Passive Haptic Learning for Computer Stenography

Check out this fantastic video by longtime open steno community member Tim! He's been working on research designed to lower the steno learning curve by introducing haptic stimuli into the learning process. The premise seems extremely sound to me, and he's gotten very promising results so far, so I'm really excited to see where this will go.

More Laptops with NKRO!

The number of NKRO-enabled laptops has been exploding recently! I've got an Alienware 13, and it honestly works pretty well with Plover, but it's a bit on the heavy side. Lead dev Ted has compiled a list of 11 laptops sporting NKRO keyboards, which offers much more choice than we've had up to this point. I'm not currently on the market for a new machine, but when I am I'll definitely be consulting this list, and I'm really happy to see this trend in new high-end and gaming-focused machines. I hope it keeps going!

Dotterel: Steno for Android!

Dotterel, a new steno keyboard for Android, was released a few days ago. (GIF above courtesy of lead dev Ted.) We've had StenoIME available for several years, but it hasn't been in development for quite some time, and has always had a number of issues that made it difficult to use. Dotterel, by community member Nimble, has greatly improved on the idea, and I find it to be a lovely swipe-style steno keyboard interface. On my rather small phone, it works best in landscape mode, though on a tablet portrait would probably be just fine. You can swipe, tap, or use a physical keyboard using a USB-on-the-go adapter, and it has quite a bit of clever context sensing that allows for accurate error correction and jumping between text fields without messing up your translation. Feel free to download it and play around with it, and if you have any suggestions on ways it can be improved, contribute to the issues thread on Nimble's Github.

New Weekly Released!

Our stalwart devs have released a new weekly version of Plover!

Mostly incremental changes to get ready for our next big release, but if any of these issues affect you, feel free to give this new version a try! And, as always, if you encounter anything unexpected, let our devs know on Github and/or in the #devs channel of the Plover Discord.

Changes

• disable serial flow control settings when not applicable (this was known to cause weird issues when changed from default)
• the paper tape now has improved support for non-Latin keys
• the log files encoding is now always set to UTF-8 (so Unicode in translations is properly handled)
• configuration changes by plugins are now fully validated before being applied
• improve support for installing plugins from source
• when running from a distribution, Plover can be started with --no-user-plugins to disable user plugins: the distribution default embedded plugins will still be available, so the plugins manager can be used to update/remove a problematic plugin
• [Linux] fix crash when using a Microsoft keyboard
• [Linux] fix crash when the window manager does not support the NETWM protocol (with commands like {PLOVER:ADD_TRANSLATION})