Saturday, July 16, 2016

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.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

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.