Plover, the Open Source Steno Program

#a11y unlock

2012-01-29T18:30:00.000-08:00

Plover Blog Accessibility: Partially Upgraded.

As Plover's been getting more and more users, we've gotten a number of people wanting to learn steno who are either blind or have low vision, and who requested an audio version of the Steno 101 series. I'm happy to say I've completed the first two lessons this weekend, and I'm going to try to get the rest of them done as soon as I can, with audio versions accompanying each new Steno 101 installment as it's released. (I know I've been promising a new installment for a really long time now, and it's all mapped out and just ready to be written up; I'm just waiting for the Plover Windows Port to be finished so that all Plover users are on the same page when trying out the new features, like command strokes and numbers. Work on that is proceeding, and I'm hoping it'll be done by the end of this week, fingers crossed.)

So here are the first two installments again, now audio described by yours truly:

Steno 101: How to Do It
Steno 101: Lesson Zero

I looked around to see whether there were any accessible embedded audio players, but didn't find anything on a cursory search, so I just linked each heading to an mp3 file; you can open them in a new tab and most browsers should play them automatically. I'm very new at this, so please let me know if I need to revise any of the files, and I'll do my best to re-record them as necessary. At the end of the project, I intend to put them all into a zip file and host them on the StenoKnight servers, so people can download them as a Steno 101 audiobook if they want to learn steno on the fly. Many thanks to our blind and low vision users for giving me the spur I needed to start on this project. Enjoy the first two lessons! More coming soon.

Analytics

2012-01-16T18:25:00.000-08:00

Graph of visits for all pages hosted on http://stenoknight.com since November, 2009 (when I started using Analytics) until today:

I just thought it was awesome and hilarious. I love the internet so much.

New Donation Page

2012-01-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's been an exciting couple of days. We've already collected $200 in Plover donations, and after receiving feedback from one donor, I've made a dedicated donation page for Plover, detailing exactly where the money goes. (Right now it all goes to help our devs write code for Plover without taking too much of a financial hit when they take time away from their day jobs or freelance work; later we might use some of it as seed money to start fabricating Plover hardware, like qwerty-to-steno keyboard overlays or low-cost USB steno keyboards that plug into a computer and immediately start outputting English when they receive steno input. I've never taken any money for Plover, and I don't intend to start. My own venal reason for founding the project was to bring more people into my profession so it doesn't collapse due to the ever-increasing shortage of stenographers. If I can help raise up the next generation of captioners, transcriptionists, and steno amateurs, I'll feel more than repaid for the money I've spent getting Plover developed.) Ever since landing on Hacker News, the interest in Plover has spiked dramatically, which is glorious. Later today I'm going to try to make an entry on our wiki detailing all the various jobs that we need help with and the current state of who's working on what. Thanks for all the email and offers of support I've gotten so far! It's so inexpressibly wonderful to see this tiny little two-person project explode into a complex and multivarious international community.

OpenSource.com Article on Plover

2012-01-13T07:49:00.000-08:00

Longtime Plover ally Mel Chua has just written a fantastic article on OpenSource.com about Plover! Go check it out. If any of you have come to this blog via the article, welcome! Try out the demo on your qwerty keyboard, check out the Launchpad page, or join the Google group or the Aviary to talk with Plover users and devs about open source steno and the next steps for the Plover Project.

Plover 2.2.0 Released!

2011-12-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

Woke up this morning to an email from Josh, Plover's dauntless programmer:

"Hi all,

I'm happy to announce the latest feature release of Plover! Version 2.2.0 includes the following features and fixes:

* a new graphical user interface that supports both older and newer versions of Ubuntu, with and without Unity
* auto-start configuration option
* hotkey commands to suspend/resume Plover, bring up the configuration dialog, and bring the main Plover window to the foreground
* support for the TX Bolt/Gemini TX protocol, which will open the way to using many Stentura machines
* protection against running more than one instance of Plover at a time
* proper handling of the number bar
* updated user guide

This is all fine and good, but what I'm happiest about is the high level of community involvement that went into this release, including Stan and Tony sending me a steno machine to test on (thanks, I'm finally ready to send it back!), the great suggestions for features and improvements to both the software and the user guide from many people on the mailing list, Hesky's seamless contribution of code to support the TX protocol (and ongoing experimental Windows port), generous financial support from various corners of the world, and, of course, Mirabai's relentless advocacy, encouragement, and testing.

As usual, the latest version can be downloaded from:

https://launchpad.net/plover

Also, for the first time, I've made Plover available from the official Python package index, which provides yet more methods of installing Plover for those adventurous enough to learn about it:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plover/

Please report any problems to the mailing list.

Happy stenographing,Josh"

This is awesome. I've been testing out this version for the past few weeks, and it is rock solid. Being able to use Unity is really convenient, and the number bar bugfixes mean that I can now write the Steno 101 lesson on numbers, fingerspelling, and metacommands that I've been planning for months! Look for that by the end of this week. The auto-start option is also great when you want to invoke Plover (I use Gnome-Do, so I only need to do Alt-Space, P, and Enter to set it going) and start writing steno right away without fiddling with the mouse. The new Plover Guide (PDF file) is also extremely useful, and we'll hopefully be mirroring it on the Wiki for easy reference fairly soon. So if you have Linux and a Sidewinder (or Majestouch or Noppoo Choc Mini or any other qwerty keyboard with n-key rollover) or a Gemini PR/TX machine or a Lightspeed or a Protege, install the new version and enjoy! If you don't have Linux, either take the plunge and install Ubuntu as a dual-boot option, or wait a few more days until the Windows port is complete. Feel free to leave feedback -- feature requests, bug reports, et cetera -- in comments here, at the Launchpad page, on the Google group, or on the (newly restyled) Aviary. Many, many thanks to Josh for his fantastic work. We've come a hell of a long way from "catalogue catalogue Log Cat log".

Plover Aviary

2011-12-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

Two nice little updates, while we wait for the newest Plover release (which is imminent) and the completion of the Windows experimental version (which should hopefully happen by the end of the week). First, Amber from the Google group has created a list of 21 sentences using the most common words in the English language; all together, the words in these sentences (which she's posted to the Plover Wiki) comprise 50% to 65% of all words used in English, so it's useful to have them under your belt. Check 'em out:

Practice Sentences with Common English Words

Another brilliant idea of Amber's was for there to be a forum for steno newbies and new Plover users, so that they could share tricks and travails with each other and maintain a form of reference that was less static than the Wiki and less linear than the the Google group. So this morning I installed phpBB (a surprisingly painless process), and I can now introduce to you:

The Plover Aviary

I've started it off with a few posts to get it going, including one where I took Amber's practice sentences and wrote them out on my steno machine using a dummy dictionary (with all the entries replaced with "STKPWHRAOEUFRPBLGTSDZ", so they came out as raw steno. For some reason, when I deleted all but one entry and tried to use that dictionary, Plover gave me an error, but it worked fine with all the entries redefined). If we can get more practice sentences from Plover users, I'll hopefully be able to plump up the previous Steno 101 lessons into a more useful form.

With luck the Aviary will soon be full of questions and answers and feature requests and competitive speed bragging. I also count today a success because I learned the word "dotterel", which I've used for the steno veterans forum (because after "hatchlings" and "fledglings" just comes "full-grown birds", and I thought that lacked panache.) According to its Wikipedia entry, a dotterel is both "a small wader in the plover family" and "a doting old fool", which fit my steno-obsessed batty old self perfectly. So there it is. Another place to go and get your Plover on with other steno neophytes. Have fun!

Fly, Plover! Fly!

2011-12-17T12:47:00.000-08:00

Plover photo by Changhua Coast Conservation Action

Pragma Nolint, a member of the Plover Google Group, has just written a training program for the qwerty-to-steno layout. It's called Fly, and you can download it here:

http://stenoknight.com/plover/Fly_v0.0.1.tar.gz

Fly screenshot

Hover Plover is still very much in the planning stage, so having this available right now is incredibly useful, especially considering that I still haven't gone back into the Steno 101 lessons to add practice material. Instant interactive feedback is a better way to learn this stuff anyway.

Currently it just works with Ubuntu, but I've put out a call for volunteers to port it to Windows and/or a web-based version, so we can reach as many Plover users as possible. Keep in mind that it uses code from Plover (and Plover's default dictionary), but you don't want Plover to be running while you're using Fly, or it won't work properly. Fly will offer up drills based on single letters, words, or even sentences, so you can learn the steno keyboard from the bottom up. If you use Fly, comment here to relate your experience, report bugs, or request features.

Many thanks to Pragma! The ever-growing Plover community never ceases to amaze and delight me. Share Fly among your friends and bring more people into the glorious world of open source steno.

Housekeeping

2011-11-27T15:51:00.001-08:00

I love long weekends. Thanks to the first decent amount of free time I've had in a while, I've been able to change some little things on the Plover Blog and Wiki that were long overdue.

* http://ploversteno.org now redirects to the Plover Wiki instead of the static FAQ page that it's superseded.

* I've put a slightly cleaned-up version of the qwerty-to-steno layout chart right at the top of the blog, where people can see it straight away. It should probably get a more prominent place in the Wiki too, though I'm not sure where; right now it's kind of buried in the FAQ.

* I've put a link to the Plover Demo near the top of the blog's sidebar and on the front page of the Wiki, because I believe that it's Plover's best low-stakes ambassador for stenocurious newcomers.

* I've updated and expanded the Wiki's Plover Cheat Sheet a bit, adding to the chart of the most common prefixes and clarifying a few of the more confusing features of Plover's default dictionary. I also submitted a bug to the Launchpad page, because the default dictionary that comes with Plover defines -FPLT as -FRPBLGTS and STPH as STKPWHR, which is only useful if you're me and you're using Plover for offline transcription work, which you almost certainly aren't. I should have changed those definitions to {.} and {?} respectively before submitting the dictionary to Josh for packaging, but I didn't, and the result is that the Hello, world. instructions on the Wiki don't work properly. Boo me.

* I've updated the Plover Blog sidebar with links to videos and interviews featuring Plover.

* I thought of another Hover Plover minigame, one that would appeal to the puzzle solvers rather than the fast-twitch kids, and which would take minimal graphical expertise to write. You'd start out with a block of text in steno, and every time you wrote one of the strokes, it would transform into its English equivalent. So at the end, you'd wind up with a block of English text. Here's a mockup, showing the starting state, the middle state, and the completion state. I based the text on a puzzle I made for a friend who didn't know steno but who liked solving cryptograms. (Solution here. Don't click the link to the graphical version if you want the fun of puzzling it out for yourself, since it shows the solution on the bottom.) I figure it'll have the satisfaction that you get from a game like Minesweeper, but without the nervous tension, because there are no penalties for misstrokes. You're just clearing the field and building up your muscle memory as you go. You'll probably start out just writing the strokes without knowing what they say, but eventually as you get more comfortable with the theory, you'll start predicting the translations before you write them.

* I'm also currently trying to sort through these guidelines for open source development, posted by Ms. Gardiner to the Plover Google Group a while back. Plover is the first open source project I have direct experience with, and since I'm not a coder myself (except on a seriously elementary level), I'm at sort of a disadvantage in figuring out the best way to organize it. The code started out completely in Josh's domain. Then Hesky joined in on the experimental branch. We've gotten several more offers of coding help since then, but except for side projects like the Plover Demo, I don't think we've had any actual committed code from anyone other than Josh and Hesky so far. I definitely want to change that, though, especially as Hover Plover development gets off the ground. Any specific advice on making the Plover Project more friendly to community development would be very welcome.

Captioned: Mary Gardiner's Keynote at PyConAu

2011-11-26T10:55:00.001-08:00

So in August of this year, programmer and open source advocate Mary Gardiner gave a keynote address at PyConAu in Sydney, Australia, called "Changing the World With Python". In the talk, she mentioned several world-changing open source projects that people could contribute to, including Sugar (which longtime Plover ally Mel Chua is heavily involved with), Calibre, an ebook management tool, Software Carpentry, a series of programming tutorials for scientists, and most unlikely of all... Plover!

I didn't know about this until a month or so later, when I was checking Plover's referral logs, and noticed that I'd gotten a few hits from the Ada Initiative website. Ms. Gardiner's posted several times on the Plover Google Group, but I hadn't put her name together with The Ada Initiative, even though my friend Sumana is on the advisory board, as is Lukas Blakk, who was at my PyGotham presentation on Plover, and who asked a number of fantastic questions. That Ms. Gardiner was interested enough in Plover to devote a decent amount of her keynote speech at a major conference was incredibly exciting, and as soon as I discovered the video I started captioning it, so that I could post it here for my Deaf and hard of hearing friends and colleagues to watch. Unfortunately I got about three quarters through the captioning process (using Plover with UniversalSubtitles, which was unbelievably smooth and pleasant, especially compared with the proprietary steno software I tried to use during NatCapVidMo last year.), and then my work schedule got ridiculously busy, so I haven't had any time to finish the job 'til now. Still, better late than never, right? It's a great video. Anyone who's interested in open source contribution should watch it -- not just Plover enthusiasts.

A few notes:

* Ms. Gardiner says that entry level steno machines cost about $3,000. That's not quite true. Professional steno machines range in price from about $3,000 to about $5,000, but entry level machines go for around $1,000 for a used student writer to $2,000 for a new one.

* The Microsoft Sidewinder X4 keyboard isn't exactly 10 cents here in the US, but it's currently going for $38.20 including shipping, which is a pretty decent deal.

* Steno courses at technical schools are rarely only two years long. Some people graduate (i.e., pass three tests at 225 words per minute at 95% non-realtime accuracy) in less than that time (I took a year and a half, and I've known some people who did it in nine months), but many people take between three and seven years to get up to graduating speed. It all depends on your talent, dedication, and practice time.

* The stenographic world record is 360 words per minute.

* She wasn't speaking at 300 words per minute, I'm happy to say, or this would have taken even longer to caption. Probably more like 160, which is why I chose to caption it in single lines, as opposed to the double-line captions that I sometimes use for faster speakers.

* Josh wasn't living downstairs from me. He was actually renting coworking space two floors above the co-op office where I was working.

* I don't make anywhere near $150,000. Some court reporters in NYC might make that, but CART providers make significantly less than that, though I have managed to squeak into the six figure range for the past three years running.

* Since this speech was given, the Experimental Windows Port was released. It should be finalized pretty soon, and Josh tells me that support for OSX is imminent as well. Seriously exciting.

* In the TypeRacer video, I was actually using my Revolution Grand, not the SideWinder X4. But I'd love to see new Plover users racing on TypeRacer with their n-key rollover keyboards. Maybe we'll even have a batch competing in next year's Championships! (I'm currently tied for third place, competing as ploversteno. Yes, I was beaten in two matches by a qwerty typist. I need to get better about not getting flustered so that my hands freeze up when I make a mistake.)

* Some of my YouTube videos feature Plover, and I want to record several more, but two of them -- the StenoKnight CART Demo and Steno Versus Qwerty -- were made with Eclipse, my proprietary steno software.

Ploverpad is now Ploverdemo

2011-11-15T11:50:00.001-08:00

And it's gorgeous!

http://stenoknight.com/plover/ploverdemo/ploverdemo.html

It now supports words of up to three strokes, has working punctuation and capitalization, allows stroke deletion with the asterisk key, and even has a nifty vertical steno notebar to record each of your strokes for posterity with a timestamp and everything. If you've ever had a question about how steno worked, or if you ever wanted to show someone else how completely mind-bendingly cool this technology is, all you have to do is open a web browser and pow! There it is, in living color. It's also a great tool for learning steno on your own, while we continue to work on getting Hover Plover off the ground. A million thanks to John for coding it. Now go, everyone! Spread the Ploverdemo link far and wide! Spawn vast flocks of Plover neophytes! Bring them home to 240 WPM country! This is gonna be awesome.

Experimental Windows Port is Up!

2011-10-31T15:06:00.000-07:00

Edited to add: New version, hot off the press, right after I originally posted this. Now it works with both Gemini PR and TX Bolt protocols. That means if you have a Stentura Protege, Cybra, or Fusion, you can press the second and third button of the machine simultaneously to put it into Bolt mode, then use the device manager to see what serial port it's outputting to, and then configure Plover accordingly! Also, I was wrong -- you can totally edit the dictionary. Its path is right there under "configure/dictionary". Woo!

Extremely exciting news. The Plover Project has been joined by Hesky Fisher, an expert programmer whose girlfriend Rachel is currently in steno school. He's been helping us support more steno machine protocols and somewhere down the line he's probably going to be an integral part of the Hover Plover team, since he's got tons of experience in game development, but right now he's working on a Windows port of Plover, which has the potential to multiply our current numbers a zillionfold. (Ubuntu is pretty freaking great, but I know firsthand how intimidating it can be, and most people aren't willing to install Wubi just for the sake of a single program). Hesky's gotten the first version working already! It's a selfcontained .exe file:

Plover.exe

And here's the qwerty-to-steno chart, just as a reminder

Just download it and run it. You'll see the red P appear in your taskbar. Press it so it turns green, and then use your qwerty keyboard or supported steno machine (see above) to write steno into any Windows program! There are a few limitations with this current version. It can't send command strokes, and a side effect of that results in Plover spitting out part of the buffer unpredictably sometimes. But it's a great way to see how Plover works with a minimum of effort. And remember, you don't need an n-key rollover keyboard to see it in action; just about every keyboard is able to write "so is this working?" (SO/S-/TH-/WOG/HF in steno or av/a/rw/ldv/ru in qwerty). Download it, give it a shot, and spread it around to anyone who might be interested. A more complete version is coming soon!

Introducing the Ploverpad!

2011-10-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

The brilliant minds behind The Plover Wiki have struck again. If you or someone you know has been intrigued by steno but is intimidated by the prospect of installing Ubuntu and downloading a full-fledged keyboard emulator like Plover, what would you say to a taste of steno that you can experience using only your browser and an ordinary qwerty keyboard? Check it out!

Click here to try out the Ploverpad!

As in the old-timey versions of Plover (remember back that far?), punctuation is currently displaying with Eclipse syntax instead of gluing and capping and all that meta stuff. Oh, and it only translates one-stroke words. But I was playing with it this evening, and I was really kind of surprised by how much I could write by restricting myself only to words that could be written in one stroke, plus prefix and suffix strokes. If you know a bit of steno, give it a try and see how long a sentence you can come up with using only one-stroke words. Post them to comments, if you like. I'd love to see what y'all come up with.

