Aviary Currently Frozen Due To Spam

No new posts or registrations will be allowed. Sorry about that! Will try to fix it when I can!

Plover 3.1.0 Released!

Okay, this is a little overdue, but there's a new Plover release available as of ten days ago!

Plover 3.1.0

This is a minor release, meaning that we try to be backwards-compatible with v3.0.0 while introducing new features. The only gray area is the new keyboard shortcut syntax, which will not always work on older versions of Plover.

Highlights:

* New configuration option to start Plover minimized

* Add ProCAT machine protocol

* Stroke and translation logging is now turned off by default

* The "Lookup" and "Suggestions" windows now return more results! We accomplished this by looking for different casing; prefixes and suffixes; and across all dictionaries

* Faster dictionary loading, which means faster Plover start up Fix TX Bolt lag on macOS

Major release with huge UI changes in the works as well, which is very exciting!

Back From Hiatus! Many Updates!

So my last post before my kid was born (the reason for the Plover Blog hiatus; sorry about that) was about Ted's presentation at PyGotham 2016. The video for that talk is now live! Embedding is disabled, but you can view it here! It's really fantastic.

Speaking of Ted, he also wrote an excellent review for a new affordable steno machine that recently hit the market, the StenoMod. I was given a review model StenoMod myself some months ago, and I've been meaning to write a roundup of how it compares to other low-cost steno machines such as the SOFT/HRUF, Stenoboard, and Planck (spoiler: it fares extremely well), but I haven't gotten a chance to sit down and write it yet. Ted says most of what needs to be said, though. It's become my go-to recommendation for new Plover users who want something that's a little less bare-bones than the Zalman.

On the learning front, a great new tool called Steno Jig by Joshua Grams has appeared on the scene. By default, it drills a list of common words, but his GitHub page has instructions on how to customize it. His numbers drill, which generates silly random sentences, is particularly fun. Very simple, but well designed and quite useful.

T-shirts are finally shipping for supporters of the Steno Arcade campaign (I haven't gotten mine yet, but hopefully they're coming soon), and they're working hard on adding new playable tracks and making the game compatible with screen readers.

Our dauntless developers continue to make constant improvements to Plover. There's a new release in the works, so stay tuned for that. I'll do my best to keep on top of Open Steno Project news from now on. My kid is a ridiculously easy baby, so I don't really have the New Parent excuse for my slackitude going forward; expect to hear more soon!

Go See Ted Speak about Plover at PyGotham 2016!

Hacking/Typing/Writing at 200 Words Per Minute, at PyGotham 2016 this Sunday at 04:30 (Room CR6 at the UN) is a talk by our lead developer, Ted Morin, about how he has used Plover for coding, chatting, and other text entry over the last few years. It's gonna be great, and as long as my wife doesn't go into labor before tomorrow (which is fortunately unlikely, fingers crossed), I will probably be captioning it! If you're at PyGotham, be sure to stop by, and if you're not, we will hopefully have a public captioning feed. At the very least, it'll be recorded and posted later. Ted's a fantastic speaker (I captioned him at the Ottawa Python Meetup), so I'm really looking forward to this.

Third Party Song Editor for Steno Hero

The fantastic thing about Open Source is that sometimes people just decide to donate their own time and expertise out of the blue! It's like randomly getting a present from a stranger, and it's the BEST.

When we finished the Steno Arcade campaign, we were just over $2,000 short of the amount we needed to build a level editor for Steno Hero, which would vastly increase its replayability and customizability. It was a pity, but that's the nature of crowdfunding. The main thing is that we raised enough money to make Steno Hero screen reader accessible, to add more default songs, to spruce up the graphics a bit, and to pay the developers back for all the time they spent developing the game on spec.


But then just a few days ago -- pow! Timothy, aka SyntaxBlitz from the Plover Discord Channel, makes WaveLyric, a waveform-based lyric timing tool specifically designed for Steno Hero! It's still pretty new, but I've played around with it a bit and am extremely impressed by the smooth and ingenious UI. Go check it out! I'm hoping this will be the start of a whole new community of homebrew Steno Hero lyrics files. Just add Ogg! Many, many thanks to Timothy for this beautiful bit of software. I'm incredibly excited to see it in action and can't wait to see what grows out of it.

