Javelin Website Updates

Jeffrey writes:

Javelin's website is now built to use wasm.

Users shouldn't notice any difference (other than things just working better), but if you see anything weird, please let me know.

Other changes:
- Jarne firmwares have a change that will improve battery life. Both main & pair firmwares will require updating to 2025-08-17 or later
- Added a few missing keys in the visual editor under Miscellaneous category -- Execute, Help, Menu, Select, Stop, Again, Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Find
- Console scripts can now be 8x larger.
- There's a new infrared web tool.

Jeffrey and the Jarne Blade!!

Last week I got to meet the amazing Jeffrey Lim, aka Tharelia, inventor of Javelin, the Jarne, and the Jarne Blade, in person!

And he generously gave me a Jarne Blade of my own!! I love this thing so much. I can't even tell you. It's so TINY! And the keys are slightly heavier than the ones on my beloved featherlight Jarne, but they're so shallow that the actuation pressure matters much less than it does with taller keys. I'm planning to use it primarily for fiction writing anyway, rather than captioning, so even if I'm a little slower on it, that's no problem. It's so portable, it fits easily in a pocket -- I even wrote a few paragraphs onto my phone with each half in one of the pockets of my shorts, and that worked shockingly well. I'm so in love with this little device. And Jeffrey was an absolute joy to hang out with. I'm so grateful to him and everything he's done for the Open Steno community!

Big English Michela Dictionary

Harri writes:

Starts with Sillabix, a stenographer in the Italian courts using Michela 🎹 theory.

They created resources on how to use Michela theory for writing English here.

Now over to me, where I have coded these rules into Froj to automate about 90,000 words (each word has about 10 outlines/briefs) so English Michela has a base dictionary!

Now onto Notnotwrong who has whipped out their keyboard (🎹 this kind) and has begun the undertaking of learning this theory. Using FrojBot to explain outlines, with Sillabix correcting any mistakes it gives 😅.

I believe it took about a week to reach a promising 20wpm.

Michela was designed to be somewhat universal, so it's great to see this revived, here's the original English Michela back from 1882!

Asterisk + Capacitive Keypads = ???

JonJon had the idea. This is Peter's implementation. I'm certainly intrigued. Would this improve my haptic feedback on the Asterisk and noticeably increase my speed? Hm! Might be worth a try.

Javelin's Host Layouts Enable Fully Scriptable Unicode Handling

Javelin's Host Layouts now enable fully scriptable unicode handling. If you've ever wanted to steno with full unicode in Microsoft Word, or emacs (that each have their own unique unicode input methods), this is now possible. All of the default host layouts have been updated and uploaded to github.

Since rebuilding an entire firmware to test a script change would be extremely time consuming, there is a new web tool to update host layouts.

This requires a firmware of 2025-07-12 or later.

Plover 5.0.0.dev3

Plover 5.0.0.dev3

Warning: Version 5 updates the graphical interface library from PyQt5 to PySide6 which requires graphical plugins to be migrated.

v5.0.0.dev3 (2025-07-14)

Features

Core

• Allow higher priority dictionaries to delete entries from others. (#1160)
• Improve orthography rules for ^ify suffixes. (#1680)
• Reduce installer file size. (#1741)

Linux

• Add dvorak keymap support for uinput users. (#1746)

Bugfixes

Core

• Allow uninstall of installed unsupported plugins. (#1739)
• Fix missing font family warnings. (#1740)

Windows

• Do not consider extended scan codes in Windows keyboard capture. (#1357)

Improved Screen Reader Experience on Typey Type

Improved screen reader experience on Typey Type

I just published a change to Typey Type that should improve the experience for people using screen readers. It removes announcements of completed words that were occurring at the same time as the next word for VoiceOver users. A range of other tweaks should make the main text area and other parts easier to use for all screen readers. Please let me know if you have feedback!

There are new sections on the about page about the speak words setting and using screen readers.

I expect the changes will make no difference to people who aren't using screen readers but as always please let me know about any bugs that sneak in.

Go here for feedback.