Even if you don't know steno, the Ploverpad can be really useful to help you learn the keyboard. Print out a copy of the Steno Keychart and walk yourself through the alphabet. You'll see that the keys on the Ploverpad will light up according to the colors on the chart. Seriously, how cool is that? It's also useful to see how close to n-key rollover your ordinary computer keyboard is; you'll see that certain words will work properly, even if they take three or four keystrokes, but other words involving the same number of keystrokes won't register.

I think the Ploverpad will be invaluable for beginning steno students, people shopping for n-key rollover keyboards, and people who want to practice their steno when they're on computers that might not have Linux installed. But most of all I think it's a fantastic way to demonstrate what steno looks like in a simple, visually striking way with very little technical hassle required. Notice that you can also drag, drop, and resize all of the windows, so if you want to focus on steno keystrokes you can make the keyboard big, and then if you want to switch your focus to translation, you can increase the size of the output window and pour out one-stroke steno to your heart's content. John and Jay, who wrote the Ploverpad, will be adding features as they go along, so stay tuned! But it's already an amazing piece of work. Please feel free share the link around all over the place. Now anyone who wants to try their hand at steno can give it a shot by just clicking on a link. Our most seductive recruitment tool yet!

Split-Screen Demonstration

2011-10-07T15:25:00.000-07:00

John, one of the guys who helped set up the Plover Wiki, mentioned that he'd tried to describe how Plover works to his friends, but they were having trouble picturing it. He thought a split-screen video, showing my fingers on the keyboard synced with a screen capture of Plover's output, would possibly do the trick. So here it is! It was recorded using the built-in camera of one laptop running Windows (trained on my fingers), while at the same time another laptop running Ubuntu received input from my Majestouch keyboard via Plover into Gedit. I also thought it might be instructive if I illustrated the chords I was pressing using my steno chart, so I put them all together this afternoon using TrakAx.

The first runthrough is in realtime (though I was trying to show each stroke as clearly as possible, so it's quite a bit slower than I usually write), and the second runthrough is in slow motion. First of all, sorry that the final TP-PL (period stroke) is out of sync; it was hard to see exactly when the period appeared on the small blurry preview screen, so I just took a wild guess, and wound up being a few seconds late. Second of all, you'll see a few random letters appear mysteriously on the screen and then get deleted, all without me touching the keyboard. That's an artifact of Plover's current output system. It works by sending ordinary qwerty keystrokes to the OS, then sending a corresponding number of backspaces to get rid of them, and finally sending the proper steno output to take their place. This is why Plover doesn't work well in programs like Vim, which use one-key command strokes, when using the qwerty keyboard as a steno machine. Plover in Gemini mode (using an actual proprietary steno machine) doesn't have this problem. The screen capture software (xvidcap) makes these deletion artifacts more prominent than they actually are while using Plover in real life; most of the time, you don't see the deletions at all, because they happen too fast to notice them. Third of all, if you try this at home with the default Plover dictionary, you might find that it comes out with "administration" rather than "demonstration" and "moreover" rather than "Plover". Stenographers' dictionaries are always changing, always adapting to the needs and emerging writing style of their owners. Modify your version of Plover's default dictionary for your own needs! I'm hoping to write another installment of Steno 101 addressing that, but I want to wait until we've implemented the just-in-time dictionary entry feature (the ability to add or modify dictionary entries while Plover is running, rather than having to shut it down, open the dictionary, make the change, and then start it back up again) that's next on the development list.

Finally, here's a static chart of the steno chords used in the video, with the English written beneath them. 16 steno strokes, compared to the 87 keystrokes needed to write it qwerty-style.

Plover Wiki is Live

2011-10-03T14:53:00.000-07:00

Check out the new Plover Wiki!This was put together by John and Jay, two new Plover fans, and I'm hoping that the rest of the Plover community will start contributing to it as well. I'll be going over the pages in the next few days, expanding and clarifying where necessary, but it's already a fantastic resource for Plover newbies and other interested parties. Feel free to browse through it, then make an account and start adding your own thoughts, ideas, theory charts, tips, tricks, fan art, screencasts, et cetera. Many, many thanks to John and Jay for getting this whole thing started!

Captioned PyGotham Presentation is Up

2011-10-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

Here's my talk. I stumbled over my words a bit at the beginning, but I think all in all I said pretty much everything I wanted to, and the audience asked lots of questions, which is always a good sign. When the camera pans over to the audience it looks like there are only a handful of people there, but actually I think there were about a dozen all together; several of them were on the other side of the aisle. I've been talking with several people I met at PyGotham, and the Plover Google Group has also picked up quite a bit lately. I'm really excited to see what's next. Josh sent me a small update the other day, with a few little bugfixes, and it seems to work perfectly, so I have a feeling the hiatus is almost over. Fingers crossed.

Plover Presentation at Pygotham

2011-09-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

Well, Pygotham was fantastic, and I think the presentation I gave went pretty well. I haven't reviewed the video of it (though hopefully that'll be up in the next week or so, captioned with Universal Subtitles, natch), but from what I remember, the people who attended seemed intrigued by the idea of steno and asked lots of interesting questions. I've uploaded a PDF of the slides I used in my talk, so if you're interested, feel free to give them a look-over. They include the other faux screenshot for Hover Plover that I commissioned, pictured below:

Hover Plover Pixel Art by Derek Sneed

This is a top-scrolling space shooter. As I mentioned in the presentation, it's mainly a dictionary building game, as well as a way to reinforce muscle memory after defining each stroke. The enemy ships are coded to the number of strokes required to write the word sitting on their tailfins. So easy one-stroke words like "snails" (STPHAEULS) or "antidisestablishmentarianism" (SPHAEURPL) are the little green ships. The yellow ships are two-strokers, like "guardian" (TKPWARD/KWRAPB). Orange ships are three-strokers, like "bemusement" (PWE/PHAOUS/PLT). The big scary red ship should properly be a three-stroker, since it's "frangipani" (TPRAPBG/PA/TPHEU), but the player's dictionary doesn't have "frangipani" in it, so it appears as an "undefined", the fearsomest type of ship in the enemy fleet. The player can fingerspell the word, which will shoot it down once, but will force them to fingerspell it again the next time it appears. But they can also call up the Plover entry definition window, fingerspell it once, then stroke out the steno they'd like to apply it to, hit the enter key (which in the Plover default dictionary is R-R), and the ship will revert back into whatever type it should be. In this case, it'll go from scary red to slightly less scary three-stroke orange. Unfortunately Plover doesn't yet have this pop-up definition feature; it's the last big improvement we need to implement before Plover can be considered truly complete. But when that gets done, and when we're able to start developing Hover Plover, this is gonna be loads of fun to play, and tremendously useful practice. A debt of gratitude is owed to Typestriker, which gave me the idea of a top-down space shooter, though it's a qwerty game, so it doesn't have any of the steno-specific functionality that the Hover Plover version will have.

EDITED TO ADD:

My dear friend Martin has already gotten to work on the overarching plot of the game, which he posted in the comments. I thought I'd paste what he's come up with in the entry itself, since it amuses me greatly. Keep in mind that this isn't officially sanctioned Hover Plover canon yet, but it's definitely a start!

"Okay, work with me here, I have a vision:

The year is A.D. 2101 - and war was beginning! On the distant planet Chordos 10, the peaceful (but fast-moving!) Ploverian civilization is under attack from the vicious Qwertons.

You play as Ensign Stino Plover, a new recruit in the Ploverian Space Force. You start off in your ill-equipped plovercraft in the side-scrolling New Chord City, and you have to get to Cape Stenaveral to launch and join your PSF comrades in orbit to defend against the incoming Qwerton attack. That level is basically the beginning level you described in your last post. As the ground-based levels progress, your plovercraft gets more and more of the equipment it'll need to fight off the Qwertons - but the challenges also get harder and harder (take away the steno hints, etc).

Once you get to Cape Stenaveral and successfully input the launch code (a few lines of random text you have to stroke in at a certain speed and level of accuracy) you launch your newly tricked-out plovercraft into space to fight the Qwertons. This is the intermediate space shooter level you describe here. If you get shot down, you crash-land back on the planet, where you can repair your plovercraft by repeating part of the beginner level and then relaunching.

If, on the other hand, you manage to fend off the invading Qwertons, you must face a final boss challenge so advanced, so terrifying, that I haven't even thought of it yet. Muahahahaha!"

Hover Plover Artwork!

2011-09-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

Hover Plover Pixel Art by Derek Sneed

In preparation for my presentation on Plover at PyGotham this Saturday from 1:15 to 2:00 in room 5 (check out the whole schedule! It's gonna be a fantastic conference!), I've commissioned some pixel art to demonstrate what Hover Plover will look like once I'm able to get it developed. This is a faux screenshot from the intermediate level game, a 2D platformer that displays both English and steno while you try to keep your broken plovercraft from crashing into the rooftops of an unnamed metropolis long enough to make it to the repair shop on the edge of town. In this game your plovercraft keeps moving forward at a constant pace, and you're only able to control it in brief vertical bursts by typing the steno stroke on the screen, which lifts it briefly away from chimneys, greenhouses, water towers, stray cats, et cetera, before it starts sinking dangerously close to the buildings again. After a while, you'll be able to toggle off the steno hints and just write the words themselves. I think it'll be incredibly fun to play. Now I just need to figure out a funding source so we can get the thing made! But I've already got a couple of irons in that fire. More news on that later. Meanwhile, I've got to finish putting together the PyGotham presentation and also start coordinating some bugfixes with Plover's programmer so that it's in good shape for the next phase of development.

My main steno machine malfunctioned the other day (every stenographer's nightmare), and though I was able to fix it that evening with 15 minutes and a couple of screwdrivers (I think the calibration on a few keys had spontaneously gotten wonky, so the "all keys lifted" state wouldn't register), I didn't have time to tinker with it; I had a class to CART. So I fired up my Filco Majestouch with Plover, set the font size on Gedit to 28, and got through the next two hours. It was a struggle; the Majestouch requires harder keypresses than my proprietary machine, so I'm afraid my speed and accuracy suffered a bit. Plover's translation engine also needs a little more sophistication; it made some spelling errors that my proprietary software wouldn't have made. But it was worlds better than it would have been if I'd had to qwerty the class. Being able to carry two steno machines in my bag at all times really gives me peace of mind, and now that the worst has happened, I know that all is not lost if my main machine ever breaks down again. (Though, of course, I'm going to be getting it serviced in the very near future, so hopefully this was a one-off.) Let's hear it for Plover!

2011-08-21T22:26:00.000-07:00

It's been so long! But plenty's been happening on the Plover front behind the scenes. For one thing, I've been using Plover a lot more often since I bought a Filco Majestouch keyboard a month or so ago. Unlike the Sidewinder X4, it's actually small enough to fit in my steno bag along with my two computers, steno machine, and all my other stuff. Before, when I had to do transcription work on the train, I had to try to wrestle my steno machine onto its tripod, balance my computer on my steno bag, plug in the foot pedal, and keep everything in place with my thighs so it didn't topple over. A huge hassle, especially when the train was crowded. With the Majestouch, I just pull it out, plug it into my laptop, and put it on top of my laptop's keyboard. Couldn't be simpler! When I went to visit my family in Montana, I left my steno machine out of my bag so I had room for clothes, and wound up transcribing an entire 80-minute interview in three airports just using Plover and the Majestouch. One big advantage of Plover over traditional steno software is that it has complete control over the OS, so I can set KH-FG to "pause/play" and TR-RL to "rewind 1.5 seconds", keyed to autocommands in Audacious, which completely removes the need for a foot pedal. So that's quite exciting.

I'm also giving two presentations on Plover in the next few months: One at PyGotham on September 16th or 17th (the schedule isn't nailed down yet), and one at the Greater Washington Shorthand Reporters Association convention, on October 21st or 22nd. It'll be interesting to give one presentation to a group of programmers who are almost certainly unfamiliar with steno, and another presentation to a group of steno people who are almost certainly unfamiliar with Python, Linux, or Open Source. We're still working on possible funding leads for getting Plover out of hiatus (its main programmer, Josh Lifton, had a kid a few months ago, so I also wanted to give him a break while he adjusts to fatherhood and other big life changes.)

I've also -- slowly, oh, ever so slowly -- been putting my thoughts together for the next installment of Steno 101, but in the mean time, I wanted to link to something that a member of the Plover Google Group discovered on the internet a while back: Stenotypy the Machine Way, a steno manual from 1914. Surprisingly, there's still a lot of really good material in there. Of course, realtime transcription wasn't invented until the 1970s, so it doesn't include long vowels or conflict resolution (where a single steno outline corresponds to more than one English word or phrase). But even so, the example sentences alone are worth my time to dig through, and if anyone's frustrated with the glacial pace of Steno 101's development, they might to give it a glance.

Hover Plover!

2011-04-19T21:14:00.000-07:00

So I've finally settled on the name I want to give to the as-yet-nonexistent steno tutorial video game: Hover Plover! A plover on the wing is already faster than your average earthbound creature, just as qwerty typing is much faster than scrawling stuff out longhand. But picture with me now... A plover in a hovercraft. Zooming around over land and water, rocketing a hundred feet into the air and then plummeting dizzily down to earth again, coming to rest an inch above the ground and snickering in your face. You can see it, right? Nothing, and I mean nothing, is faster than a plover in a hovercraft. It's the perfect symbol of what steno can do for anyone who wants to turn spoken words or thoughts into text. I'm not a game designer and I'm certainly not a programmer (sadly, I haven't written any Python code for almost a year now. I keep thinking I'll get back to it, but work has been ridiculously busy this semester.), but I've been playing video games since 1986, and I've got a few ideas on where to start. They can be refined and developed later, once Plover itself has gained a few more features and once we figure out a way to raise money for game development, but this is just to prime the pump.

There are several modes in Hover Plover, because it's got two distinct purposes: One, to teach steno to total beginners, from the keyboard layout to abstract principles of theory and briefing; two, to give people an incentive to use steno, to make it a self-reinforcing experience, as addictive as any game with a significant learning curve. The payoff of being able to write at 225 words per minute is so far in the future for many steno students that it may as well be impossible. That's why about 85% of people who enroll in steno schools drop out. And since Plover is designed for people who don't even want to make a career out of stenography, but who are approaching it more casually, who are mainly just curious about what it can do to help make their daily typing tasks more efficient, the fun-to-grind ratio has to be much higher than it is in your typical steno school (which basically just consists of mindwrenchingly boring dictation drills), or everyone will drop it like a lukewarm mudskipper within five minutes of trying it out. Even at low levels, there's got to be that incremental get-a-reward-and-raise-the-stakes mechanic that keeps people playing Tetris until 4:00 in the morning.

So the first mode is just key recognition, very similar to your typical qwerty typing tutor. Color-coded keys from the steno chart flash on the screen, and you're asked to type them. The plover zooms his hovercraft around the screen to show you where to go. First you get the whole keyboard with letters on the keys, then you get the keyboard with blank keys, and finally you're just given the letter and you have to find and press the key yourself to get the colored letter flag to come up. Then you start with basic chording, along the lines of the first few Steno 101 lessons. It's hard to make this bit too exciting, but once you've got the basics down, you can go into game mode.

Game level one is individual letters -- some of which are represented by chords, some by single keys -- in a split-screen format, to encourage people to use both hands. So you have S-, left side S, and -S, right side S. At first you only get one at a time, but eventually you start having to press two letters, one on each side of the screen, at the same time. I don't know if there should be multiple plovercrafts or if one plovercraft should phase shift so it's able to hit every letter simultaneously, then coalesce back into its singular form -- but that's something we can hammer out during the design process. The main thing is that every time someone hits the right letter and scores a point, they're reinforcing the keys in their muscle memory. They can have a choice of a game with single keys that starts slow and gets faster, or a game that keeps the same pace but starts with single keys and moves up to chords. At first you're allowed to stagger the keypresses, first hitting S- and then -S for a two-stroke point. But after a while you'll be penalized if you don't hit them more or less simultaneously. Tiny incremental steps with visual and auditory reinforcements all along the way -- that's the way to get someone hooked. Once they've fully internalized the keyboard, they go back to the tutor. Again, it'll follow the rough plan of the Steno 101 series (which I swear I'll finish someday, though possibly not before summer, I'm afraid.) After you complete each tutorial, you unlock a game, and each game you unlock becomes more complex and immersive.

Eventually, I'd like to offer at least half a dozen Hover Plover minigames, in every style of classic gaming, from a platformer (where your plover moves forward at a constant rate, but you've got to strike the right chord at the right time to make him jump, or else he'll smack into something and the plovercraft will shoot out from under him), to a bird's eye space shooter (along the lines of TypeStriker, where words fly around and shoot your plovercraft, and you have to stroke them out to auto-target your lasers on them before they can deplete your shields; a good dictionary builder and memory recall tool) to a rhythm music game (the Plover mailing list has already talked about this one a bit, with the working title of "Steno Hero"), for a more integrated intermediate to advanced drill, writing actual complete sentences at a rate defined by your own favorite songs. A package of several minigames, all unified by the simple plover-in-a-hovercraft motif, would let students focus on different aspects of steno writing without getting bored by just drilling the same thing all the time.

People would post videos of themselves playing the game on YouTube, and random gamers would stumble across them, wondering how it's possible to type the words of a song as quickly as they're sung, how someone can keep their head while word-emblazoned enemy starships crowd the screen, coming faster and thicker all the time, as the dauntless plovercraft locks on to each, writes their name in a nanosecond, and blows them into smithereens. Once people see how fun the games are to play, they'll want to make the effort to learn how to play them. Then one day they'll look up from their high score table and realize that not only have they spent the past four hours blowing up baddies and buffing up their in-game word arsenal, but now they're able to write emails or sales reports or short stories or blog posts three times faster than they ever could before. That's how we build our secret steno army: We hook 'em, we train 'em, and then we let 'em loose. Who's with me?

Plover 2.1.1 Released!

2011-02-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

This is a bit overdue, I'm afraid. The first few weeks of the semester are busy enough that I haven't been able to keep up with Plover emails. But I'll get to them soon, I promise!

So Josh, our dauntless programmer, has released a new version of Plover.