Plover Vector Art

I made some diagrams of Plover's steno-to-qwerty keyboard mappings back in 2010, using MS Paint. They have not held up well, to say the least. Have some much-needed replacements, courtesy of Krakob:

And Ted:

Phew, that's better! Go to the Google Group for ai and svg files. Many thanks, Krakob and Ted!

Cool Little Plover Trick

A cool Plover trick invented by my longtime friend and recent Plover learner Martin:

Someone else may find this useful; I created a new version of my dictionary update stroke. What this does is copy the word immediately before the cursor to the clipboard, then pop up the Add Translation window, paste the copied word into the "Translation" field, then puts focus back in the "Strokes" field:

{#Control_L(Shift_L(Left) Control_L(c) Control_L(Right)}{PLOVER:ADD_TRANSLATION}{#Tab Control_L(v) Shift_L(Tab)}

In other words, hit control-shift-left to highlight the word immediately preceding, then hit control-C to copy to clipboard, then control-right to return to the starting position. Open the "Add Translation" window. Hit tab once to get to the "Translation" field, control-V to paste the word, and then shift-tab to return to the "Strokes" field.

For example, you're typing the following text: "First you must arrange the broongle in alphabetical order." Since you expect "broongle" to be a common term you'll need a lot, you decide you want to brief it. After fingerspelling "broongle", you can use this new dictionary update stroke. The Add Translation window will appear with "broongle" already in the "Translation" box. Now you just need to stroke PWRAOPBG/*L and hit R-R; the definition is saved. No need to fingerspell "broongle" more than once.

Three caveats:

Obviously this stroke will overwrite whatever else you had in your clipboard.

This stroke is dependent on the exact layout of the "Add Translation" form, and thus it may well stop working properly in future Plover versions.

This stroke doesn't work when you're dealing with multiple words separated by a space or a hyphen - if you try it with "foongle-broongle", only "broongle" will wind up in the translation box. In that case, you'll need to either fingerspell it again or select the text and copy it yourself. (Unfortunately, there is no control-shift-left or control-shift-right defined in the standard Plover dictionary, and while it is in the modifiers.json dictionary, it requires three strokes for each word you want to move backwards.)

Nice, dude. Very nice. Definitely gonna try that one out.

Lead Dev Ted in NYC!

Yesterday our amazing lead dev Ted Morin came down from Ottawa to visit NYC, and we had a grand time wandering the city, drinking coffee, and talking steno. In the video above, he demonstrates that my Infinity Ergonomic's actuation force is so low that it's possible to depress a key by blowing on it, which is a pretty neat party trick. I got to try his Treal, which has a nice soft touch, though I have to say the Palantype-style slanted keyboard configuration felt more wrist-pinching than ergonomic to me. When it comes to spring-mounted machines, I definitely prefer the Planck.

By way of expressing my immense gratitude for all that he's done for the Open Steno Project, I bought Ted a little plush Blastoise at the Nintendo Store:



Then we met up with Stan for lunch, though sadly I failed to get any pictures of the three of us. It was great, though.

In the six years since Plover got started, I've met so many brilliant people through open steno. Ted's just the latest in a long line of free software badasses who have donated time, money, expertise, hard work, and good will to make our community what it is. I'm so damn grateful for it.

Steno Arcade Campaign Is Over, 112% Funded!

Just a quick note to thank everyone again for funding the Steno Arcade campaign! We raised a total of $8,440, well above our baseline goal to finish development of Steno Hero, though sadly we didn't reach any of our stretch goals. However, we'll definitely be conducting additional campaigns in the future to fund the other three games in the Steno Arcade series, so please stay tuned! I'll also post here with updates about when rewards will ship as soon as I get all that information. For all the money and playtesting and signal boosting and support, I can only say THANK YOU SO FREAKING MUCH!!! The amateur/hobbyist steno community is amazing, and I can't wait to see how it'll grow and expand into the future. You guys are the best.

Steno Arcade is Funded!

We are funded!!!

With three days left of the campaign to go, we're aiming for the stretch goal that will allow us to let players use any song in their music library. It's ambitious, but we've got a fighting chance! Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your help and support in making Steno Arcade a reality!!!

