Plover takes control

So Josh, the person responsible for 99% of Plover's code, came by my coworking space today and showed me the newest version of Plover. It's wonderful beyond description. The dream I had when I first came up with the concept and started this blog back in 2008 is finally realized: Plover now writes instant English translations from a steno machine or SideWinder to the active window. Yes, we have achieved keyboard emulation. It blew my mind to see it, and I did a jig of giddy glee.

Now, for the time being this only works on Ubuntu. Windows development, when it comes, will be a fair distance down the road (possibly after development for Android, though we're still thinking about how best to work out that one.) Still, with Wubi available, there's no reason that anyone with a Windows machine can't install Ubuntu as a dual boot option on their system in about 20 minutes, without affecting their existing configuration at all. It's remarkably seamless. There are also a few other kinks to work out before I upload the new code to the Github. We discovered a bug or two today, so Josh is going to tackle them over the next few weeks and hopefully after some testing we'll have a good stable release to show you. Then there's the polishing that needs to be done, adding some linguistic and orthographic rules, and putting all the formatting syntax back under the hood where it belongs. But this is a huge step, and I'm thrilled to bits. In the next day or two I might try to do a sneak preview video to show you guys, if I can get a screencast put together. But for now, you're gonna have to take my word for it. It works! It works! Yeehaw!