* Fix for a bug that caused crash when adding, for example, an -ing suffix to words that end in a consonant followed by y, such as early -> earlier.

* Fix for a bug that caused crash when starting Plover configured to use a Gemini PR with a non-existent serial port.

* Update of the default dictionary to the latest from Mirabai.

* Refactor of the underlying config file logic such that addition of configuration options in future releases is invisible to the end user and less error prone.

Download it at the Launchpad site

I also was pleased to see in a recent post on Metafilter, someone asked a question about steno, and someone else -- who was not me -- answered it with a link to What Is Steno Good For. So that's exciting!

In other news, I discovered a few days ago that I can make Plover sort-of-kind-of work with my laptop's built-in keyboard, if I sort of roll or arpeggiate the keys. For instance, if I want to write my brief for "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (which, along with "antidisestablishmentarianism", is the first word people tend to say when they notice they're being transcribed in realtime), STPRAPBLG, I couldn't just press down all the keys at once the way I can with my SideWinder or Revolution Grand; my laptop's keyboard doesn't have n-key rollover, and recognizes only two or three keys at a time, maximum. But if I start out by pressing the S key (the A key on the qwerty keyboard), then the T and P, then while still holding onto the T and P, let go of the S, roll onto the A, keep the A pressed down and lift up the TP while going on to the PB, et cetera. When I get to the end, I release the last key, and the word pops up like magic. Plover is actually able to recognize all those keystrokes, as long as they're only pressed one or two keys at a time. And since it doesn't mark a stroke as complete until all keys have been lifted, you can essentially play this arpeggio of keys and come up with a correct steno translation for any word in your steno dictionary, even on a keyboard without proper n-key rollover. Now, it's nowhere near as quick as actual strokewise steno, and it's a bit tricky to do properly, but at the very least it can be useful for testing Plover when there isn't a SideWinder handy.

Steno 101: Lesson Three

2011-01-10T12:39:00.000-08:00

Steno 101: How to Do It
Steno 101: Lesson Zero
Steno 101: Lesson One
Steno 101: Lesson Two
Steno 101: Lesson Three

If you've gotten this far, you have progressed from Plover Hatchling

to Plover Fledgling.

Congratulations! Keep at it, and you'll be zooming around in no time.

Yes, another installment of the Steno 101 Series! It's been a while, huh? I've been sitting on this one for a while because it's tough for me to calibrate how much information to deliver in each lesson, and which aspects of steno to focus on first. The first few lessons were fairly easy, because they just introduced the steno keyboard, which is universal to all stenographic theories. As the lessons go along, though, I'm forced to choose between various schools of thought while giving a certain amount of fair play to the methods I don't use. Many books could be written on the differences between theories, and no two implementations of a theory are alike; each stenographer adapts their theory to their own preferences. The best I can do is to tell you how I made my choices over the course of learning steno and developing my dictionary, and hopefully that'll help you to understand the choices you'll be obliged to make as you go along.

So now you know how to write all the letters on both sides of the keyboard, and you can write tons of simple words, like "clock" (KHROBG) and "vowel" (SROUL). But how would you write something like "trash" or "bench" or "pitch"? When a word begins with Sh- or Ch-, you write them with SH- or KH-, which is relatively intuitive. But when they end in -sh, you use -RB, and when they end in -ch (or -tch), you use -FP. Why? No particular reason; you've now entered into the realm of steno conventions, which inhabits the middle space between the hard and fast rules common to all stenographers and the "arbitraries", "short forms", or "briefs", which are so numerous and unbound by theory that many of them are used by only a single stenographer in the world.

-FP and -RB are on the standard side of the steno convention spectrum and used pretty universally, as far as I can tell. There are quite a few more that are commonly accepted across a wide range of theories. Several of the consonant clusters I use in this chapter, though, are used in only one or two theories, and some I came up with myself through trial and error. Entries following these rules are all pretty well represented in the Plover default dictionary, but if you look at other dictionaries or steno theory books, you probably won't find all of them there.

Consonant clusters, in no particular order:

-PBLG -- "-dge", as in edge, badge, or Raj.

-FRB -- "-rve", as in nerve or serve

-FRPB -- "-rch" or "-nch", as in perch, bench, or crunch. Usually this works fine for both consonant clusters; it isn't necessary to specifically distinguish which one you mean. The only exception that comes to mind is "lunch" and "lurch", which I solve by writing lunch "HRUPBS".

-RBS -- "-tious, -cious, -xious", As in delicious, obnoxious, precious.

-*T -- "-th", as in fifth, plinth, or bath.

-*PL -- "-mp", as in plump or lamp.

-*LG -- "-lk", as in milk, whelk, or balk.

-FT -- "-st", as in taste, blast, or boost.

F is used frequently to serve as an S or S sound in the middles of words; SPAFPL is spasm. TKPWHRAFS is glasses. KIFG is kissing. But since F already serves double duty as both F and V, it can sometimes be tricky to handle, as in paves/paces, braves/braces, proves/process, laughs/laves/lasses, et cetera. Usually F as S gets lower priority (takes the asterisk or requires a extra stroke) compared to F as F or F as V. More on this in subsequent lessons.

-GS -- "-tion, -cian, -cean, -sion, -gion,", as in notion, ocean, passion, fashion, Titian, fission, elision, region, physician.

It's also used for literal -gs endings when there's no confusion (there's another one! KAUN-FAOUGS); since the word "bession" doesn't exist, you can use BEGS for "begs", but "PIGS" is reserved for "pigeon", and if you want "pigs" you're going to have to do it in two strokes (PIG/-S) or with sthe -Z key (PIGZ).

-BGS -- "-ction", as in faction, traction, constriction, diction.

Now, as you remember, -BGS is also -X, so you'll need to distinguish those sounds from one another when necessary. There are two schools of thought here. One is to decide that all -BGS words without the asterisk are -x words and if you want them to become -ction words, you have to put the asterisk in. This has the virtue of consistency, but it also requires more use of the asterisk than some people like (though you'll see as Steno 101 goes along that I'm quite a fan of the asterisk myself, and encourage its use for all sorts of purposes). The other way is to give the least common word the asterisk. So if "faction" is used more often than "fax", it'll be spelled TPABGS, but if "fix" is used more often than "fiction", you'll have to spell the latter "TP*EUBGS". Plover's default dictionary uses the "less common word gets asterisk" method, so you'll either have to memorize which word of each pair goes with which mapping, or you'll have to change them to suit your own preferences.

There are a few more consonant clusters that come up now and then, but these are the most frequently used, and they should be plenty to work on for now. In the next lesson I'll talk about prefixes and suffixes and give you some more principles for creating briefs and resolving homophone conflicts.

Finally, let me give you briefs for a few of the most common words used in steno, according to the hit counter of my steno dictionary. I told you about some of these in Lesson Zero, but then I wrote them in pseudocode, and now that you know all the keys on the keyboard, you're able to read and write them in actual steno.

-T = the
SKP = and (APBD can also be used, but it's more awkward due to the finger stretch)
TO = to
U = you
-F = of
AEU = a
THA = that
T- = it
S- = is
TPH = in
EU = I
SO = so
TH = this
T-S = it's
WAOE = we
SR = have
PWUT = but
TPOR = for
WHA = what
THE = they
R- or -R = are
OPB = on
TPHOT = not
PWAUS = because
TP = if
-B = be
TKO = do
W- = with
TKOEPBT = don't
-FT = of the
OR = or
PW = about
WAS = was
WUPB = one
K- = can

I know that so far this series hasn't had nearly enough practice material or exercises, and I'm going to try to fix that when I go back to revise the first three lessons. Of course, when the Steno Tutorial video game gets written, it'll offer tons of practice opportunities with realtime feedback, but until we're able to start working on it, you'll have to put yourself through your own paces. After posting this I'll start working on some exercises using what you've learned up to this point, and hopefully I'll be able to post them in the next week or so, but I really wanted to get this lesson up and out. With luck, the next one won't be so long in coming.

Plover Speaks!

2010-12-19T20:17:00.000-08:00

I finally uploaded a video of what Plover looks like when plugged into a text-to-speech engine. If you remember, the first part of my What Is Steno Good For series was called How to Speak with Your Fingers, and was about how steno can be used as a conversational tool for people who don't use their voices to speak. Plover's now at a point where that's not only possible, but ludicrously easy. All I did was to launch Plover, open a terminal window in Ubuntu, type eSpeak, press enter, and start writing. Whenever I wanted to send a line, I pressed R-R on my steno machine, which my steno dictionary has defined as "press return". That's all there was to it.

Recently, I was quite moved by Roger Ebert's blog post Trying to Get a Word in Edgewise, about the frustration he's experienced since he lost the use of his voice, and by my friend (and early Plover supporter) Mel's response to it. I was already in the middle of planning this video before the blog post went up, but after it was posted, one of Mr. Ebert's fans randomly came upon Plover and recommended it to him. The next morning I was thrilled to discover that Mr. Ebert had actually commented on the relevant article. I panicked a bit, because I didn't yet have anything to show him and no time to make the video until the weekend. Now it's finally up, though, and I can prove that Plover isn't just a pipe dream; it actually works. I know that Mr. Ebert uses a Mac, and that Plover is currently only working on Linux, but cross-platform support is high on our to-do list. I think this video speaks for me better than any blog post ever could, so I'll just leave it there.

(One more minor thing: YouTube lists the running time at 5 minutes, but the actual video is only about 2 minutes long. No idea why those extra three minutes of frozen screen were tacked on there, but just ignore them.)

Plover 2.1 is Live!

2010-12-05T15:50:00.000-08:00

Download Plover 2.1 here.

Incredibly exciting news! The new version of Plover has been released, and it now supports command strokes. This means you can use your steno machine to do anything you can do from your qwerty keyboard -- alt-tab, navigation, formatting, you name it. I'm going to try to make a screencast this week showing me using Plover with Vim, which has been a dream of mine since I first started thinking about Plover. Unfortunately Vim commands don't currently work with the SideWinder X4 (though we'll hopefully be fixing that soon), but the Gemini PR version works flawlessly with every program I could think to throw at it. The SideWinder should work fine with most other programs; it only has trouble with one-key alphanumeric command strokes. Next on the development list: Adding and editing dictionary definitions from the steno machine while using Plover.

Many thanks as always to Josh, our dauntless programmer. I've also updated the Donate button both here on the blog and on the FAQ page. For some reason it stopped working, but it's fixed now. Sorry for anyone who tried to donate and wasn't able to. If you'd like to give it another try, it shouldn't give you any more trouble. Please feel free to send questions, comments, bug reports, and feature requests to plover@stenoknight.com. I'm also hard at work on the next installment of Steno 101, so this blog should be seeing quite a bit more activity than it did over November, which was mostly consumed by NatCapVidMo.

I can hardly believe that my desire for a free, open source steno keyboard emulator that works on affordable hardware has actually come true. There's more to come, but this is a huge milestone, and I'm completely ecstatic.

New experimental version with improved GUI

2010-10-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

Good news from Joshua, Plover's programmer. The newest update from the experimental series of Plover has been released. He says:

"The latest experimental release of Plover (version 2.0.0.4) includes a graphical user interface for viewing and editing all Plover configuration parameters. This will hopefully make Plover configuration much easier and less error prone. Aside from the known-to-be-buggy support for the Gemini TX stenotype, everything in this experimental release should work as advertised. If it doesn't, please let me know or, better yet, file a bug report directly in Launchpad."

Download it here.

New logo!

2010-10-18T14:31:00.000-07:00

The logo I commissioned for Plover is done! Steno mavens will please note the eponymous feather pattern on the left wing. Logo design by Laura Lake, freelance illustrator. Font is ButterBrotPapier by Anke Art.

Now, I know it's generally traditional to name little animal logos that represent FLOSS projects. I'm not sure what, though. I was thinking of holding a competition for the longest (in terms of letters and/or syllables) common name that can be reasonably represented in one stroke on the steno keyboard. So something like KHREUFRD for Clifford or KHRAEURPBS for Clarence will do, but your invented SKWRO*EPBT brief for Jonathan doesn't count. Or we could leave the little guy nameless; I'm not particular. The main thing is we've got a logo. Now to print up some business cards for the next hacker/steno/accessibility conference I go to...

Qwerty to Steno Key Map

2010-10-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

File this one under painfully obvious. In all the excitement of the Plover release, I had forgotten that the actual description of the qwerty-to-steno layout that Plover uses was buried way back in the archives, and that new people trying to figure out how to position their fingers would most likely be totally lost. Sorry about that! By way of apology, I whipped up a new image that should be a little more helpful, and after I finish posting this I'm going to put it on the Plover FAQ Page as well.

The dark blue letters correspond to the letters of the qwerty keyboard. The light blue letters correspond to the letters on the steno keyboard that they produce when Plover is connected. Basically you move your hands half an inch up so that your left thumb is resting between the C and V keys and your right thumb is resting between the N and M keys. The rest should fall into place. a good test sentence to write when you first start up Plover (not least because even keyboards without n-key rollover often type it correctly) is:

AV A WR DVL RU

in qwerty, which corresponds to

SO S TH WOG HF

in steno, which translates to

So is this working?

in English. Now that you know where to put your fingers, try it out and let me know how it goes!

Blog Interview and TX Support

2010-10-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

Two exciting things today. First of all, over at Plover's Launchpad Site there's now a User Guide and experimental support for the Gemini TX Protocol. We're still looking for testing with that one, so if you have a TX machine, give it a shot.

Also, there's an interview on Plover at the Geek Feminism Blog, where I talk about some of my reasons for kicking off the project and some things I hope for Plover's future.

There's been a huge amount of excitement since the Plover 2.0 release, and there's also a hackathon scheduled this Saturday, both onsite in Toronto at HackLabTO and online via IRC on the #plover freenode channel. Thanks to everyone (especially to Josh, Plover's tireless coder, for writing the manual and releasing new code daily and to Leigh Honeywell, who's behind both the Geek Feminism interview and the hackathon) for your enthusiasm, linkage, and donations. Plover is picking up steam, and it can only get better from here.

Plover 2.0 Is Released!

2010-10-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, kids, the moment you've all been waiting for...

Download Plover 2.0 Here!

You might also want to visit the new Plover landing page:

http://stenoknight.com/plover/

It answers some common questions about the project and the new release, and also features this video showing me using Plover to demolish the competition in an online typing game called TypeRacer.

This video was made using the Gemini PR option. I'll probably make another one with the SideWinder later, showing all the other amazing things Plover can do. You can blog with it, chat with it, write a novel -- you name it! In future releases, we'll also implement the ability to control every aspect of your computer using steno, plus superior dictionary management and support for additional steno protocols. But for now, bask in the glory that is a fully functional and completely free high speed stenographic text entry system. Remember, if you have Windows but not Linux, you can give yourself a stress-free dual boot option in less than 20 minutes using Wubi. Then just extract the .gz file to your chosen directory and follow the two-line installation instructions in the README. Feel free to email me at plover@stenoknight.com if you need any guidance or if you have comments, bugs, or feature requests. A million thanks to Joshua Harlan Lifton, Plover's programmer, for devoting so much time and passion to the project in the past month. And please spread the word. I think Plover has the potential to transform the way people input text and interact with their computers, but the first priority is to make everyone aware of its existence. Now go, play around with it, and see what happens when you triple your speed and quarter your effort.

Calm Before the Storm

2010-09-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

Just so none of you are alarmed, I've temporarily switched Plover's Github repository to private, at the request of Josh, the programmer. He's putting the finishing touches on the big release version and doesn't want old messy code lying around all over the internet. I've tested the version he's currently polishing, and it's absolutely glorious. Installation is dead easy, the interface is simple and intuitive, and the actual translation (now with formatting and orthographic suffix rules!) is like butter. Like butter, I tell you. You're gonna love it. He says it'll probably be about a week before the big reveal, so I hope you can all hold out 'til then. If I get a chance, I'll try to put together that screencast I've been promising. It's gonna knock your stenoloving socks off.

Plover takes control

2010-09-21T21:51:00.000-07:00

So Josh, the person responsible for 99% of Plover's code, came by my coworking space today and showed me the newest version of Plover. It's wonderful beyond description. The dream I had when I first came up with the concept and started this blog back in 2008 is finally realized: Plover now writes instant English translations from a steno machine or SideWinder to the active window. Yes, we have achieved keyboard emulation. It blew my mind to see it, and I did a jig of giddy glee.

Now, for the time being this only works on Ubuntu. Windows development, when it comes, will be a fair distance down the road (possibly after development for Android, though we're still thinking about how best to work out that one.) Still, with Wubi available, there's no reason that anyone with a Windows machine can't install Ubuntu as a dual boot option on their system in about 20 minutes, without affecting their existing configuration at all. It's remarkably seamless. There are also a few other kinks to work out before I upload the new code to the Github. We discovered a bug or two today, so Josh is going to tackle them over the next few weeks and hopefully after some testing we'll have a good stable release to show you. Then there's the polishing that needs to be done, adding some linguistic and orthographic rules, and putting all the formatting syntax back under the hood where it belongs. But this is a huge step, and I'm thrilled to bits. In the next day or two I might try to do a sneak preview video to show you guys, if I can get a screencast put together. But for now, you're gonna have to take my word for it. It works! It works! Yeehaw!

New readme file!

2010-09-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

So the illustrious Stan, longtime Plover user and supporter, has turned the ugly-as-sin Github readme file into a gorgeously formatted PDF. He also assigned it a version number, which I'd been extremely neglectful in not attending to up 'til now. Behold!

Plover Readme 1.3

Thanks, Stan! You're the best. Hopefully in the not too distant future we'll be writing a whole new extensive readme to incorporate the keyboard emulation features that Josh, Plover's lead programmer, is currently working on.

Edited to add Stan's reply in the comments, just because it's too good to be overlooked by people who might not click through:

Well, it ain't open source for no'n ;).

I definitely had fun doing it -- even though it distracted me from actually practicing steno along with the fact that I stayed up until nearly five in the morning to do it. But I figured this would be easier than the old readme file which I for some reason I had a hard time following (maybe I was the dummy toward which the dummy series are directed).

But I'm glad I could contribute. I hope the version number makes sense. My reasoning was as follows:

1.0 - Plover that worked in command line.
1.1 - Plover that opened the small window (for which you made the 'it really works!' video)
1.2 - Addition of Eclipse and DC dictionary support
1.3 - Current one with the text output and GUI.

