Saturday, April 30, 2016

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!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just got a chance to try it out. Works like a charm!

Mau

DinoMight said...

I didn't realize there was an update until today and it is awesome! With the previous version I had an "add translation" stroke defined that pulled up the window to input my stroke and definition. When I use that stroke now, it selects the Plover window on my taskbar but doesn't pull anything up. I have it defined as {PLOVER:ADD_TRANSLATION} Any ideas?

DinoMight said...

Oh! I just realized that even manually trying to select Add Translation doesn't do anything. After I click on it, it highlights the Save button but no window comes up to actually input something. It does let me open the Dictionary Editor and select New Entry, though.

Soo Doe Nimh said...

Upgraded last night (older Windows 10 laptop). Started fiddling with it - just running through my flash-card word lists for fun as well as catching up on some correspondence. Went 3 hours and saw no crashes - an unheard-of occurence on the older version.

On Windows 10 the old version would not display - I could only see it in the Alt+Tab task switching, and would use that to focus on it for shutting it down. The process ate one thread completely, taking up 25% of CPU capacity at all times. I would shut it down if I planned to leave the machine for 15 minutes.

The software has really come along. Thanks to Mirabai and all the developers who worked on this one. The newer documentation on the format of the dictionary file is also appreciated; I have been using lots of Ctrl and Alt shortcuts in my dictionary.

I am also really impressed at how fast my 600,000-word dictionary (ugh) now loads.

So: solid general improvement. It's far more robust now on Windows.

* Faster dictionary loading on start-up
* Stable - I haven't crashed it yet
* CPU consumption is now minimal
* Interface is easier to use, and the outlines window is appreciated

Thanks to everyone who worked to make Plover so good.