Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Two bug fixes in SideWinder version of Plover

If you go over to the Github, you'll see changes in tktest.py and sidewinder.py. I recently took a trip to Seattle and Missoula and didn't have enough room in my luggage for my steno machine, so instead I took along the new SideWinder X4 I bought for my brother William. I had four transcription files to finish before the end of the trip, and I discovered that the freezing bug which had intermittently affected Plover completely prevented me from using my rewind foot pedal with Winamp, so my brother and I sat down together and fixed it, by gum. I also put in a line of code that made it so if you accidentally hit the space bar (like I found myself doing constantly, since it's so close to the vowel keys) it doesn't throw out the stroke the way it does if you hit other keys besides the ones mapped to be steno keys; it just ignores the space and translates the stroke as usual. These two tiny little changes has made Plover drastically more useful as-is, and tomorrow I'm meeting my Python tutor to work on keyboard emulation. I know it's been a bit of a hiatus, but Plover is back in active development again.

2 comments:

Gulrot said...

Just found the plover project some days ago, and this looks really interesting, I really want to get myself an X4 and try it out when I get back home from Japan. How is it to adapt to another language? Like Norwegian? Is it possible to make a dictionary myself, does it accept unicode? for letters like æøå? I'm so close to buying an x4 that I found in a store here, but I'm more keen on a norwegian one :)
Well, just have to keep myself waiting for a bit more, I'm reading the posts here in your blog, and I want madly to get to know it, I do type "acceptably" on a normal keyboard (qwerty 60 dvorak 75 colemak 40) so well, I really want to get something new exciting to learn, so in the mean time I'm learning teeline ;)

Mirabai Knight said...

Hi, Gulrot. Sorry it took me a while to get back to you. Plover is currently compatible with every character in the latin encoding set. As long as you can make a Norwegian dictionary, Plover will work just fine with it!

By the way, my mom's Norwegian, so I'm extra happy to hear from you. Tusen takk!