Sunday, January 5, 2014

Gigantic Backlog Linkdump

As promised, here's a massive linkdump of Plover material that's accumulated over the past few months. Ideally I should have been parceling these out little by little, but I didn't, and that's that. In no particular order:

* A new version of Plover, v2.5.7. Feature and bugfix list here. Main exciting feature is that it's now possible to run Plover directly off a thumb drive, in "portable" mode!

* A version of Plover's default dict.json dictionary, but with Canadian spellings, thanks to the dauntless and multitalented Brent Nesbitt.

* Brent is also the man behind the amazing Android apps Steno Lookup and StenoIME. I've been playing with StenoIME (an Android keyboard replacement) quite a bit, and while it's still a little rough around the edges, it's an absolute joy to be able to use Swype-style steno on my phone and tablet. Steno Lookup allows you to search within the Plover dictionary from your phone, which is also quite useful, especially for beginners.

* Speaking of lookup apps, Brent's ridiculously handy StenoTray Java app has been given a bugfix and update from Marius van Voorden so that it's now able to match raw steno as well as translated steno.

* Stan Sakai's personal essay on how he became a professional captioner, including the role that Plover played in kindling his fascination with stenography.

* Plover Chord Cheat Sheet by Zack Brown (author of Learn Plover!), depicting all the chords and consonant clusters used in steno. Incidentally, Zack and I are still getting together on a regular basis to expand and refine Learn Plover! into a comprehensive guide for beginners. We're definitely in the home stretch now. Stay tuned!

* Take Four, a steno game by Kitlei RĂ³bert.

* Stenogogy, a new blog about the Plover learning process by Scott Johnson.

* Also a new Stenosaurus blog by Hesky, who's been helping to code the firmware for the Stenosaurus. Incidentally, while the Stenosaurus is still a ways away from starting its crowdfunding campaign, both Plover and the Stenosaurus together have amalgamated into The Open Steno Project. A new website with improved navigation design for new users is coming soon! The Github repository for both Plover and Stenosaurus can be found here.

Phew. I think that's finally everything. Enjoy the bounty of all this hard work from Plover's devs and users! The amount of awesomeness this community produces over the course of just a few months is nothing short of mindblowing. Thanks to everyone for a brilliant 2013! I can't wait to see what happens next.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Really exciting and awesome stuff! Keep up the great work!

Scoon said...

Hi Mirabai,

Thanks for the updates. Getting excited for release!

Can't wait to see what it looks like. Any idea what the total funding goal might be? I hope it's something fairly easily achievable.

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