Live from the Sprint

We're in the middle of the Plover sprint at PyGotham, and it's so much fun I might explode. At one point we had over a dozen people in here, eating free pizza and playing around on the dozen stenofied SideWinders I had scattered around the table. I made a one-page quickstart guide (which I'll post to the wiki sometime this weekend) and printed the newly redesigned steno alphabet chart (better quality one will be uploaded when I get the files from the designer), and four awesome diehard coders (plus the enduringly wonderful Hesky) are still here almost six hours later, chasing bugs and coding new features. It's amazing. I think I got at least one of them pretty hooked on steno (thanks in large part to tthurman's brilliant new browser-based steno word drill program). I don't know how many people are going to show up to the workshop tomorrow, but so far the amount of goodwill and enthusiasm for Plover has been staggering. I love captioning at tech conferences, and I love talking to tech people about steno. Plus PyGotham is on two boats (docked at a pier in lower Manhattan) this year, and the view is something else. I need to post a ton of links to cool stuff that Plover contributors have created over the past several weeks, but I'm going to wait 'til after the conference, so that I can include whatever comes out of this sprint. There is one new thing I want to link to tonight, though. This has been live for a couple days, but I've been so busy preparing for the weekend that I haven't had a chance to post about it. Check it out:

The Plover Store

The owner of In a Flash Laser set up a store for the acrylic steno keys! She graciously offered to drop ship key kits on demand, which is a big relief, since her shipping infrastructure is a lot better than mine. Because it's all done through her company, the key kits are currently the only item that we can sell, but at some point I might try to set up an alternate store for the new steno alphabet poster (though like I said, I'll be uploading a free jpg of it for people who want to print their own.) and maybe some wearable Plover swag of some sort. Each key kit order includes a $9 donation to the Hover Plover development fund. I'll try to post a high quality photo of key placement sometime early next, but it's honestly a pretty straightforward process, and it really makes the keyboard vastly more comfortable and accurate. I'm typing on a laser-keyed SideWinder right now, and it's smooth as yak butter cognac. The momentum is building. The technology is coalescing. The users are starting to appear from all directions. Plover is on the march.