Steno Arcade: 67% Funded! New Songs Released!

There's a new release of Steno Arcade on Steam, featuring two new slow songs, with hopefully two more to come before the end of the campaign. We've got eight days left and 33% to go, so please spread the word and contribute if you can!

I've also recorded a video attempting to play the hardest level, I Feel Fantastic, on my new Planck. I only got 77%, but I still think that's a pretty decent showing for such a ridiculously speedy song. Anyone who'd like to beat my score is welcome to try! :'D

Plover 3.0 Released!

From our amazing lead developer Ted Morin:

Plover has its first stable release in over 2 years today.

So much work and love went into this, and we're looking forward to much more frequent releases in the future. Read on below for changes, fun facts, install instructions, and download links.

The community has been testing Ted and Benoit's weeklies for months now with excellent results, and the current state of Plover is finally stable and feature-rich enough to be deemed officially release-worthy!!

To start with, we've gotten a badly needed refresh of the Plover homepage.

The new release is pretty close to the latest weekly, but if you've been stuck on Plover 2.5.8 and waiting for an official release to switch over, you've got a wondrous store of features waiting for you, such as:

• Suggestions Window
• Lookup Window
• Dictionary Editor
• Finer Grained Translation Control
• Title/Lower/Camel/Snake Output Modes
• Media Key Support

Dictionary improvements, bugfixes, a new icon, and much, much more. I've been using the weeklies for ages now, and I can hardly remember what life was like before all these new features. Plover is SO MUCH BETTER now.

The previous release, Plover v2.5.8:

• Was released over 840 days ago.
• Was downloaded over 23,000 times.

This release, Plover v3.0:

• Adds 578 commits.
• Has received help from over 20 contributors.

Infinite thanks go to:

• @morinted, for tirelessly spearheading this entire project
• Our developer emeritus, @balshetzer
• @mighele for the dictionary editor, retrospective strokes, spaces-after output
• @balthamos for the suggestions window
• @rbrewer123 for fixes
• @jeremy-w for translation transparency, documentation, contributing.md, PR and issue templates
• @avalai for the new Plover icon and help with the homepage layout
• @Benoit-Pierre for doing so much work to make Plover better at its core, countless bug fixes, internal refactoring, new features, and great code reviews, literally hundreds of commits!
• ...and all the other developers and users who submitted PRs and took part in issue discussion.

Go get Plover 3.0 now!

60% Funded! Plus Plover on a Planck

Okay, it took a lot less time to get from 0% to 50% than it did to get from 50% to 60%, but that's the nature of the crowdfunding beast. The important thing is that we're still edging upward. The For All To Play team is working hard on getting out an update of Steno Arcade featuring three slower songs that will be easier for qwerty typists and steno beginners. Speaking of which, I can't condone any of the language in this 20-video playlist of people playing Steno Arcade on YouTube; much of it is NSFW, in languages ranging from Thai to Italian to Russian, and it's all uncaptioned, so watch at your own risk. But I have to admit it's pretty hilarious to watch people ragequitting over the difficulty of our game, especially since they all seemed to be having a pretty good time with it. Why don't you all just learn steno already? (';

The other exciting thing I've been up to lately is playing with the gorgeous new Planck keyboard that Scott Urueta of SOFT/HRUF fame built and graciously sent to me.



This thing is by far the best steno input device I've ever tried, apart from my Infinity Ergonomic. Smooth, lightweight, extremely compact and portable, with lovely flat keytoppers and a very low actuation force. I absolutely adore it. Some people on Reddit asked if I'd make a video writing steno on 10FastFingers, so I gave it a shot:



That video turned into a 90-comment discussion on r/mechanicalkeyboards about the virtues of steno, and that led to the creator of the Planck adding Plover as a layout in the default Planck firmware, which is really exciting! I had to go through a whole process of downloading a custom firmware remapper to get Plover working on my Planck, but the new batch of Plancks will ship out with Plover already baked in. I seriously cannot emphasize enough how great a machine this is for the amateur or hobbyist Plover user. There are only two major downsides:

1) The Planck is sold unassembled, requiring some soldering skills and a fair amount of time and patience to put together, which is pretty intimidating for most users.