On a final note, I want to let everyone know that everything in that readme is subject to change and revision. I threw that logo together because it was the first idea that popped in my mind but again, I can design something a lot sleeker if I spend a little more time thinking about it. But I do love the designs from the design prototypes post so I will do my best to try to somehow integrate them if I decide to change it up.

And of course with any major changes with Plover will hopefully be documented in the readme.

I'll put up a url for the original InDesign file once I get my FTP server working again (home ISP services tend to look down on mass file sharing I have found) to uphold the opensource spirit.

Go Plover and opensource software! I'm pretty much done shoveling through my backpack for the hardware key every time I have to open CaseCATalyst or having to spend $5k on Eclipse once I go pro. Many people at my school and around Seattle have even expressed interest in learning steno after observing me practice at coffee shops or libraries. They say, "How is it that you're 'typing' THAT fast?" Or, "My fingers and wrists would kill me if I even attempted half of that pace on a regular keyboard." Then I begin to explain how it works, show them my theory notes, and tell them that I was doing a 200wpm drill and they become captivated further. Once I tell them how much machines and software cost however...

Makes me wonder how many people we could get to at least give steno a chance if the equipment were more accessible.

Steno machines and software are really not complicated things. It's only because of its esotericism that companies are able to reap in as much as they do and bully their users around with excessive and cumbersome anti-piracy measures for technology far exceeded in complexity by things as common as the iPhone or a netbook PC.

With everyone's small contribution I think Plover's really got a chance to rise up to become an equal competitor along side DC, Eclipse, CaseCAT, etc.

Linux did. It even runs on mobile phones. Who's to say we can't steno on an iPad or on a tablet PC?

Steno 101, Lesson Two

2010-08-30T14:21:00.000-07:00

Steno 101: How to Do It
Steno 101: Lesson Zero
Steno 101: Lesson One
Steno 101: Lesson Two
Steno 101: Lesson Three

It's been a while since the last installment, but here without further ado is Steno 101, Lesson Two. Now is probably a good time to review Lesson Zero and Lesson One.

Before we get started, I have to address an issue I inexcusably neglected in the previous two segments. If you look at the steno keyboard, you'll notice that the left hand side has four columns of keys before it hits the asterisk, but the left hand side has five columns after the asterisk.

So unless you're Count Rugen from the Princess Bride, you might be wondering how you're supposed to handle that extra column of keys. The answer is that the right hand pinky finger operates both of the two rightmost columns, even though it rests on the left TS column rather than the right DZ column when it's not in use. I prefer to use steno machines with wide keys that let me hit all four keys with one pinky, if I want to, but different stenographers have different preferences. The main thing to remember is that the pointer fingers should always be on the columns adjacent to the asterisks, and the rest of the fingers should follow naturally from there. I've recently started tutoring a beginner in steno, and her fingers kept wanting to drift over to the right, which meant that she had to either stretch or shift her hand left whenever she wanted to press the FR keys, which is really inefficient, considering how often "FR" is used in steno, versus "DZ".

So you've learned S, T, P, and R on both sides of the keyboard, and you've memorized all the various vowel combinations and diphthongs you can get out of the four vowel keys, A, O, E, and U. What's left? First, the other consonants just represented by individual keys:

You can see there are more on the right hand than on the left, but they should all be pretty easy to remember, since they're just straight-up letters rather than chords. The tricky part comes in here:

These are all the letters represented by chords. This time there are more on the left hand side than on the right. In fact, in most steno theories, including mine, only the left hand side has a complete alphabet, and it's the only side used to spell words out letter by letter when they aren't defined strokewise in the steno dictionary.

All this is a lot to memorize, but I hope that breaking it down in this way will make the process easier. Feel free to print out these charts and have them on hand for reference. You might first try memorizing the individual keys on both sides, then try to memorize the complete alphabet on the left hand side incorporating both chords and individual keys, and finally incorporating the four chords on the right hand side. Then try putting the letter keys and letter chords together with the vowel chart from the previous lesson. Once you've got all that under your belt, you'll be able to write almost any English word phonetically, and you'll be able to use the left-hand spelling alphabet (which I write using the letter or chord plus the asterisk key for lowercase letters; I'll get to uppercase letters and other alphabets in subsequent lessons) to spell out words that aren't in the dictionary. Next lesson we'll learn what to do when a word isn't possible to write strictly phonetically, then work on a few principles for briefing prefixes, suffixes, and other common word components.

Funding

2010-08-18T14:18:00.000-07:00

So I just had a good session with my Python tutor, and it seems that Plover has reached a turning point. The essential steno-to-English structure of the program is working well. The next biggest priority is getting it to work as a keyboard emulator, and it looks like the most efficient and robust way to do that is to plug Plover into a program with flexible, relatively low-level control over the OS: namely, Autokey in Linux and AutoHotKey in Windows. We're starting with Autokey first, because it's written in Python (AutoHotKey is written in C++, though fortunately it's also open source) and my Python tutor runs Ubuntu, so it's the most convenient one to try first. We dug through the program a bit today, and it looks like it's going to involve a fair amount of intricate rerouting and testing and kludging. The other issue is that Plover is written in Python 3 and Autokey is written in Python 2.6, so we'll have to negotiate how to work that in as well. What it comes down to is that an hour a week or every other week is not going to be enough to get this moving along in the near future. Plover development so far has been funded entirely out of my pocket, to the tune of nearly $2,000 so far. I can only afford to pay about $300 a month, which has been keeping development at a relative snail's pace. My tutor is excited about the project and would like to put more time into it, but he's got a business to run just like I do, and can't afford to work at a loss. It looks like our options are:

* Keep developing Plover at the same rate we've been moving, about three hours per month.

* Find more funding from an external source, either from individual donations, a FLOSS grant, or some kind of seed money from a person or organization interested in contributing to the project. The trouble there is that Plover is not something that can be monetized directly. The whole point is that it's free for anyone to download and/or modify. Donations might help a little, but its user base is currently pretty small, and not likely to get much bigger until it's capable of being used as a fully functioning keyboard emulator.

* Figure out a way to make money in ways adjacent to Plover.

- My Python tutor is also a hardware hacker, so he's interested in trying to put together some kind of wearable steno keyboard with Plover built in, so it can just be plugged into a computer and work without any software configuration or Autokey-style workarounds. The only way that can be profitable is if it's sufficiently cheap to make and there's sufficient demand from wearable geeks willing to pay $100 - $200 to triple their typing speed. Whether either of those conditions are possible is difficult to calculate.

- Alternately, we could work on making a standalone AAC device, using Plover and Open Source Text-to-Speech Software. The advantage there is that AAC devices are often funded by health insurance or governmental agencies, and can cost thousands of dollars for non-realtime speech synthesis. If we could act as a vendor to people with good fine motor control but the inability to speak, as outlined in my How To Speak With Your Fingers article, there might well be a bigger pool of money available and more motivated users willing to pay for and learn how to use such a thing.

- On the other hand, I could try to make money on the pedagogical side of things, offering Plover and the Steno 101 series (next installment coming soon!) for free, but charging for personal steno tutoring or classes or something of that sort, either remotely or online. I'm certainly willing to put in the time, but I wonder how easy it will be to find people who want to take steno classes on software that's still in development, and how much they'll be willing to pay for the privilege.

- The third way to pay for development would be to keep funding Plover out of my own pocket up until the point that it hits keyboard emulation, then try to build it into a video game hosted on the web. If that takes off, we can fund development via ads and donation requests on the website. (A Tetris/Guitar Hero hybrid has been proposed, and its skeleton is already sketched out here, just waiting for code and graphics to bring it to life) Again, lots of uncertainty, but I feel like the video game route is both the best way to learn steno and the best way to bring it to the attention of the general public. If we could get it working on a mobile/wearable system, all the better. But we can't even start on the video game until Plover is emulating qwerty output, and that's looking to be a considerable distance away.

* And, of course, I want to improve my own Python skills so that I can start contributing code rather than just money, enthusiasm, and steno expertise to the project. That's easier said than done, but I'm going to try to keep making headway in that direction. Currently Plover isn't in the best shape for collaboration, but it's definitely a future priority to structure and document it so that people can contribute code as well as or instead of money to help get it off the ground.

Any thoughts and suggestions are very welcome. As long as I have money to spare, Plover development will continue to go forward. For now, I think I'm going to keep spending that $300 a month; I'm going to work on making a dedicated Plover page with a FAQ, donation button, and links to relevant posts from the blog; I'm going to do a bit of outreach in the mobile/wearable and open source communities to see if I can figure out a hypothetical price for functioning plug-and-play steno hardware; and I'm going to keep blogging the Steno 101 series so that anyone who wants to teach themselves steno can do so, using the current not-quite-a-word-processor version of Plover. It's definitely a start, and we'll just have to see where it goes.

Update

2010-08-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

I gave my first beginning steno lesson to the auction winner last week, using a new SideWinder and the latest version of Plover. She did remarkably well, for only an hour worth of steno training! I taught her how to write "the stoat sat at the top step" (old steno school habits die hard) and gave her some exercises on memorizing the vowels and diphthongs with S, T, P, and R. Hopefully this week we'll move on to some of the other consonants, and she'll be off and running. I'm also supposed to be having another Python lesson tomorrow, in which we're hoping to get qwerty emulation operational in the Linux version of Plover using Autokey. I'll keep y'all posted.

StenoKnight Blog?

2010-08-05T10:23:00.000-07:00

Lately I feel like I'm bubbling over with things to say about my business, StenoKnight CART Services. I get some of my thoughts out on Twitter, but the character restriction is starting to feel really limiting. I have an articles page, which contains both things that I wrote for the Plover Blog and things that I wrote on various other forums over the last few years. But I kind of want to have a space for blog posts on my daily CART work, freelancing, promoting a business, time management, Deaf/HoH issues, and all that sort of thing. The Plover blog doesn't seem to be an appropriate place for it, so I'm toying with the idea of creating a StenoKnight-specific Blog. But, on the other hand, I've had the StenoKnight Facebook page for a while now and it's been largely neglected. Maybe that's just because I don't really enjoy the Facebook interface, but I'm worried that starting another blog will quickly feel like a burden and dilute my professional web presence even more. So maybe I should just write the things I want to write offline, polish them up, and post them on my articles page rather than having a dedicated top-of-the-head blogging space. I don't know. I know this isn't Plover-related, but since a fair number of this blog's readers are aspiring court reporters or CART providers, I guess I'm wondering which you guys would rather read: Polished articles on various topics that are published pretty infrequently on my website, or a new space for less carefully edited but more frequent posts on running a CART business in New York City?

Steno Versus Qwerty Versus Automatic SR

2010-08-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

First of all, have some lovely Egyptian Plovers from the Bronx Zoo, taken by Abigail on a recent photo jaunt.

Thanks, Abigail!

Second, a low-cost wearable computer rig that'll make you look significantly less dorky than your average gargoyle.

I'm a little concerned about overheating brought on by lack of ventilation, but even so it's a good start. This guy uses a foldable qwerty keyboard. You'll remember from my article on mobile and wearable computing that I think steno is just dying to be turned into an efficient wearable text input system. I think that two flat multitouch panels with keypads for haptic feedback tied snugly around each thigh and connected to the rest of the rig via Bluetooth would be ideal. Still not sure how feasible it would be to manufacture, but as Plover inches ever closer to full keyboard emulation (we're a session or two away from getting it working in Linux, and then hopefully we'll be able to port that bit into the Windows version without much trouble), I'd love to try it out in a mobile context, even if that means sawing open a SideWinder, cutting off the steno-irrelevant sections, snapping the circuitboard in half, and rewiring everything so that it can be attached to a wearable substrate like jeans, a hoodie, or a small bag.

Third, I'm going to check out the exhibit hall of SpeechTek2010 tomorrow. I'll let you know what I think, but I doubt I'll be out of a job just yet. And, anyway, even positing true AI and human-equivalent automated speech recognition, there are many contexts in which text input via fingers is more private and more convenient than dictating, which means that steno will always have a place in the game -- assuming I can get enough people aware of its many benefits.

Speaking of automated speech recognition, I made a short video the other day, and YouTube's autocaption transcript just kicked in today, so I decided to post it.

I stitched together several snippets of timed audio, dictated at speeds between 40 and 185 words per minute, and made screencasts of myself transcribing them first using the qwerty keyboard (top portion) and then the steno keyboard (bottom portion). First notice how much more work I was doing on the qwerty keyboard than on the steno keyboard. In What Is Steno Good For: Raw Speed, I discuss all the wasted energy and effort required to type out each individual letter, backspacing and retyping if I inadvertently type them in the wrong order, and the inherent limitations on speed imposed by this method. My fingers are moving much more quickly and working much harder in the qwerty window than in the steno window. As you can see by the end of the video, I was losing huge chunks of the audio, my accuracy was dismal, and I was positively sweating bullets between 160 and 185 WPM in the qwerty window. When I got to use my steno machine, 185 felt like a stroll in the daisies. I usually don't start feeling like my fingers are really going full blast until I get up to 240 or more on my steno machine, which this video doesn't show; I chose to stop at the point where my qwerty typing completely broke down. The difference in terms of ease, comfort, and ergonomics is hard to miss.

If you want to see how YouTube's automated speech recognition did at the same task, turn the captions on, then select "transcribe audio". You'll notice that even though the audio is crystal clear and each word is perfectly enunciated, it makes so many mistakes that it's almost impossible to understand what's being said by reading the autocaptions alone. Later on the quality improves a bit, though there are still significant errors, because the 185 WPM section of the transcript is a judge's jury charge, which contains lots of boilerplate big words such as "testimony" and "circumstances". Speech recognition has a much easier time with multisyllabic words, especially in dictation where there's a clear space inserted between each word (as in these samples, since they're intended for dictation, though they sounds quite unnatural to most ears) because there are comparatively fewer possibilities to rule out than in words of one or two syllables, which automated SR always has a great deal of trouble with. The problem is that small words are often the most important words in the sentence (especially if they're negatory words such as "no" or "not"), and you can see if you look at the auto captions that even making an error in 1 word out of 20 (a 95% accuracy rate) can cause great confusion.

The most successful and least error-ridden passage in the transcription was the phrase "the convergence of resources and bolstering of partnerships to support a coherent program for science and mathematics for all students". Because there were so many multisyllabic words in that passage, the autocaptioning system got them all right except for the phrase "for all", which it translated as "football". This is an error that a human transcriber would never make, because "football" and "for all" are stressed entirely differently in English, and syntactically it makes no sense to insert the word "football" between "mathematics" and "students". But you can see how that one tiny error brings the rest of the sentence into doubt, and can steer a Deaf or hard of hearing person off on entirely the wrong train of thought. It's this complete lack of ability to understand speech in context and to correct errors semantically that makes automatic speech recognition ultimately unreliable without extensive babysitting by human editors.

Two bug fixes in SideWinder version of Plover

2010-07-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

If you go over to the Github, you'll see changes in tktest.py and sidewinder.py. I recently took a trip to Seattle and Missoula and didn't have enough room in my luggage for my steno machine, so instead I took along the new SideWinder X4 I bought for my brother William. I had four transcription files to finish before the end of the trip, and I discovered that the freezing bug which had intermittently affected Plover completely prevented me from using my rewind foot pedal with Winamp, so my brother and I sat down together and fixed it, by gum. I also put in a line of code that made it so if you accidentally hit the space bar (like I found myself doing constantly, since it's so close to the vowel keys) it doesn't throw out the stroke the way it does if you hit other keys besides the ones mapped to be steno keys; it just ignores the space and translates the stroke as usual. These two tiny little changes has made Plover drastically more useful as-is, and tomorrow I'm meeting my Python tutor to work on keyboard emulation. I know it's been a bit of a hiatus, but Plover is back in active development again.

Sidewinder + Steno Lessons for Auction

2010-07-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

Hey, all. A friend of mine is trying to pay for her last semester of college, and her friends are having an auction to help raise funds. For my part, I'm offering a SideWinder X4, all decked out steno-style, plus six hours of steno lessons, either offered in New York City or over the internet. The current bid is $65, so if this sounds like a good deal to you, get in while the getting's good!

Auction for Maria: Steno Machine and Lessons

Steno 101, Lesson One

2010-07-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

Steno 101: How to Do It
Steno 101: Lesson Zero
Steno 101: Lesson One
Steno 101: Lesson Two
Steno 101: Lesson Three

So you've read Lesson Zero, which taught you some basic principles using pseudosteno, and now you're ready to start learning real steno. In order to keep it at a manageable level, I'm going to focus this lesson on two main groups of letters: The vowels, including chorded vowel combinations, and the consonants which appear as single letters on both sides of the steno keyboard.

First, the vowels:

A - as in bat, ant, father, or allow
O - as in got or knoll
E - as in let, pert, or defy
U - as in grump, bull, or purr
EU - as in grip, dirt, or tryst

AO - spelling differentiator, oa or oo
AE - spelling differentiator, ea or ae

AEU - as in grape or saint
AOE - as in seen or breech
AOU - as in glue or pew
AOEI - as in guise or spite
OEU - as in toil or ploy
AU - as in bought, tawny, or faun
OU - as in down or mound
OE - as in boat or grown

Let's look at the single vowels first: A, O, E, and U. They're all single-key vowels. (EU, even though it's a chord and not a letter, should also be grouped with them rather than with the vowel chords below, because it corresponds to the letter "I" and works like a single-key vowel). You'll see from the examples that a single vowel can stand for a few different vowel sounds. That's because, even though English has a fairly large number of actual vowel sounds, English spelling breaks vowels up into two rough categories: "short", which consists of a single vowel on its own, and "long", which consists of a doubled vowel, a diphthong (two different vowels together), or a vowel whose sound is modified by another vowel elsewhere in the word.

The steno theory I learned, while mostly phonetic, sometimes uses spelling to inform how to write a word. So if a word is written with a single "short" vowel, it will usually be written with the same vowel on the steno machine, regardless of what it actually sounds like. "Pert" and "Purr" have the same sound, but "pert" is written with the E key, and "purr" with the U key.

The theory also uses spelling cues to differentiate between long-vowel soundalike words. I spoke a little about this in Lesson Zero, but now that you see the whole vowel chart, it should make more sense.

