Plover + MIDI + Braille

Check out this mindbending video from Sillabix, a user of Michela steno, who recently got our devs to create a version of Plover that works with Michela input from a MIDI piano keyboard. Michela was originally developed to work with Italian, which has fewer orthographic oddities than English, requiring fewer keys, but it has been adapted to English as well, which is what's being shown here. It's somewhat slower than traditional English steno, but seriously cool. For added awesomeness, Sillabix integrated it with both a text-to-speech synthesizer and a Braille font, which presumably could be integrated into a refreshable Braille display for realtime tactile output. Pretty dang rad.

PloverCAT

It's still early days, but Luke has been working on a plugin for Plover that replicates traditional CAT software by offering a text field where every translation is automatically mapped to a stroke in the log, allowing for globaling and retranslation by altering stroke definitions throughout the document. It's been years since I've used CAT software (I just use Vim, Aloft, or Streamtext for pretty much all my captioning), but I know several people who have requested a feature like this, and it's pretty cool to see that it's being developed! Luke has promised to keep us posted as the plugin comes together, so stay tuned!

Remember Outlines in Plover more Easily!

Check out this awesome post on the Plover subreddit about longtime community member BX1959's new Anki deck and mnemonic drilling system for memorizing the Plover outlines for the top 4,300 words in English! From the post:

ROPE is a guide to learning and recalling Plover outlines for over 4,300 common English words. It does this in two ways: first, it relies on Anki's spaced repetition system to help you solidify the outlines in your memory. Second, it includes mnemonic devices (in the form of stories) for a sizeable chunk of the outlines, about 1200. These stories serve to connect the outlines to their corresponding word by including words that are similar to the components of the outlines.

If you'd like to try using ROPE to learn new outlines, download both the Excel document and the Anki file. (If you don't have Anki on your computer, download it for free from the website.) The Anki file and the Excel document have the same material; Anki is just a flashcard program that lets you keep track of your learning, and the Excel file is useful to have as a reference. Once you've gone through the Learn Plover! exercises, you can start using Anki to learn new outlines, even if you're very new to Plover. This system is meant to be super-customizable, so you can add in or change stories, outlines, and words however you please. For more detailed information, see below!

I haven't used Anki myself, but I know tons of people who swear by it. Give it a try and let us know what you think, either in the comments to this post or in the Discord!

Want a Hacktoberfest T-shirt? Contribute to an OSP repo!

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source, and anyone who makes four or more pull requests to an open source repo hosted on Github will receive a free T-shirt from Digital Ocean.

Some Open Steno Project repos to contribute to:

Plover
Stenodict
Stenojig
Stenomancer
Stenocomplete

If you have your own steno-related open source projects hosted on Github, feel free to add them to this post in the comments.

Happy hacking!