2) The manufacturer doesn't keep a steady inventory of Planck kits; he waits for orders to accumulate on Massdrop and then sends them out in batches.

The good news is that Scott is considering selling assembled Plancks alongside his SOFT/HRUFs. Even with a markup for his labor, they'd still be pretty affordable, and if he was able to keep a fair number in stock at a time, people wouldn't have to wait on Massdrop releases to get theirs. Fingers crossed it works out! I think this could be a huge help in filling the gap between the $40 Zalman solution and the >$500 lever-based proprietary machine option.

Next time I post, we'll hopefully have a new release of Steno Arcade up and running, and with any luck we'll have edged closer to our goal. I'm still really hoping we'll hit that $10,500 stretch goal so that anyone who wants to make a Steno Hero level with a song from their own music library will be able to do it. Fingers crossed! Even if you don't have the means to contribute financially, signal boosting the campaign in our last few weeks would be massively appreciated. Many thanks for all your help so far!

50% Funded!

Check out the update on stenoarcade.com. We've got a ways to go, especially if we want to make the stretch goal that will allow us to include an in-game song editor, but we're off to a great start!

Steno Arcade Campaign is LIVE!!!

Check out the Steno Hero Crowdfunding Campaign!


Our base funding level lets us finish Steno Hero with screen reader support and 12 playable songs, but our first stretch goal, which I'm REALLY excited about, lets us build an in-game song editor that will allow you to play Steno Hero using any game in your music library. Seriously, how amazing would that be?! And any money we get after that will go toward the development of other games in the Steno Arcade series, like the chord-hopping Stenogger, the single-stroke platformer Stenobolt, and the dictionary crunching Stenografius!



If you want to be a Steno Hero and help save the future of stenographic technology, contribute at the $35 level and get the T-shirt to prove it! Or if you want to kick in a little more, you could get your name included in the lyrics of a special Steno Hero song level that we'll be composing just for the game. There's even a level where you can get a little custom-built pixelated version of yourself getting funky in the Steno Hero crowd!

Go check out the campaign, and if you've got a bit of cash to kick in, that would be amazing. Also many thanks for signal boosting this as much as possible, both online and off! When complete, the game itself will be 100% free for anyone to play, but the more funding we get, the more games we can build.

Stenosaurus Gets One Step Closer

From The Stenosaurus Blog:

We've had printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) for the Stenosaurus for several months, but I've only recently been able to begin properly testing it. Here are the tests I've run so far:

Apply power. Nothing started smoking or even heating up. Success!

Program the Stenosaurus to monotonously blink its LEDs. This took a horrendously long time, not because the program was difficult to write or because something was broken, but because the development tool chain for actually compiling and then loading the code onto the Stenosaurus took a long time to get right. Nothing was particularly difficult, but I ended up going through four different laptops, at least as many operating systems for those laptops, and a few combinations of various compilers, linkers, debuggers, and programmers. I'm happy to report that I now have a setup that works and is reasonably easy to replicate so that others can also start developing on Stenosaurus. (Of course, there is only one assembled PCB in existence, but that will hopefully change soon.) What's more, the LEDs blink as expected. Success!

Program the Stenosaurus to blink the LEDs anytime a key is pressed. This was relatively straightforward and worked as expected for all keys. Success!

In short, everything is going well, though there's a lot more testing yet to do.

Hope to see even more new developments soon!

Known Supported Keyboards Page Updated

It had been falling into desuetude, so I recently gave the Known Supported Keyboards page on the Wiki a bit of an update. I took off keyboards that were no longer available, put on some new ones like the Keyboardio and the Ergodox, and rearranged them in order of current price. The whole Wiki really needs some work, honestly; it's been quite a while since its last thorough revision. But this is probably the most important page currently on it, so I'm glad that at least it's up to date again, especially since we're on the brink of launching the Steno Arcade crowfunding campaign! If anyone wants to add additional user-tested keyboards or comments (or, indeed, feels like revising other pages on the Wiki), the help would be very much appreciated!

Huge New Plover Pre-Release Candidate!!!!

The incomparable Ted, the redoubtable Benoit, and many other people have been working tremendously hard to create the first new version of Plover for over two years, and they've finally come out with a pre-release candidate for testing!!!