Let's go back to pseudosteno again for some examples:

Pair: PAEUR
Pear: PAER

Bare: BAEUR
Bear: BAER

Grate: GRAEUT
Great: GRAET

You can see that words containing "ea" together are written with "AE", while the words with the same long A sound that don't contain "ea" together are written phonetically, with "AEU". (Or, in the case of a word pair like "breech" and "breach", with the long E sound, "AOE", for breech, while breach would be written "BRAECH" in pseudosteno.) This is the main use for the "AE" key combination, so you can see that it's really a conflict differentiator, rather than a vowel sound per se.

The AO key combination is similar. It can be used as a spelling differentiator for word pairs like "soar" (SAOR) and "sore" (SOR), but more often than that, it's used to represent the "OO" vowel pair, irrespective of what it sounds like. Pseudosteno again:

Book: BAOK
Floor: FLAOR
Zoo: ZAO

That covers the second group of steno vowels. The last group covers so-called "long" vowel sounds and diphthongs, and it's going to involve the most straight-up memorization. The good news is that these operate almost entirely phonetically, so you don't have to concern yourself with spelling. Eventually I'm going to make a steno tutorial video game that will teach you these sounds and drill you on them, but for now you're going to have to memorize them on your own, with whatever method that works.

AEU - "long-A" sound
AOE - "long-E" sound
AOU - "long-U" sound
AOEI - "long-I" sound
OE - "long-O" sound
AU - "aw" or "au" diphthong
OU - "ow" or "ou" diphthong
OEU - "oy" or "oi" diphthong

Let's ditch the pseudosteno and move into some actual steno. In this lesson we're only going to deal with the top section of the complete steno layout chart that I posted several weeks ago.

These are the single-key letters that appear on both sides of the steno keyboard: S, T, P, and R. Try using them with your new vowel combinations. I've made a chart that shows what you get when you try just one left-hand letter, a vowel or vowel chord, and just one right-hand letter, but remember that steno can work with an unlimited number of letters in a chord. (Purple-highlighted cells in the chart represent chord combinations that aren't English words and can therefore be assigned to phonetic word parts or briefs. If I've highlighted a few that actually are words, let me know; I'm not the world's best Scrabble player.) First try a few from the chart:

Practice going through the vowel sounds to reinforce them in your muscle memory. Then try plugging in additional consonants. A few starter chords to get you going, using the "short a" sound:

STRAP: Strap
STARS: Stars
START: Start
PARTS: Parts
PRATS: Prats
SPRAT: Sprat
RAPT: Rapt
SAS: Sass

Now try making some more chords, using different vowel sounds and different combinations of letters. Let me know what you come up with in the comments. Feedback is always welcome. In the next lesson, we'll start learning chorded consonants. Stay tuned!

Plover's Got a Discussion Group

2010-07-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

At Tony's suggestion, I've made a Google Group for Plover. I know a lot of you found out about this blog via Depoman, and feel free to keep talking about it there, but for sustained conversation I thought the Google Group was a better idea than the slapdash blog comment discussions we've been having up 'til now. If you know anyone else who might be interested, please send them along. I'm hoping to get more Steno 101 lessons up in the next week or so here at the blog (mirrored on my website's articles page), and a drastically more useful version of Plover (hopefully with Linux keyboard emulation, and maybe even Windows as well) should be uploaded to the Github by some time in August. Meanwhile, please feel free to use the group to talk about what you'd like to see in the software, steno-customizations of your SideWinder, your experience of learning steno, and anything else that takes your fancy.

A Request

2010-06-26T15:17:00.000-07:00

Hey, all. I don't actually know how many people subscribe to this blog (because I just activated Google Webmaster Tools today and they haven't kicked in yet), but it's had a good half a dozen commenters, and I have a feeling there's a lurker or two hanging around as well. I've got a favor to ask you guys. When I tell people about the Plover Project, the most common response I get is, "Sure, steno is impressive. But who's actually going to take the trouble to learn it?" I know that a number of you are looking to become court reporters, captioners, or CART providers, but I know there are others who intend to use steno to write fiction, avoid RSIs, or any number of other reasons. I'd love to get a bunch of blurbs from people who are either starting steno via Plover or are choosing to use Plover alongside their more traditional steno studies. Why do you think it's worthwhile? What's your motivation in learning steno? What sorts of things do you want to do with it? Just a couple of sentences from a few different people would be enough to fill a post that I could link to whenever the doubters raised their eyebrows at the whole idea of a steno program for amateurs. I'll kick it off with a comment from my friend Martin, who works as a draftsman:

"Here's how I look at it: Right now, I type at about 40-50 WPM. If I ever made a change to how I typed, I'd spend at least a month or so writing at like 20ish WPM. If I learned to write qwerty properly, I'd eventually get up to 60-80 WPM -- clearly not worth it. Dvorak, maybe 75-90 -- meh. That Dutch thingie* , realistically I'd probably max out around 100-150ish. Steno, probably about the same. That's worth the time, but it's not worth the money. Plover takes the fastest option and makes it one of the cheapest."

Anyone else have a story to tell? You can write 'em in the comments or email me (plover@stenoknight.com), and then I'll collect them and put them together as a post on the blog. I'm hoping to show that there are plenty of reasons to learn steno, and plenty of demand for Plover that will only increase as it develops. After a month-long hiatus, my next Python session is on Monday, and we're gonna work on keyboard emulation in both Windows and Linux. We've got some pretty good leads on how to do it, so if all goes well, Plover will be able to write properly formatted text into any program you like after the next several weeks.

*Velotype, which I showed him this morning after a Plover commenter sent it to me. Thanks, Nicolay!

CART, Court, and Captioning

2010-06-25T22:08:00.000-07:00

What Is Steno Good For?

Part One: How to Speak With Your Fingers
Part Two: Writing and Coding
Part Three: The Ergonomic Argument
Part Four: Mobile and Wearable Computing
Part Five: Raw Speed

Part Six: CART, Court, and Captioning

Finally, the sixth and last installment of my What Is Steno Good For? series. The first five sections dealt with using steno in daily life, for conversation, prose composition and coding, injury prevention, typing while walking, and inputting text as efficiently as possible. Plover is being developed primarily with those five spheres in mind.

This section is different. It focuses on people who actually want to make a living as court reporters, CART providers, or captioners. It's also the category that the majority of the Plover Project's current testers, readers, and commenters belong to. In order for Plover to succeed, that proportion needs to change.

Steno as a career is skyrocketing. Official reporters (the ones who work in actual courtrooms) are facing layoffs, but in every other field -- deposition work, captioning, and CART -- there's far more demand than supply. Rates are relatively high (though down considerably from their peak in the '90s, and gradually continuing to decline) and work is plentiful. Certified realtime stenographers can make six figures a year, while setting their own schedules and maintaining autonomy as independent contractors. It's pretty much a dream job.

Steno as an academic-vocational discipline is dying. Steno schools continue to shut down across the country. The national dropout rate is 85%. Student machines cost over $1,000, and DRM-riddled student software runs about $500, so without even considering tuition, students are forced to pay a largely non-refundable $1,500 right out of the gate. Considering the 15% graduation rate and the variable length of study (which ranges from 1 to 6 years, but averages around 4 years of intensive daily practice to reach graduation speeds of 225 WPM), steno school is a fool's gamble for the vast majority of new students. Most schools are for-profit, so it's in their interest to accept large numbers of theory students, selling them their steno machines when the semester starts and buying them back at a steep markdown from the dropouts, who tend to leave around 120 WPM, just in time for the next crop of theory students to arrive. There's no incentive for schools to screen for English aptitude, physical dexterity, or self-discipline, because the students that are all but doomed to fail are potentially even more lucrative than the successful ones, due to the revolving steno machine sale-and-buyback scheme. This means plenty of profit in the short term, but in the long term it spells the death not only of these short-sighted schools, but of the steno professions themselves.

A market in which demand exceeds supply will hold out only so long. Eventually the vaccuum caused by the shortage of stenographers will collapse, and inferior but readily available substitutes such as electronic recording, undertrained voice writers, and non-verbatim notetaking systems will move in to claim the territory. Compounding the problem is that many people think that the career is less than a decade away from obsolescence; 30 years of Star Trek has put the idea into their heads that artificial intelligence is a nut we're close to cracking, and that a computer that can understand and transcribe everything we say to it is just around the corner. I've got lots and lots to say on this one, but let me just lay out the short and sweet version, and you can either take my word for it now or wait for the long argument to come later. (You might also want to read this article for some of the technical details.)

Without true artificial intelligence, there is no reliable speech recognition. Current speech recognition software works relatively well with good audio, clear speakers, and a somewhat restricted vocabulary. Dictation at 160 WPM or less can give good results, especially if the speaker puts in the effort to train themselves and their software, and providing that they have the luxury to stop the dictation and correct any errors made by the software before continuing on. In real-life situations, where the speaker being transcribed can't be induced to slow down, correct errors, or enunciate perfectly in American-accented English -- even with an intermediary "respeaker" repeating the dictation directly into a microphone, inserting punctuation, and correcting errors on the fly -- the software's verbatim realtime accuracy is significantly below that of a trained stenographer. The only respeakers that even approach the accuracy of realtime steno are true voice writers, who spend thousands of hours training their voices, figuring out ways to differentiate the pronunciation of homophones, and creating macros to resolve mistranscriptions. It is not easy to do. I compare true voice writing to beatboxing and steno to playing a drumset in my article Voice Captioning Versus CART. You can read it if you're interested in that sort of thing.

The trouble is that everyone keeps saying "Voice recognition software is constantly improving. It gets better with every new release. Soon it'll be perfect." The first two statements are correct. The third is a fallacy. The software is improving, but asymptotically. Its theoretical ceiling of improvement is far below what's required for consistent, reliable transcription. Speech recognition software doesn't parse language the way humans do. It has no ability to use context or meaning to change sounds into words. It records audio waveforms, breaks them up into little bits, and compares them to a database of other audio waveforms. It never finds a perfect match, because no two humans say the same word in exactly the same way each time. Instead, it tries to choose the closest match in its database of thousands of other tiny fragments of audio. All speech recognition software relies on probability-based algorithms to guess at what's being said. This means that the more common the phrase, the more variants of it will be found in the database, and the more likely it will be to be correctly transcribed.

But the converse is also true. In the architecture class I provide CART for, the phrase "sum of the forces" comes up several dozen times a week. But because the phrase "some of the" is so much more common in normal speech than "sum of the", the VR software would mistranscribe it unless the voice writer figured out a way to say "sum" that sounded completely different from the word "some" and defined it as a custom waveform. There are scads of these soundalike words and phrases in the English language, and the voice writer is at a disadvantage when trying to distinguish them. The steno writer has a number of options to resolve homophone conflicts or to compress a wordy phrase into a single stroke. They can add the asterisk, they can alter the vowels, or they can take a cue from the way the word is spelled. It's much harder for a voice writer to find an alternative way to pronounce a word or syllable, because not only must they pronounce it consistently so that the computer can recognize it each time, but it also can't sound like any other words or syllables that they might be called upon to speak. It's much easier to write a memorable nonsense syllable on the steno keyboard than it ever would be to speak it.

There's also the inherent uncertainty involved in decoding analog speech with a digital algorithm. Even with good amplification, the signal is always lossy to some extent, and the speech processing algorithms are essentially a black box that weigh relative probabilities and then just spit out the most likely one, without being able to incorporate any semantic or contextual calculations. The voice writer is never quite sure what the machine is going to make out of what they said, and no matter how cleanly they speak, they're forced to build in a lot more error correction time into their transcription process. Steno writers can write a word in half a second that took the speaker three seconds to say, and they know with certainty what will come up on the screen when they hit a particular chord. That's an advantage a voice writer will never have. Add in that a voice writer has to speak at the same time that they're trying to listen, and you see some of the difficulties they labor under.

There are some excellent voice writers out there, and I don't want to devalue their talent or the enormous amount of training that goes into the process of achieving accurate verbatim realtime using VR software. On the contrary; I think if people realized how much work it takes to do the job properly with the voice, they might balk a lot less at the idea of learning to do it with their fingers. Unfortunately, the shortage of CART providers, captioners, and court reporters has led to a widespread practice of companies hiring untrained voice writers, deciding that their output is good enough, and dropping both standards and wages accordingly. It's a sad situation.

Because voice recognition is perceived to be so much easier than it really is, and because learning it only requires about $200, a microphone, and a computer, it's much easier to find people willing to give it a chance. After all, if it doesn't live up to their expectations, they're only out $200, rather than the $1,500 albatross steno school dropouts find themselves trying to unload. Imagine if computer programming required a special computer that couldn't connect to the internet or run games or do anything else except write computer software, and that it sold for $1,500. What do you think the state of software development would look like? Maybe some rich kids' parents would buy them the machine, but they'd probably prefer that they become doctors or lawyers than programmers, which is a lot of work for not much prestige. Poor kids would be completely out of luck. Middle class kids might think that programming sounded fun, but they'd probably decide it wasn't worth the restrictive entry cost. Some few people might decide that programming was their best shot at making a good living, so they'd scrimp and save and take out loans to buy the special programming computer plus the lessons to go with it. And after all that, what if they didn't like programming? What if they didn't have an aptitude for it? They were out $1,500 and a lot of wasted effort. What kind of smart, inquisitive, curious kid would make that kind of gamble? What would the field of computer programming look like if this were the only way to write software?

It's the state of steno today, and I'm worried that if it goes on for much longer, the discipline will die out altogether. The only way we can build the next generation of realtime reporters, captioners, and CART providers is if we get people using steno for all sorts of purposes -- not just the ones that will make them an immediate profit. Once there's a pool of amateurs and enthusiasts all using steno in their daily lives, it will be evident how useful it can be and how outdated the qwerty interface has become. Kids will start learning it in their typing classes. Companies will start selling steno machines (hopefully ultra-portable ones!) at consumer prices. People who would feel awkward talking to themselves in public via VR software will embrace steno as the most efficient way to put their thoughts into words.

All of this holds true even if they're only writing at 120 words per minute. It took me a year and a half to graduate from steno school. In that time, I noticed that most of my fellow students dropped out when they were writing between 120 and 225 words per minute. Relatively few of them dropped out before their third semester. They would make fairly steady progress through theory and up to 120 WPM, then plateau. It seems that nearly anyone can get up to 100 WPM or so in less than six months, but that closing the gap between 100 and 200 seems to take much more work. You don't need to write at 225 WPM to reap the advantages of steno. Even 120 WPM is double the average qwerty typing speed, and steno has significant ergonomic benefits as well. Users can overtake their qwerty speed within the first few months of use, then gradually work their way up to higher speeds while using steno to perform their daily tasks, rather than spending 10 hours a week in grueling, boring dictation classes.

Inevitably, some of these people will find they have both a passion and a talent for steno. They'll push themselves to go faster and faster, and eventually they'll arrive at court/CART/captioning speeds. Much like programmers do today, they'll start out tinkering around with the free software, discover a passion and an aptitude for the system, possibly spend some time in a formal program polishing their technique, and discover one day that they're skilled enough to take paying work. These people are the future of our profession, and right now they hardly know it exists. The only way people will bother to learn steno is if the software is free, the steno machine costs less than $100, and the lessons are available online. The Plover Project is an attempt to meet those goals, and to secure the future of the work that I love.

Raw Speed

2010-06-21T21:26:00.000-07:00

What is Steno Good For?

Part One: How to Speak With Your Fingers
Part Two: Writing and Coding
Part Three: The Ergonomic Argument
Part Four: Mobile and Wearable Computing

Part Five: Raw Speed

In the introduction to the What Is Steno Good For? series I said, more or less facetiously, that this section would be devoted to "break onto the high score tables of online typing games." Speed for the sake of bragging rights is great and all, but I think there's more than that to be gained from being able to write three times faster than a qwerty typist.

When I tell people about Plover, they often say, "Well, I guess it's cool that you can type 240 WPM, but your job is to write down what other people are saying. I work alone, on my own time. Why would I go to the trouble of learning this whole new system? I type 60 WPM on a qwerty keyboard, and it's never been a problem for me." That's a fair question. Does the ability to type faster actually offer real-world advantages to people who aren't working as stenographers or transcriptionists? Which is the limiting factor: The input speed of the fingers or the output speed of the brain? And if there is a difference, is it only a quantitative one, or can it be qualitative as well?

I've talked about using steno to converse without speaking, the ease and fluency it lends to prose composition, its ergonomic benefits, and its potential in mobile applications. But speed is the most obvious and immediate benefit of steno over qwerty. It lets you get rid of the boring stuff quickly, leaving you more time for the interesting stuff. Whether that means being so blindingly fast at your dull data entry job that you get promoted to something requiring actual intelligence, or whether it means solidifying your ideas in text before they snarl up and blow away, it's a worthwhile thing to do. The counterargument to that, which I hear a lot, is that words just don't come that quickly; it takes longer to think of them than it does to write them, even at glacial typing speeds. That doesn't match up with my experience, and I don't think I'm the only one.

I'm willing to bet that the act of qwerty typing slows down the thoughts of many people. When I type on a qwerty keyboard, I feel my mind splitting along four consecutive but overlapping tracks: One, the word I want to write. Two, the way it's spelled. I'm a pretty good speller, but English is weird enough that the process is never completely automatic. Three, the series of five to ten finger motions it takes to type it. Four, the error checking mechanism that iterates over the first three and confirms that the correct word choice, orthography, and letter position have appeared onscreen. Usually I'll have already started typing the next word when I spot a spelling or typing error in the previous one, and by the time I've pressed backspace ten times to correct two transposed letters, my train of thought will have gotten all tangled up and I'll have to pause for a second to remember what I was writing. Even when I try to pace myself and type more slowly than usual, I'll make an error like this every few sentences, and my flow of composition will have been interrupted half a dozen times by end of the paragraph.

I know this sounds less like an argument for speed and more like the argument for fluency that I made in part two, but I don't think people realize how closely they're connected. Your mind won't let itself leap too far ahead of the words on the screen, so the rate of the words effectively throttles the rate of your thoughts. Add in the constant backspacing and rewriting, and three quarters of your mind is devoted to busywork, while the quarter devoted to producing actual words is forced to wait its turn.

