contemplating just writing a script that prettifies the log file after the session's over using regular expressions. It feels like a cheat, but it's a way to get useful text out of Plover in the short term (assuming we can fix the first two problems), so I'm willing to let it lie for the time being. Yesterday my tutor and I had a two-hour session, but we're still not finished solving either problem. We've got another session scheduled for tomorrow, and if it's still not where we want it, we might even meet Monday as well. So thanks for your patience, Plover users. The next big step is coming soon, if you can just hold out a little bit longer.

1 comment:

Abby Bayne said...

Thanks for the update, looking forward to the next instalment.