Go to the Github for release notes and download links!

Ted says:

With this new "weekly" build of Plover, we hope to start a trend of rapid releases. We'll try to push a new weekly every time there's a new feature, so you might see weekly builds on a daily or biweekly basis, depending on how much actual development gets done. One thing is for sure, though: We won't wait another 2 years (!!!) before getting improvements into your hands. This is a "pre-release", not quite a version 3.0.0 just yet. We want to have the brave among you try it out and let us know if anything broke in a major way.

• New icon and overhauled GUI
• Full Unicode support
• New lookup window
• New Suggestions window
• Undo buffer now defaults to 100
• Delete words on empty buffer
• New dictionary editor
• "Add Translation" Transparency
• Repeat last stroke
• Uppercase next word
• GUI for remapping keyboard layout
• Better portable mode
• Add multiple dictionaries at once
• New output modes (Caps, Title, Snake, Camel, and Custom)
• 20,000 entries added to default dictionary
• Default dictionary restructuring (Main, Commands, and User)
• Keystrokes suppressed instead of backspaced in Linux
• Retrospective capitalize, uppercase, lowercase, toggle asterisk, insert space, and delete space, and currency formatting

Go to the Github for all the details! Then download the new version and tell us what you think! The official release of Plover 3.0 is right around the corner! Help us make it go as smoothly and quickly as possible by reporting any bugs you run across.

Infinite thanks again to Ted, Benoit, and all our other amazing developers. I've been running a version of Plover with several of these features since last Fall, and it's been fantastic to have them, but I can't wait to get my hands on the newest version.

OSP Community Survey Responses

We got 55 responses to our survey! Some of the highlights:

The most exciting thing here is that a third of respondents have already exceeded their regular typing speed, and it took at least half of them less than six months! Those are some pretty great stats, I have to say. Selected comments from respondents:

Qwerty typing was hurting my hands and it was too slow. I Googled ways to increase my speed, found out about stenography and court reporting, then found out about the Open Steno project.

One day I decided that there had to be a better system for typing. I then wanted to learn how a steno machine works and that led me to you. Thank you, by the way, for your generosity and incredible guidance.

After investigating colemak I discovered that it would not boost my speed or to any great extent save my hands from RSI. I chose steno because of my loathing of QWERTY and colemak's inability to provide higher speeds or truly improved ergonomics.

I want to see if steno helps my dyslexia.

Video games led to mechanical keyboards led to typing led to steno.

Practice material in the form a la Duo Lingo (start with whole sentences from the start) would be great.

The Discourse chat system has been wonderful. I feel a lot more connected to the few brave souls trying to learn steno than before. :)

I wish plover would use a more rapid release schedule; having only a few small features in each new release rather than waiting years for a big one seems to work well for other FOSS projects who are adopting the strategy.

That last user will be very happy to learn that we're on the brink of a major new release, and that our release schedule will be far more rapid after that point. But more on that as it develops! Also stay tuned for exciting new Steno Arcade and Stenosaurus news, coming in the next few weeks! Thanks, everyone, for answering the survey! It was really cool to see all your responses. Read the complete summary of responses here.

Please Take The Third Annual OSP Community Survey!

Click Here To Take The Open Steno Project Community Survey!

It's just 14 questions, and should take you no more than a minute or two. Because we're about to launch the Steno Arcade crowdfunding campaign (stay tuned for that!), I wanted to get some demographic data to show new people who are curious about the makeup of our community. We're particularly interested in how many Plover users have exceeded their regular typing speed and how long it took, since that's always the first question people tend to ask. Just go fill it out real quick, and please feel free to give us any comments you might have about our software, hardware, or community resources. It's always so amazing to hear from all of you. Many, many thanks!

The Zalman ZM-K600S - NKRO at $40?

This $40 keyboard claims to have n-key rollover via USB. Can it be true?! Do we finally have a reliable low-cost successor to the Sidewinder X4?! Man, I hope so. It's been a long time coming. If anyone has tested one of these puppies out and found that it has at least 16-key rollover with Plover over USB, please let us know! I'd love to have a $40 entry point into steno again, after many long years hovering around $100.