How does steno consolidate those channels of word selection, spelling, typing, and error correction? Well, with word selection you're on your own; the steno machine can't help you there. But then you only have to conjure the sound of the word and stroke out its corresponding syllables. The spelling takes care of itself. No more pausing to remember where the double l goes in "parallel"; just write PA/RA/LEL and the computer will find the proper spelling for you. This is very useful when producing work for clients with divergent specifications. If you're copywriting for one company that prefers the spelling "Web site" (shudder) and another that favors "website", you don't have to spend any thought cycles retraining your fingers each time you switch; just define WEBT differently in your two client dictionaries and forget about it. Same with international spellings. Get both an American dictionary and a Canadian/British dictionary, and your writing can stay the same while your spelling toggles across borders. That also goes for diacritical marks, brand names, trademark symbols, and everything else it's a pain in the butt to write out each time; define it once, and you can just keep writing phonetically without worrying about the extra fiddly bits. Of course, you can do this to a certain extent with autocorrect and autoexpand settings in word processors, but they still require three to five keystrokes per word, and they don't easily accommodate several client or task-specific dictionaries.

That's spelling taken care of. What about typing accuracy? Qwerty requires your fingers to be constantly in motion, and their timing has to be split-second accurate if you want to avoid writing letters in the wrong order. Most people have a few fingers that are quicker than the rest, leading to persistent letter inversion and spacing errors. In steno, there is no space bar, so that's 1/5 of your errors obviated straight off. It's also far harder to make letter inversion errors, because the steno machine registers strokes not when each finger hits the key, but after all the keys have been released. You can compensate for a lazy or overactive finger merely by lifting your hands decisively from the keyboard at the end of each stroke. In steno, the wrist and forearm muscles get to set the pace, rather than the scattershot fast-twitch muscles of the fingers.

Pay attention to how many times you hit the backspace key when writing qwerty, even while typing slowly and evenly. The longer it takes to discover an error, the more backspaces you need to return to the spot and fix it, which means that you're forced either to be hypervigilant as you type or to spend nearly as much time backspacing as typing. In steno, the asterisk key deletes the last translation, not the last letter. Misstroke a six-letter word? Fix the error with a single stroke rather than six. No more leaning on the backspace key, waiting for the cursor to catch up. One stroke to write a word, one stroke to delete it. All of these shortcuts simplify the mental and physical bookkeeping you have to do during the writing process, which speeds up not just your typing, but your thoughts as well.

And what do you do with the time you save from that increased typing and thinking speed? The stuff that isn't typing. Typing is boring. It's not profitable. It's also not scalable. You might think that part of my scheme to hook people on steno would be to tell them how to make money off of it, but to be honest, unless you're really good, really fast, and really dedicated, you're not gonna be able to earn much from it. Realtime stenographers (I'm one myself) make a good living. Offline (i.e., non-realtime) transcription jobs, like gold farming, are only sustainably profitable these days in countries with pretty low costs of living. If there's a transcriptionist in the Philippines reading this who's thinking about using Plover to make their work more efficient, I'd be thrilled to bits to hear from 'em. But in the United States, Canada, and Europe, even stenographic speeds aren't likely to make you enough transcription money to live on. There are too many people working at far slower speeds who can afford to charge much less. So speed alone isn't the answer to everything.

On the other hand, there are a lot of jobs out there that involve plenty of typing. In most of them, the typing is usually the grunt work you have to get out of the way in order to do the fun part of the job: Emails, spreadsheets, reports, text chats, work logs, and assorted administrative chaff. There's also tons of nonprofit and volunteer accessibility work out there that's in desperate need of accurate human transcription. It's not just for altruistic purposes, either. Transcribe your YouTube videos, and it's now accessible not only to the Deaf and hard of hearing, but also to the people who found your video via a keyword in your transcript, people who watch muted videos on the sly at work, and people who are too impatient to watch something to the end if there isn't a transcript to give them the gist first. Add those four groups together, and you've got a pretty good chunk of the internet. At qwerty speeds, it can take almost an hour to transcribe and caption a five-minute video. With steno, you can do it in less than ten.

If I haven't convinced you by now that increasing your typing speed is worth your while, it's probably not gonna happen. I'll turn to the people who are already convinced. The people who play Typestriker and Typing Maniac and The Typing of the Dead, just to feel the flow of words through their fingers. The people who spend their leisure time making speed runs in video games and yearn for that same rush of screaming sweetness in their boring data entry jobs. The people who, bless their hearts, spend months retraining their fingers to use Dvorak for, at the most, a 20% increase in speed. These are the people who should welcome steno with a gleaming eye and a jackrabbit heart. They already know they want to be the fastest thing going. Now, with $60 and a bit of practice, 240 WPM is theirs for the taking. If this sounds like anyone you know, send 'em along to the Plover Project.

Steno 101, Lesson Zero

2010-06-18T19:10:00.000-07:00

Steno 101: How to Do It
Steno 101: Lesson Zero
Steno 101: Lesson One
Steno 101: Lesson Two
Steno 101: Lesson Three

Audio version

Before I start teaching you how to use that nice colorful chart I posted a while back, I'm going to talk about some of the fundamental principles of machine shorthand. Later I'll get into the nitty gritty, but for a first introduction, I just want to give a quick overview on what it takes to turn words into a code that a computer can turn back into words.

The Steno Machine

Today's steno machine is descended from a machine first invented by Ward Stone Ireland in 1910. A steno machine has anywhere between 24 and 37 keys: 22 capital letter keys, 1 to 4 asterisk keys, 1 to 9 number keys, and sometimes 2 optional accessory keys. The asterisk and number keys are all identical to one another; their numbers only vary for ergonomic reasons.

A chord made up of one or more of those keys (also known as a "steno outline") can represent a single letter, a syllable, or an entire word. The letters on the left hand side represent the beginning consonants of words, the keys operated by the thumbs represent vowels, and the letters on the right hand side represent the ending consonants. The asterisk key, struck by itself, represents a command to delete the last stroke from the record. When struck with other letters, it's a sort of wild card, and can be employed for several different purposes, all of which I'll get into later.

Each letter appears in a strictly defined order within a chord, and chords are always read from left to right. When writing down steno outlines for the benefit of colleagues or students, stenographers often employ a sort of pseudosteno, writing the English letters they mean to represent, rather than the actual keys they would press on the machine to write the chord. So the word "braving", which would properly be written "PWRAEUFPBG", would be written "BRAIFNG" in pseudosteno. The stenographer would know to translate the "B" to "PW", the "I" to "EU", and the "N" to "PB" when writing the outline on the machine. Because pseudosteno is much easier for beginners to read, I'm using it to write all the examples in this first lesson. Then in the second lesson I'll start teaching you those "B" to "PW" and "I" to "EU" mappings using the chart.

Principles of Steno

Audio version

Steno is commonly considered a phonetic writing system, though I would really call it more of a phonetic-mnemonic system. Each stenographer has a wide degree of latitude in determining how to write each word, and the criteria they use are fairly arbitrary, as long as the outlines are memorable and easy to write. Most one-syllable words are written phonetically, unless they contain letters out of steno order (STKPWHRAO*EUFRPBLGTSDZ -- more on that in the next lesson) or if they conflict with soundalike words or phrases. Soundalike words are usually differentiated by altering vowels, taking advantage of spelling differences, or inserting the asterisk key in the less common outline.

Resolving homophone conflicts -

Bear: BAER
Bare: BAIR

So: SO
Sew: SWE

Gram: GRAM
Graham: GRA*M

Multisyllabic words will sometimes be written phonetically, syllable by syllable (often with schwa sounds omitted) but will sometimes be truncated, inverted, or mashed together. When you see a slash between two steno outlines, it means that the word or phrase is made up of multiple strokes. A steno machine registers a stroke as complete when all the previously pressed keys have been released, so the slash indicates that the stenographer should lift all their fingers from the keyboard and then write the next chord in the outline.

Syllabic -

Harmonica: HAR/MON/KA
Bungle: BUNG/*L
Dreadful: DRED/FL

Phonetic, shwahs ommitted -

Committed: KMITD
Leverage: LEFRJ
As much as: SMUCHS

Inverted -

Greater: GRAERT
Destroy: SDROI
Really: LAOERL

Truncated -

Prejudice: PREJ
Superintendant: SUPT
Accident: SDENT

Briefs

Audio version

So far most of the outlines I've shown you fall under the category of "more or less phonetic". Another important tool in steno is the brief, also known as the "abbreviation", "short form", or "arbitrary". Briefs are simply non-phonetic mappings of steno outlines to English words or phrases. For instance, the phrase "from time to time" could be written out:

FROM/TAOIM/TO/TAOIM

(Four strokes)

Or it could be briefed:

FRIMT

(One stroke)

Either one will translate as "from time to time" if they're defined that way in the steno dictionary, but the second one is shorter and easier to write. The trade-off, of course, is that "FRIMT" doesn't really sound much like "from time to time", though it's got a hint of mnemonic resonance to hang your hat on. Briefs are counter-intuitive and sometimes hard to remember, but very useful. I'll be saying a lot more about how to invent and use them in subsequent lessons.

The Hyphen

Audio version

In the steno outlines I've shown you so far, you've seen capital letters, slashes, and asterisks. The only other character used in writing steno is the hyphen. Like the slash (and unlike the capital letters or the asterisk), the hyphen is a guideline to writing, and does not actually appear on the steno machine. It represents the middle of the keyboard and is used to differentiate keys written with the left hand from those written with the right hand. A letter with a hyphen after it, such as "T-", is written with the left hand; a letter with a hyphen in front of it, such as "-T", is written with the right hand. Some letters appear only on one or the other side of the keyboard, so it's not always necessary to use a hyphen when writing steno outlines. In this lesson I only use it when it's required for clarity.

Common Short Words

Audio version

Very common short words are usually briefed rather than written out, because the fewer keys a stenographer presses at a time, the less energy they expend and the less likely they are to make a misstroke. English uses words like "it", "the", "is", and "will" so often, it makes sense to write them with only one letter.

Outlines and briefs for common short words:

Can: KAN
Can: K-

Will: WIL
Will: L-

It: IT
It: T-

The: TH*E
The: -T

Is: IS
Is: S-

With: WI*T
With: W-

Be: B*E
Be: -B or B-

If: IF
If: F-

Steno Theories

Audio version

All English language steno theories are derived from the original Stenotype theory devised by Ireland when he invented the machine. Some modern theories depart radically from that first theory. Some differ very little. Theories tend to differ most in their treatment of briefs and how explicitly they write suffixes and vowel sounds. The controversy is often stated as "brief-heavy" versus "stroke-heavy", though it gets a bit more complicated than that. I'll probably write an article summarizing the main points of prevailing theories at some point, but in the Steno 101 series, I'm going to teach you the theory I use, which I adapted from NYCI theory, in turn descended from StenEd, one of the most popular and mainstream modern steno theories. Because I believe that steno dictionaries must be constructed by their stenographers to be truly useful, and that rote memorization of other people's systems is of limited utility, I'll try to leave plenty of jumping-off points where people can adapt the theory to their own purposes. In subsequent lessons, I'll also explain some of the inconsistencies in my dictionary, how they originated, and possible ways to improve them.

This is getting to be pretty lengthy for an introductory lesson, so I'll just mention one more element of stenographic writing, and then we'll try to put everything together.

Word Boundaries

Audio version

The steno machine saves an enormous number of keystrokes by eliminating the space bar. Word boundaries in steno are implicit rather than explicit, but the steno software is able to insert appropriate spaces remarkably well without needing to be told where to put them. In certain cases, however, the stenographer needs to be careful about word boundaries and work around possible overlaps. Misplaced spaces are known as "boundary errors", and they're usually resolved by dictionary tweaking, theory modification, or, in rare cases, brute force. If worse comes to worst, a stenographer can manually insert a space between strokes, though there are usually better ways to work around the problem.

Some examples of boundary errors with and without homophone conflicts:

We're going to the play right now.

He almost makes the play write itself.

The playwright is coming to the rehearsal.

In order to resolve a potential word boundary issue, the stenographer needs to weigh the likeliness of a boundary error against the trouble of figuring out how to avoid one.

"Play right", "play write" and "playwright" from the sentences above occur commonly enough in English that a means must be found to differentiate them. But what about the word "catalogues"? Ordinarily it would be written in pseudosteno:

KAT/LOGS

A smart stenographer would recognize that the components of that word are words in their own right -- "cat" and "logs" -- and try to construct hypothetical sentences in which they'd appear next to each other. For instance, you could say:

"That cat logs 12 hours a day down at the Post Office, catching mice."

It's possible to do, but it seems like a bit of a stretch, doesn't it? The stenographer will probably conclude that the phrase "cat logs" is not common enough to worry about, and put "catalogues" in their dictionary as KAT/LOGS.

Another example:

PAOI/NAOERNG

"From across the banquet hall, he could see the enormous pie nearing the dessert table as its six muscular bearers staggered beneath its bulk."

"This is a pioneering development in the field of pastry transportation technology."

Based on your knowledge of English, is the phrase "pie nearing" likely to come up in conversation as often as the word "pioneering"? No? Then setting the outline "PAOI/NAOERNG" to "pioneering" is probably safe. Still, this kind of probability check needs to be done whenever defining a multisyllabic word in a steno dictionary, and the decisions are not always as clearcut as "catalogues" and "pioneering".

Wrap-up

Audio version

You've learned about pseudosteno, differentiating soundalikes, syllabic and non-syllabic outline construction, using single letters for common words, and avoiding boundary errors. Let's put it all together. I'll write a paragraph in English and then show you how I'd render it into pseudosteno.

Clifford held his breath as he waited to hear the hiss of the elevator. He checked his pockets for the fifth time. Still empty. He might belong to the dorkiest echelon of the Intelligence Squad, but he was determined to do his duty. There it went. He tiptoed rapidly out into the hall and dove through the doors as they opened. He let his breath out with a slow and shaking whoosh as his MagnaShoes engaged. Carefully, gingerly, he clomped up the wall and onto the high steel ceiling. Blood rushed to his head. The elevator's doors closed and he felt himself ascending. When they opened again, he would be ready. His fingers twitched above the cloth keypads mounted on his thighs, ready to write down everything they heard over the next 8 hours. He'd do Steno Batallion proud.

778 Keystrokes

KLIFRD HELD HIS BRE*T AZ E WAITD TO HAER -T HIS FT LFR TP-PL E KHEKD HIS POKTS FOR -T FI*FT TAOIM TP-PL STIL EM/TI TP-PL E MAOIT BLONG TO*T DORK/YEFT ERB/LON FT INT/JENS SKWAD KW-BG BUT E WAS DERMD TO DO HIS DAOUT TP-PL THR T- WENT TP-PL E TIP/TOED RAEPLD OUT NAO -T HAUL SKP DOEF THRU -T DAORS AZ THE OEPD TP-PL E LET HIS BR*ET OUT NAI SLOE SKP SHAIK/G WHAORB AZ HIS MAG/NA/SHAOS EN/GAIJD TP-PL KAIFL/LI KW-BG JING/ERL KW-BG E KLO*MD UP -T WAUL SKP OENT -T HAOI STEEL KRAOENLG TP-PL BLAOD RURBD TO HIS HED TP-PL -T LFR AES DAORS KLOEFD SKP E FELT HIM/SEFL A/SEND/G TP-PL WHEN THE OEPD SGEN KW-BG E WO B DRAE TP-PL HIS FIRNGS TWIFPD BOF -T KLO*T KAOE/PADZ MOUNTD ON HIS THAOIS KW-BG DRAE TO WRAOIT DOUN EFRG THE HERD OEFR -T NEGT AET HOURS TP-PL *ED DO STO*IN BA/TAL/YON PROUD TP-PL

171 Keystrokes

Legend:
BLUE = Briefed Short Words
GREEN = Punctuation
PURPLE = Multisyllabic Words With Schwas Omitted

Mobile and Wearable Computing

2010-06-07T13:08:00.000-07:00

What is Steno Good For?

Part One: How to Speak With Your Fingers
Part Two: Writing and Coding
Part Three: The Ergonomic Argument

Part Four: Mobile and Wearable Computing

When I was 10 years old, my big brother William came to visit from California. He was 29, had a mohawk and mirrored sunglasses, worked as an electronic engineer for a tech company in Silicon Valley, and lived in a drainage tunnel because he didn't believe in rent.

My brother William, just after graduating from Cal Poly

He was, needless to say, the coolest human being on the planet. One day he came to talk to my 6th grade class about careers in computer science. He walked into the school wearing a head mounted display that projected green glowing lines of ASCII onto his eyeballs, controlled by a clunky beige laptop strapped to his chest (this was 1991), with a numeric keypad peripheral tied around his right leg, which he controlled using a chording system he'd invented himself. Actually, he'd built all of it himself, putting it together out of spare parts on a whim, and the instant I saw it, I wanted one just like it. It was my first exposure to the idea of writing via chording and my first taste of the dorktastic awesomeness that is wearable computing.

It shouldn't be too surprising that my brother abandoned his wearable rig shortly after he got it all working. It was too heavy and too hot, the display gave him eye strain, and the chording thigh pad was hopelessly slow and uncomfortable.

Not my brother. A guy named Steve Mann.

I've railed often enough against the inefficiencies of qwerty and its tedious one letter per keystroke input ratio, but the one letter per chord ratio of nearly all one-handed keypad systems (Twiddler, Frogpad, Chordite, et al.) is even slower, less accurate, and less ergonomic. The jacked-in cyberfuture of the '90s failed to materialize, and while computers continued to get faster and smaller, they remained external objects, migrating from our desks to our backpacks to our pockets, but refusing to become part of our wardrobes.

Fast forward 19 years. I'm now the age my brother was when he blew my mind by walking into Washington Middle School like an awesome apocalyptic cyborg. Every day I carry a 26-pound bag from my apartment in Upper Manhattan to the subway and settle in for an hour long commute to my office in downtown Brooklyn.

This is actually an old picture. I've gotten a new steno machine and a new laptop since then, and I don't carry the wireless router anymore, since I now use Bluetooth instead. But you get the general idea.

The bag contains one laptop (a Lenovo SL400) and one tablet PC (a Samsung Q1), both running Windows XP; two tripods; a Revolution Grand steno machine; a USB foot pedal for audio transcription; and a bunch of wires and cables. Sometimes I want to get my transcription work done on the train during my commute, so I set up the steno machine on its tripod, press the Samsung Q1 onto its heavy-duty velcro holder, plug in the USB foot pedal and my Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones, and start writing. It sounds less awkward than it is. When the train is crowded, that maneuver is all but impossible, and I'm forced to leave all my fancy transcription gear in my bag. Instead, I reach for my phone. I can't do transcription work on it, but it keeps me entertained.

