Hacktoberfest 2021

Lead dev Ted writes:

Hello fellow stenography enthusiasts!

It's that special time of year again where open source contributions get you either a cool shirt or trees planted. I love this time of year because it always energizes me to work on open source stenography stuff. Expect some activity on both Plover and Art of Chording.

I believe this is the third year that Open Steno contributors have participated in Hacktoberfest. If you feel like pitching in, go to the Hacktoberfest website for instructions on how to participate!

QMK Extensions for Hobbyist Stenoboards

Longtime steno friend and community contributor Joshua has just released a package of extensions to QMK (the popular open source mechanical keyboard firmware) that enables first-up chord-send and tap-and-hold chord repeat extensions, compatible with the Planck, Preonic, ErgoDox EZ, Clueboard, Cluepad, and Atreus. Handy stuff for people who want to be able to send repeated navigation commands via their steno machine without having to press and release for each one. Nice work!

Plover and Toki Pona Meet Again!

Back in 2010, very, very early in Plover's development, Sonja Lang, (esteemed linguist and creator of Toki Pona, an extremely simple and elegant constructed language) joined the Plover Google Group. The software wasn't really in a usable state at that point, so only the most hardcore users at the time were able to do anything with it, so she drifted away from the community relatively quickly (which I completely understand), but before she did, she introduced me to Canadian graphic designer Laura Lake, who wound up designing Dolores, our beloved steno-winged mascot!

These were her first preliminary sketches of Dolores. I love them a lot.

And now, 11 years later, the Toki Pona community has intersected with the Plover community once again. On the Toki Pona Subreddit, there's a lovely little video demonstrating timeopochin's Toki Pona plugin for Plover. It's still in development, but seems very handy for users of the language! I'm delighted to see our respective orbits colliding once again, and hope that both communities will be able to enjoy the intersection.

Plover for Legal Material

Paul Fioravanti has written a really nice blog post about using Plover to transcribe legal material, incorporating principles from Platinum Steno. I'm not very familiar with Platinum Steno personally and have never done any legal work, but it's very cool to see the ingenious way that Paul has adapted Plover (the only steno software NOT primarily designed for court reporters) for legal purposes.