Seeking Input on New Plover Icon Art

Over on the Plover Github, Ted's got a conversation going about updating the tired old Plover "P", which was a bit of placeholder art that somehow never got updated when Plover first got going over six years ago. Here are some possible options:



Ted's been rocking the commits lately, and a new version is imminent (I've been working with a development build for the last three months and loving it -- especially the ability to output Greek letters to Aloft for the physics class I'm captioning!). So we've got to hammer down the art issue as soon as possible. If you've got any opinions on what color to paint this particular bike shed, or if you've got art ideas -- or actual art -- of your own to offer, please speak up! The more input we can get, the better.

The Plover Parser

Ted, our amazing lead developer, has done it again:

Github Page for The Plover Parser

The Plover Parser will read through your Plover stroke/definition log files (assuming that you've got logging enabled), compare them with a wordlist of the 10,000 most common English words (or, optionally, a wordlist that you provide, such as a medical dictionary, if you want to search for more specific matches), then compile a frequency list of which strokes you used most often for which translation during the span of time covered by the logs.

If you're interested, you can look over the reports for my counts (arranged by commonality of translation in English) and stats (arranged by the number of times each stroke appears in the logs). My log files go from last November to yesterday, and the parser found that I used 6,000 of the 10,000 included in the wordlist over that time.

Why is this useful, beyond just idle curiosity? A lot of steno beginners get confused by the number of misstrokes in the default Plover dictionary, especially when using lookup apps like StenoTray. They're not able to quickly distinguish a "canonical" stroke from a "misstroke", and they worry about learning the wrong one. Now, I'm not sure that's as big a problem as some people think it is; in my opinion, the only thing that distinguishes a misstroke from a brief is how easy it is to memorize. I don't want to take misstrokes out of the default dictionary, because they're very useful to have in there once you get a little speed under your belt. But for people who want to learn how steno works by learning the "canonical" strokes, this is a really easy way of separating the strokes I use deliberately day after day after day from the ones that come from a random, occasional slip of the finger, even though they translate just as correctly. So all we have to do is scrape the most used stroke from that list of 6,000 common words, and we've built ourselves a clean pedagogical dictionary for beginners who are intimidated by the full messy scope of the official Plover dictionary. It'll also be useful for building levels in Steno Arcade.

If you want to scrape your own logs and get a snapshot of your own writing style, feel free to use Ted's script and let us know what you come up with! I think it's a very cool project.

New Cross-Platform Steno Hero Demo!

There's a new version of the Steno Hero demo, with flashier gameplay, and it now runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux! Go download it from its Steam Greenlight page, and if you have a Steam account but haven't already, please give us a vote! The crowdfunding campaign site is extremely close to launching, so stay tuned for that!

As you can see from the video above, I only managed to get 77% accuracy on Jonathan Coulton's I Feel Fantastic. Can you beat my score? If so, send me a screencast, and I'll post it! It's a doozy.

Also, The Open Steno Project now has a Discord server (a Slack-style alternative to IRC), which you can access for free via browser or mobile app. There have been some great discussions on there (I try to pop in at least once a day), and there's some talk about forming a beginning steno learner's group, so sign on if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Also also, the HTML5 version of Plover Learn is now hosted on the stenoknight server, for easier access to all potential Plover learners! Thanks again, tthurman!

Steno Bricks and HTML5 Plover Learn

Hey, check out Drew's very cool Steno Bricks site:

StenoBricks is a project by Drew Neil that aims to visualize how Plover Steno theory works. A Steno Brick is one or more keystrokes that stand for a sound.

Also, our old friend tthurman has rendered the interactive Plover Learn exercises into HTML5. Find the source here.

Fantastic work!

Stenosaurus Updates!

If you follow the Stenosaurus Blog, you already got these updates several days ago, but just in case you don't, have some beautiful pictures of the first fully assembled test unit!







Josh writes:

Obviously, I missed my stated goal of launching in 2015. I'm trying to find the right sauce with which to eat my hat. I'm also carving out more time to work on Stenosaurus. My new goal is to launch this month, which I think is realistic so long as we don't run into any unexpected hiccups. If we do, I'll detail them on the blog (hiccups are at least as interesting as good news) and I'll provide an updated estimated timeline right away.

Pretty exciting! Can't wait to see more!