Part three of What is Steno Good For? was composed entirely on my phone (a Blackberry Curve 8330) with two thumbs and a lot of patience. This is what mobile computing means in 2010: Hunting and pecking on a teeny-tiny qwerty keyboard at 20 WPM. Oh, my 10-year-old cyberpunk self would be weeping. But why are these pocket-sized systems currently the most convenient form of mobile text input? Is this as good as it's going to get? Will we be stuck tip-tapping on our phones with our thumbs forever? I sure hope not. The basic problem is this: If it's small enough to fit in a pocket, it's too small to type on efficiently. If it's too big to fit in a pocket, it's too inaccessible to be available on the spur of the moment. There are two potential solutions to the problem. One, clothing-integrated or clothing-mounted text input. Two, virtual space text input. The first one is easy enough to visualize. The second one is pretty far out there, so I won't be addressing it at any length, especially since I'm concerned that its usefulness will be limited without at least a minimal amount of haptic feedback.

As you've probably guessed, this is the least reality-based article in the What is Steno Good For? series. None of my ideas for wearable steno systems are anywhere close to currently available. My scheme is to get people hooked on free software, free steno training, and $60 steno machines first. Then maybe once there's a critical mass of steno-savvy consumers, some company will recognize the demand for efficient mobile computing and manufacture the wearable computing technology I've always dreamed of. My first job is to convince you that steno is actually an ideal solution to the finger size versus pocket size paradox I referred to before. But first, a quick detour on the subject of head-mounted displays. It's a problem that still hasn't been solved to anyone's satisfaction, even after several decades of trying. They're too heavy, too fragile, too stupid-looking, too headache-inducing. But let's posit that someday soon the problem will be solved, and we'll be able to go out and buy lightweight, stylish augmented reality overlay monitors that look just like ordinary pairs of eyeglasses.

So you're walking down the street wearing your AR specs, watching text hover gracefully over all of the local landmarks. What if you want to interact with that text? What if you want to work on your novel while doing your grocery shopping? Text chat with your friend in Belize while walking your dog? Or, you know, write a blog post on a crowded subway? If you're reading this on a desktop computer, put your qwerty keyboard in your lap. If you're not, pretend. Imagine the keyboard split in half and made flexible, melding with the fabric of your jeans and wrapping around each leg. Then imagine trying to type on it while walking. Do you see how many buttons that is? Even if you leave out some of the metakeys, you've got 33 keys plus enter, shift, and space. Make them big enough to fit your fingers, and they wrap clean around to the back of your thigh. Make them small enough to fit completely in the region where your fingers rest naturally, and it's impossible to type on them accurately. The human hand, the human leg, and the English alphabet seem to have irreconcilable differences.

Yeah, no.

See? Just... No.

But instead of 36 tiny little squares, what about two panels of ten nested rectangles, plus two more resting under each thumb? Compared to the qwerty layout it's both narrower and shorter, and those 24 panels (22 letters plus two asterisks) can be used to produce every letter of the alphabet plus punctuation, commands, and special characters to boot. At 260 words per minute, I might add -- but this article isn't about speed; I'll get to that in the next one. This is about walking and writing or sitting and writing or lying down and writing or doing the cha-cha or riding bumper cars or running a marathon and writing. Unlike on the qwerty keyboard, where you're constantly moving your hands up or down, left or right, leaving and returning to the home row, in steno the only fingers that ever leave their fixed positions are the right pointer for the asterisk and the right pinky for the D and Z keys. All the others stay put, making touch typing much easier, even under bumpy conditions.

Okay, this is really not doing it justice, but I don't have Photoshop, so it's the best you're gonna get.

Don't want to type on the tops of your thighs? Wear a hoodie and type on your abs with your hands in the pockets. Cross your arms and type on your biceps. The limited surface area required by the steno layout means that you could hypothetically write in steno more or less anywhere you can rest your fingers. Now, because it's a two-handed system it's still going to be inconvenient in some situations, but it's got a good shot at succeeding where the qwerty keyboard was inevitably doomed to fail.

I know this clothing-integrated stuff is still many years away, but even on the slightly less mobile front, I'm excited about the dual screen multi-touch laptops I've posted about recently. Putting steno on those seems like a good compromise between my bulky three-part transcription system and all these full-on wearable pipe dreams, and I know they'd be a big help to me in my daily commute. We take our technology with us almost everywhere we go these days, and we desperately need a more elegant way of interacting with it. I think steno could fit the bill.

PS: Just for laughs, here's my current most successful attempt at mobile steno computing. It is not a practical everyday solution. I use it to CART meetings and other events with Deaf or hard of hearing clients who need to walk around a lot; it worked quite well for a meet-and-greet tour of a client's potential grad department, for instance. But this sort of thing is way too bulky and weird-looking for anything but special occasions. It uses my Samsung Q1, my Revolution Grand, some gaffer's tape, and a Connect-a-Desk. Far from perfect, but all I've got for now.

A Little Love for the Hackers

2010-06-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

Steno 101: How to Do It?

2010-06-03T21:50:00.000-07:00

Steno 101: How to Do It
Steno 101: Lesson Zero
Steno 101: Lesson One

Steno 101: Lesson Two
Steno 101: Lesson Three

Audio version

A break from the What is Steno Good For series, just in case you've already been convinced by parts one through three and you're raring to get started. Obviously my dream of seeing steno sweep the world and capture the hearts and hands of Qwerty typists everywhere is not going to happen by itself. Efficient touch typing comes with practice, but anyone who knows the alphabet can hunt and peck on a keyboard and get accurate, if slow, results. That's not true of steno. You have to invest a fair amount of time in learning the different chords of the keyboard before you can start writing anything. When I went to steno school, they taught us a letter, then gave us a few sentences utilizing that letter, drilled us for a week until we were writing the practice sentences at about 20 WPM, then added another letter. It meant we spent a lot of time writing stuff like "The ape sat at the top step" over and over again, while my Theory teacher yelled "Use da pinky fingah!" at us in her charming Queens accent. I was bored and frustrated a lot of the time, and I think I could have gone a lot faster if I'd been left to my own devices.

I've been trying to think about how I've learned previous manual systems -- the B-flat major scale on a bassoon, the SNES controls for Super Mario World, the keyboard shortcuts in Vim. Mostly I've gone through a brief tutorial or overview of the system as a whole, and then I've just jumped in and tried to use what I learned, consulting a cheat sheet as necessary until I'd internalized all the patterns. I definitely welcome input from all the steno autodidacts reading this blog, because I'm very curious to discover how you wound up teaching yourselves steno. Ideally I'd love to make a steno theory computer game that offered both tutorials and practice; that's the best way I can think of to learn this stuff. But my programming skills are not yet up to devising educational fast-twitch action games with compelling gameplay and whupsnout graphics, so this is the best I can offer for the time being. First the cheat sheet, then (in a day or two, I'm hoping) the overview/tutorial in boring blog post form. Click to embiggen.

Audio version

The Ultimate Mobile Plover Platform?

2010-06-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

Two-screen Linux-based multitouch tablet?

The Kno!

If this is true multitouch, this could be a fantastic platform for Plover.

The article where I got the above video. I'm excited!

The Ergonomic Argument

2010-05-31T20:08:00.000-07:00

Part three in my six-part series What is Steno Good For?

In part one I talked about how people who used speech synthesizers to communicate could use steno to speak as quickly and as easily as people who use their voices. In part two I concentrated on the fluency that steno brings to prose composition and programming. In this article I want to talk about the ergonomic benefits of steno, with special emphasis on split screen steno keyboard configurations.

When I first started studying steno, I was a qwerty transcriptionist, working for a television captioning company. Three hours of nonstop typing at breakneck speed in the morning, an hour for lunch, four more hours of frantic typing in the afternoon. By the end of the week, my wrists would be screaming, and I started to worry that my temporary day job was dooming my future career. I tried getting a Microsoft Natural keyboard, which claimed to offer a more ergonomic slope to the wrists, but I didn't stop feeling that Friday ache until I was able to abandon qwerty and start using my steno keyboard at work. I mentioned previously how typing each letter of each word can interfere with the smooth flow of composition, and in a subsequent article I'll get into more detail about the speed differential between qwerty and steno, but the relative potential for long-term physiological damage is just as important to mention.

In courtroom dramas on TV, you'll often see a court reporter sitting next to the bench, hammering away on an old avocado-colored steno machine while their notes stream into the paper tray. (Most steno machines these days use LCD screens instead of paper, but I guess directors find the old-fashioned ones more picturesque.) Sometimes TV shows actually go out of their way to cast real court reporters, but more often they'll just get a likely-looking extra, put her in a beehive and hornrims, and tell her to look stenographical. Do you know how to tell the difference between the real ones and the fakers? It's easy.

Watch their hands. Heck, even easier: Watch their forearms. The fakers will be frantically wriggling their fingers, assuming that the only way to keep up with the cross examination is to twiddle away like Glenn Gould on uppers.

The real ones, on the other hand, will be making one clean, relaxed stroke every half-second or so. Their hands will make small lateral movements across the keyboard, but the force of each stroke will come from their forearms, not their wrists or their fingers.

If an average word is six letters long, a qwerty typist has to move their fingers up and down six times in the space of a second to type 60 words a minute. That requires engaging the entire arm, from fingertip to shoulder, rapidly and without any rest for as long as the typist is typing. As one finger finishes firing, another steps up immediately, and the more quickly someone tries to type, the more violent and uncontrolled their motions become.

In steno, by contrast, you get a 14% bonus right off the bat (again, assuming that 6-letter average word length), because there's no space bar; all spaces are inserted automatically by the software. Then you get the ergonomic advantage of pushing each stroke statically from the forearm, like a pianist playing chords, rather than bearing the full force of each stroke a finger at a time. That cuts down on the overall percussive shock. There's also the crucial rest interval between each stroke, which allows the stenographer to relax, redistribute their fingers, and move back onto the keyboard for the next stroke, rather than forcing them to keep their hands always tense and wiggling, a major cause of cramping and typist's claw. And then, of course, the most obvious advantage is that for every six qwerty strokes you type, you only type one in steno. While you're racing feverishly to keep up at 90 WPM, in steno it gets almost boring if the speed drops below 180.

Now, all this is not to say that stenographers never get repetitive stress injuries. Type 40 hours a week for decades, plus countless hours of transcript editing, and even that 700% efficiency advantage won't necessarily spare your hands and fingers. Most stenographers use fixed keyboards that force them to hold their wrists parallel to the floor, an unnatural and unhealthy angle. I started on one of those myself, and coupled with the qwerty typing in my day job, I found the first part of steno school -- when I was only writing at 140 to 160 words per minute, six hours a week -- a painful and worrying experience. My dad, an infrequent computer user who hunted and pecked at a snail's pace, had recently undergone surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome, and I knew genetics were often a factor in RSIs.

While still a student, I decided to buy the most ergonomic machine on the market. The choice was simple. Only the Neutrino Group line (the Gemini, Gemini2, Piper, Evolution, and Revolution) allowed not only for a more natural wrist angle -- 45 degrees to the ground rather than parallel -- but, crucially, it also allowed for minor adjustments to be made quickly and easily in a wide range of motion. Now when I feel a twinge, I slightly adjust the yaw, pitch, or roll, and I feel a different set of muscles kicking in to take over for the fatigued ones. I'm not a pitchman for the Neutrino Group by any means (though I've given them favorable reviews, I've always made sure to mention both pros and cons), but they have a fair amount of anecdotal data showing that court reporters with severe RSI problems who switched to Gemini machines were able to lessen or eliminate their pain and numbness in a significant number of cases.

I've provided CART at speed over 200 words per minute for more than seven hours at a stretch, and my wrists felt far better afterwards than they would after only an hour or two back in my 100 WPM qwerty days. Steno lets me be less frantic and more efficient. My ergonomic machine keeps me from locking my arms into an uncomfortable position. I realize that Plover is primarily aimed at people who are not going to be shelling out a grand for an ergonomic steno machine, and that the $60 SideWinder keyboard I'm recommending to amateur steno fans does not have all the adjustable advantages of the Neutrino Group machines, but it does have all the other ergonomic benefits I've discussed in this article. Also, part of my long-range plan in releasing this free software is to greatly increase the number of people who use steno, potentially bringing down the prices of the ergonomic machines as their market size increases from "a tiny fraction of the estimated 40,000 professional stenographers in the US, the majority of whom chose to buy Stenograph brand writers for some inexplicable reason" to "a substantial number of people who spend most of their workdays typing on their computers, who have already switched to steno using $60 keyboards but who like it so much they're looking to upgrade".

Maybe it's a pipe dream, but it makes plenty of sense to me. Computers are a huge part of modern daily life, and RSIs are a big problem for many people who use them. Steno offers a possible solution.

Note to stenographic professionals (court reporters, captioners, and CART providers): I know you don't like being called "stenographers" and I know you think I should call the act of using a steno machine "writing" rather than "typing". Go argue with Truman Capote; it's all the same to me.

Download dictionaries.py!

2010-05-28T11:43:00.001-07:00

Intrepid reader and tester Abigail just reminded me that I forgot to upload one of Plover's essential files, dictionaries.py, to the GitHub. This has now been remedied, so please be sure to download it before trying to run Plover. Many, many apologies!

2010-05-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

You know my Blogger profile icon?

That's a picture of my dear old Gemini2, which I bought back in 2006, while I was still in steno school. My friend Mel (who I met through my friend Sumana) is here from Boston, and I'm lending her my Gemini2 so that she can figure out whether learning steno might be helpful for her RSI issues. We're having a bit of trouble hammering out the Python2/Python3/pyserial/Tkinter peculiarities on her system, but I hope we'll get the hang of it soon. I'm really excited to have a professional Free/Open Source Software expert in on the project!

A Milestone

2010-05-25T17:53:00.001-07:00

Embiggen to view detail:

Yep, we've finally gotten over the latest big hurdle. Plover can now receive text from either a steno machine (transmitting in Gemini PR serial protocol) or a $60 qwerty keyboard (e.g., SideWinder X4), and output it to a text file, with proper punctuation, capitalization, prefixes, suffixes -- you name it! Now, it's still pretty rudimentary. It's not yet smart enough to know that if you put an -ed on the end of "hat" you get should get "hatted" rather than hated, or that if you put an -ing on the end of "glaze" you should get "glazing" rather than "glazeing". All that will come eventually. And the next priority, of course, is to put all that cool formatting action on the screen while you're writing, instead of just after the fact in the text file. But for now, bask in the glory that is... The new version of Plover.

Go to the GitHub, download the source, and follow the instructions in the readme.

Please send me any bugs you might find! I wanna squish them as soon as possible, but I won't be able to unless I know about 'em.

(DigitalCAT-style dictionary users, if you want to take advantage of the new formatting awesomeness, I'm afraid you're going to have to send me your dictionaries one more time, so I can convert them again: plover@stenoknight.com. Sorry about that!)

The Good News and the Bad News

2010-05-21T10:15:00.000-07:00

The good news is that we got Plover working beautifully on my Python tutor's Ubuntu machine. Both the Sidewinder X4 and the Revolution Grand. Outputting to file and making corrections to the file with the asterisk. It was great. We high-fived. He left.

The bad news is that when I downloaded the files, changed "Tkinter" to "tkinter" (as far as I know the only change that needs to be made between versions besides switching it to my com port, which I also did), and tried to run them on my Windows XP machine... No dice. The Sidewinder version is giving me "IOError: can't do nonzero cur-relative seeks" and the Gemini PR version is giving me "TypeError: sequence item 0: expected str instance, int found". I don't understand! Everything is the same, and it was working so gloriously before. I am baffled and disheartened. But hopefully, if my tutor has the time, we'll be able to figure out what's going on and fix this together on Monday. And my tester has Fedora, so maybe it'll work on her machine even though it's currently b0rked on mine. Sigh.

Update: No Update! (yet)

2010-05-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

We are coming down to the wire. My Python tutor has returned from his travels and I'm trying to get as much done on Plover as possible before one of my prospective testers comes down from Boston in six days and borrows my spare steno machine (a Gemini2), so she can bring it home and attempt to learn steno. She's primarily interested because she's had severe RSI problems in the past and still has to do a lot of typing, so I've sold her on the tremendous ergonomic benefits of steno, and of a Gemini split-keyboard writer in particular. That reminds me that I should write part three of my six-part series, What Is Steno Good For?: The Ergonomic Argument. Look for that in the next day or two. In order for her to get much use out of it, though, we have to finish incorporating the serial steno machine protocol into the currently sidewinder-only GUI base of Plover. Then we have to fix the file output so it makes corrections properly. And then we need to figure out the punctuation/capitalization/adfix issue, though at this point I'm contemplating just writing a script that prettifies the log file after the session's over using regular expressions. It feels like a cheat, but it's a way to get useful text out of Plover in the short term (assuming we can fix the first two problems), so I'm willing to let it lie for the time being. Yesterday my tutor and I had a two-hour session, but we're still not finished solving either problem. We've got another session scheduled for tomorrow, and if it's still not where we want it, we might even meet Monday as well. So thanks for your patience, Plover users. The next big step is coming soon, if you can just hold out a little bit longer.

Qwerty is to Steno as Tetris is to This Guy

2010-05-09T23:29:00.001-07:00

Quick post, because I'm in the middle of a marathon transcription session -- three hours of audio due before tomorrow morning. I keep from going out of my mind with boredom by running playthroughs of video games on my other monitor, so I can watch them out of the corner of my eye during pauses between words, changes in speakers, ums and uhs -- that sort of thing. In putting together my video playlist, I stumbled across this video.

As most of you are probably aware, beginners play Tetris by thinking each move, then doing it: Left, left, up, up, right, down, et cetera. More advanced players hold down the keys until they repeat and then learn to release them at just the right moment. But look at this guy's hands. He's playing chords. Instead of thinking of each discrete move he wants the block to take, he's memorized the chords that deliver a certain block in a certain orientation to a certain section of the screen. He's essentially taken the same step that stenographers take when they go from 60 WPM on the qwerty keyboard to 260 WPM on the steno keyboard. He couples that with complete mastery of his reflexes, perfect recall of the playing field, and an absolute lack of hesitation. Yes, my friends, we have found the Ed Varallo of Tetris.

Yet another dCAT bug squished

2010-05-07T13:35:00.001-07:00

If you use a dCAT dictionary, download the stenowinder.py I just uploaded to the Github a minute or so ago. It fixes the bug that was happening when the O- key was pressed either alone or with the asterisk. I'll squish every last one of those dCAT bugs, if it's the last thing I do!

Collaboration!

2010-05-06T20:38:00.000-07:00

So Moss, my awesome programmer friend, came down from Boston and worked with me today on Plover for four glorious hours. The good news is that we made several changes to the structure of the program, arranging things more logically so they could be handled in a less convoluted way and laying the groundwork for the next several things on the agenda, namely:

1. Reconciling the Gemini version of Plover with the Sidewinder version of Plover. (Currently they're in two separate files, and the Gemini version doesn't interact with the GUI part of the program.)

2. Making it so that words deleted by the asterisk key in the GUI are also deleted in the log file. (Currently log.txt just records all translations made during the session, even if they were supposed to have been deleted.)

3. Fixing the bug where, if more than the maximum recognized number of keys is pressed on the Sidewinder at once (which seems to be around 13 and up), the program freezes because the "released keys" list is longer than the "pressed keys" list, and so it can't figure out when to process the stroke, flush it, and move on.

4. Eventually adding special syntax recognition, so that punctuation, capitalization, glue strokes, and adfixes all work properly. This is at the bottom of the list, but it's an important step to get to in terms of Plover's actual usefulness as a method of text entry.

The bad news is that we haven't actually implemented any of those features -- yet. We did add a test file (stenowinder_tests.py) for developers to use in figuring out dCAT versus Eclipse compatibility, and we also made two little helper files to streamline the process of swapping out dictionaries and changing the 'dCAT' or 'Eclipse' flag in stenowinder.py.

* If you have a dCAT dictionary, rename it 'dCATDict.py', then download dcattktest.py, stenowinder.py, and tktest.py. Run dcattktest.py and it should launch the GUI in the proper format.

* If you have an Eclipse dictionary (like ploverbd.py), rename it 'eclipseDict.py', download eclipsetktest.py, stenowinder.py, and tktest.py. Run eclipsetktest.py and it should launch the GUI in the proper format.

I know this seems more convoluted than it used to be, but it keeps people from making mistakes when switching between dictionary formats, like I did last week when I thought I'd fixed the asterisk bug and it turned out I'd just forgotten to switch between 'dCAT' and 'Eclipse' format. The difference between this solution and the alternate files I made (and later discarded, namely dcattest.py and dcatwinder.py) when I first converted the StenoMaster dictionaries is that eclipsetktest.py and dcattktest.py are just tiny little launching programs, not an entirely separate fork of Plover, so I can make as many changes as I want to the main program and they should still work fine. It's better. Trust me. More later!

Spoke too soon?

2010-05-04T21:44:00.000-07:00

After I gave up in frustration and went to do the dishes, I suddenly got a brainwave between the Chana Masala pan and the teacup and thought that I knew exactly where the problem was. I ran to the computer, made the fix and... Well, it seems to work. I think. As far as I can tell. More testing needed, my intrepid dCAT dictionary users. Please let me know if it's still busted!

Asterisk bug still not fixed

2010-05-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's the bane of my existence. The asterisk bug is still giving me hell. Argh. Hopefully I'll be able to whup it in the next day or two, but until then, dCAT dictionary users, I think you're out of luck. Many apologies.

Another bugfix for dCAT format dictionary users

2010-05-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

Hey, Sonja informed me that the asterisk key wasn't working in stenowinder with dCAT turned on. I think I've just fixed that. Get the update at the Github (just download stenowinder.py and switch the setting from Eclipse to dCAT, then run tktest.py as usual) and let me know!

Bug fixes

2010-04-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

For any of you that are using DigitalCAT-formatted dictionaries (e.g. the one that comes with Stenomaster), I've fixed a major bug and I've also consolidated the files, so you don't need to use dccattest.py or dcatwinder.py anymore. Just download stenowinder.py and tktest.py at the GitHub, then open stenowinder.py in any text editor. The first few lines of the file look like this:

from ploverbd import exportDic
import unittest
import sys
# choose either 'dCAT' or 'Eclipse'
dictType = 'dCAT'

If it already says dCAT and you have a DigitalCAT-formatted dictionary, you're set. If it says Eclipse, change it to dCAT. Unless you have an Eclipse-formatted dictionary, in which case change it from dCAT to Eclipse. You get the idea. The default distributed dictionary, ploverbd.py, is in Eclipse format. Also, it's apparently grown too big to be directly accessed by Github's html parser and has to be downloaded by right click/save as (wait a while for it to muster its strength) or by getting the whole package by clicking the "download source" button.

New and exciting features, like functional file output and maybe even punctuation formatting, will with luck be added on Monday, (and sometime after that, I hope to add TX and Stentura protocol options into the program; I got the protocol specs today, but I can't make any sense of them, and they're second in priority to figuring out this file output thing.) If you guys find any more bugs, though, drop me a line and I'll try to patch them up as they come in.

Finally, high-rez pictures!

2010-04-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

A friend came to my coworking space today and brought a camera, so I finally have good pictures of my kepadified Sidewinder X4. Here it is alongside my $2,395 Revolution Grand:

And here's a closeup of the keypads, making a more or less steno keyboard shape out of the crooked qwerty keys:

Many thanks to Sumana for the pictures.

In other news, I had my Python lesson today, and we got a stopgap file output system working, but I don't want to upload it to the github yet, because while the asterisk is still deleting strokes properly in the GUI display, it's not deleting them in the file, which makes for confusing reading (unless you're one of those people who are 100% accurate at all times, in which case just say the word and I'll upload it with all speed.) But if all goes as planned we'll fix the problem next week and I'll be able to give you guys a way to save the text you're stenoing with your awesome $60 keyboards. And maybe I'll try to do a little hacking on my own until then, so stay tuned.

Abigail's brilliant stenohack

2010-04-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

In case you don't read the Plover blog comments as obsessively as I do, I want to post a few excerpts. I had assumed that the task of interesting people in open source steno software would be almost as difficult as writing it, but that hasn't been the case at all. The blog's already got a handful of dedicated commenters, from Sonja and Stan, the early adopters, to Abigail, Tony, Paul S., and Alice, the enthusiastic newcomers.

From Tony: Ok, let me just say how excited I am about Plover. Mirabai, I've followed, and greatly benefited from, your postings on the Depoman forum.

I decided to learn steno about six months ago because I write a lot and I hate the speed of typing. It became an obsession. I ordered an antique steno machine online, started learning first Phoenix, now intensively studying StenEd. But I have nothing electronic.

I am buying a Sidewinder this very day. You will be hearing more from me.

I've also gotten a fair amount of private email from people who came across the blog and are looking forward to trying out the program once it becomes a bit more functional. To that end, I'm devoting today and at least part of tomorrow to making Plover more than just a pretty demo. Then on Monday I'm resuming my Python lessons after a two-week hiatus (my tutor has been traveling, but now he's back in town). For now, though, let me turn the post over to the fabulous Abigail and her recent SideWinder hack. First, her introductory comment:

I just wanted to say that I've downloaded Plover and I am just amazed. It is like you have read my mind. For a bit of background, I was a steno student years ago, also at NYCI, loved it but quit because of life circumstances, moved overseas, moved back. Intended to return to court reporting - got very sick. Anyway, I say all this because I'm a little better but not good enough to go back to school but have been learning Stenomaster theory and re-teaching myself in the hopes of using steno to do transcription from home but wasn't sure what I going to do about the heavy outlay of funds just to make that happen. This could be my miracle solution. Thank you so much for using your brilliance and vision to come up with this program - please keep going! $60 for a keyboard? Heck, I could buy 10 of them and still be ahead, even with Ebay prices for dirty old equipment and ancient software! I tried Plover with my HP bundled keyboard and a few words came out so this could be just fabulous! Thank you!!!!!

Next, her amazing brainstorm:

I don't know if it will work long term but see the attached picture. I had a really, really old manual stenograph so I've wiggled the keys off of it and attached them to the keyboard with Scotch double-sided foam squares. They stick without damaging either sets of keys. Looks neat, huh? The touch of my doctored keyboard is not bad, pretty sturdy, of course not as good as the real thing, but close. The keys don't rock but I don't know if after extended use with flying fingers if they might flick off. I guess then you can just replace the sticky pad. I just experimented a little so far and I find it much easier that the keys are raised and more like a steno formation.

So if foam or leather keypads don't make the SideWinder feel enough like a steno machine, think about buying an old junky manual writer and gutting it for parts. Thanks, Abigail!

Writing and Coding With Steno

2010-04-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

Part 2 in my "What is Steno Good For?" series

In Part 1, I talked about how steno could be used by people who speak
with voice synthesizers, making it easy to communicate in English at
true conversational speeds using only their fingers.

In this part I want to talk about the benefit of steno in prose composition. I'm currently writing this on a qwerty keyboard on a subway train (the A down to Hoyt-Schirmerhorn in Brooklyn, if you're interested) because there isn't room to use my steno machine and my laptop's keyboard isn't antighosting, so I can't use Plover (which also needs a file output option before it will be anything more than a demo. Planning to get on that very soon.) I'm typing out every letter of every word I want to write, plus spaces between each word. Though I make my living writing in steno, I still use qwerty for a lot of things, because my $4,000 proprietary steno software isn't much good as a keyboard replacement and because my steno machine isn't always immediately to hand. I'm pretty used to it; before I learned steno, I worked for several years as a qwerty transcriptionist, and I can type at around 110 words per minute.

Even so, whenever I switch to qwerty, it feels so clumsy and plodding. It's not all that great for my wrists either, but I'll write more about that later, in the section on using steno to avoid repetitive stress injuries. Mainly it's just such an inefficient input mechanism. I already know the word I want to write when I type the first letter, but instead of moving on to the next word, I have to spend however many more fractions of a second typing out the rest of the letters, then pressing space, then starting on the second word. It artificially slows down my thinking and forces a staccato note into whatever I'm writing.

Steno, by contrast, is quick, clean, and smooth. Many famous writers composed their works in pen shorthand, including Samuel Pepys, Astrid Lindgren (author of the Pippi Longstocking books), and Charles Dickens, whose work as a London court reporter probably had a lot to do with his matchless ear for dialogue. The trouble with pen shorthand, though, is that it needs to be transcribed manually, which few modern writers have the patience for. Machine steno, on the other hand, can produce digital text three times more efficiently than the best qwerty typist can type; but I don't know of any authors who use a steno machine in their work. This is almost certainly due to the high cost of the equipment and software, coupled with a general lack of knowledge about the benefits of steno.

Steno is an unparalleled method of text input, especially for high-volume work, where fluency of thought is vitally important. Writers and programmers would seem to profit the most from it, considering the amount of time they spend putting words up on a screen. If you're only interested in programming, skip down three paragraphs. If you're a writer, keep reading. I think this applies equally to essayists, bloggers, science writers, business writers, and the rest of the gamut, but most of my experience has been as an intermittent writer of amateur fiction, so I'll use that as a template to extrapolate from. I'm sorry to say that I don't get the chance to do much writing for most of the year, but I'm a longtime participant in National Novel Writing Month, the yearly ordeal in which otherwise sane people try to write 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days, just for the fun of it. I've attempted it four times and won it twice. The first time I won, I was living with my parents after college and working the graveyard shift in a group home, where my duties involved about three hours of actual work and five hours of sitting on a couch keeping watch over a house full of peacefully sleeping people.

I wiped my November clean of social engagements and devoted nearly every waking hour in November to my novel. It was a terrible piece of writing, but after sweating and moaning and suffering untold tortures, I wrote the last of my 50,000 words and declared victory just shy of the December 1st deadline. Six years later, I won again, but my circumstances had changed. In that time, I had moved to New York City, learned steno, and found my own apartment. I was supporting myself and my partner with my CART business, plus working weekends as a theater captioner and picking up a bit of transcription on the side. I didn't have the luxury to sweat and moan over a novel; if I wanted to write, I had to do it between CART gigs. There's no way I could have done it without steno.

Every day, between one job and another, I'd haul my gear to the Square Root Cafe and bang out a couple of chapters between bites of grilled cheese sandwich. It wasn't great writing by a long shot, but it flowed in a way that I'd never experienced before. Every word my characters said to me came up on the screen as quickly as they could have spoken them. Before, in the time it took me to type out the six or seven letters that made up each word, my brain would cloud over and I would start second-guessing myself so much it was a mighty battle even to get to the end of a sentence. With steno, most words came in a single stroke, so my text was able to keep ahead of my doubts and excuses and just keep going. I could write for half an hour on the subway going home, or pull out my gear and do a quick 10 minutes in the park before schlepping onward to my next gig. Before, I would have told myself that I didn't have time to get anything substantial done in those few scattered intervals, that I needed several solid hours to get into the flow and mood of writing. After learning steno, I couldn't get away with that ploy. Before I knew it, my 10 minutes were over, but I'd managed to fill half a dozen pages. It wasn't even the speed that helped me do it, primarily; it was the fluency that steno gave to my thinking.

The cover of my 2008 NaNovel.

Switching suddenly from fiction to programming might make for a weird transition, but it's one I've made myself over the past year, so it bears mentioning. This November, instead of attempting NaNo again, I decided to find a Python tutor to help me develop this idea for an open source steno program that had been fighting to get out of my head for several years already. Part of the frustration was that, try as I might, I was never able to make my steno software work effectively with Vim, my favorite text editor. Even when writing fiction, the 1.5-second time delay built into Eclipse's buffer drove me crazy. In the program itself, it lets me see my words instantly (in a sort of distorted "preview mode" that I have to turn off when I'm CARTing, because it's too distracting to my clients), but when I piped its output to other programs, the delay was there not only when I tried to write using steno, but when I tried to edit or navigate around the document as well. I still haven't managed to find a good solution to programming using the steno keyboard, but I can see so clearly what it might be like, if only the software were properly designed.

Programming is especially suited for steno, because there's so much boilerplate to write again and again, even in an eloquent language like Python. If I want to define a function, I have to type:

def someFunction(arg):
stuff.

That's eight strokes just to get started, plus 20 more strokes to write "someFunction", "arg", and "stuff". In steno, on the other hand, you could write something like D*FD in a single stroke, and it would put in the def, the space, the parentheses, the colon and the carriage return automatically, then jump you up to the space after the def to write your function name and arguments, then then drop you back down to the body of the function, all in four strokes. Best of all, once you defined that function name in your steno dictionary, you wouldn't need to worry about remembering to write out the name in camel case each time. Just use a single stroke like SPHU*PBGS (pronounced "smunction"), for instance, and start thinking of it as just another word, instead of two words mashed together in a lexically unnatural way.

I love the way Vim has mapped a useful command to each key of the qwerty keyboard. It's immensely powerful once you get used to it. But it's only got 26 keys to choose from, and it takes a long time to learn which key does what, since the correlation between "move one word forward" and the "w" key is pretty abstract and arbitrary. In steno, you could certainly keep using just the w key, if it's what you're used to, but you could also, say, map the "move one word forward" command to a single stroke like "WOFRD" (pronounced "woffered"). That's mnemonically much more useful than just "w", and an even bigger advantage is that the number of possible one-stroke commands is almost infinite. Instead of one stroke equalling one letter, steno lets one stroke equal one syllable, which is about five times more efficient quantitatively. As a qualitative improvement, the advantage is inestimable.

Mark Twain, one of the first professional authors to buy a typewriter, said:

"The machine has several virtues. I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair and work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around."

Mr. Clemens was a forward-thinking man, and qwerty was a remarkable innovation for its time. It's been responsible for over a century of great prose and programming. But everything he says there goes for steno too -- plus a whole lot more besides.

Ghosting and Antighosting

2010-04-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

What is ghosting and antighosting, anyway?

According to Antighosting Explained: "Some keyboard keys don’t work when multiple keys are pressed simultaneously. The key presses that don’t show up on the computer or seem to have disappeared are said to have been ghosted. On most keyboards, even some that are explicitly marketed as Anti-Ghosting, this happens with many three key combinations.

Want to know if your own computer keyboard will work with Plover? Test its antighosting abilities online with the Keyboard Ghosting Demo. As far as I know, the only true antighosting keyboards on the market are the SideWinder X4, Razer Tarantula, Stealth 7G, and Logitech G19. The SideWinder is by far the cheapest of these, but if you have one of the others lying around, you should give Plover a try.

The Sidewinder FAQ states that the X4 can recognize up to 17 alphanumeric keypresses at a time. But a steno machine has 22 keys, and all of them can theoretically be pressed at a time! I was worried that this might be a problem, but then I looked in my actual steno dictionary, and noticed that the longest single stroke (STKPWHRAOEUPBS, an alternate stroke for "guidelines") only used 14 keys. So maybe there are some people out there whose dictionaries contain lots of 18-to-22-key strokes, in which case they'll probably have to upgrade to the more expensive antighosting keyboards. If you're like me, and your steno dictionary stroke length maxes out at 17 or fewer, you're probably okay.

True antighosting is paramount when using a qwerty keyboard as a steno machine. After a few weeks with the SideWinder X4, I'm happy to report that its key recognition capabilities seem to be flawless. For a $60 keyboard, that's no mean feat. I can't recommend it highly enough. Microsoft isn't giving me any kickbacks, either.

Plover logo prototypes!

2010-04-06T08:56:00.000-07:00

Illustrious commenter Sonja wrote me last night with an exciting development. She has a friend who's an illustrator, by the name of Laura Lake. Sonja told her a little about the project and asked if she had any ideas for a logo. Look what she came up with!

I'm a huge fan of the one on the left, but Laura's favorite is the one in the middle. What do you guys think?

Files are up at the github

2010-04-05T16:06:00.001-07:00

If you want to try out the new GUI version of Plover, go here and download tktest.py, stenowinder.py, and ploverbd.py. Put them all in the same directory, and if you've got Python 3.1.2 installed on your computer, just run tktest.py. A little window should pop up, and if you have an anti-ghosting keyboard, you can just start chording away. If anyone tries this, please let me know how it works. I'm really excited to get to the next step, where it actually starts outputting to files and/or other programs, but I think even just being able to mimic the action of a steno machine with a qwerty keyboard is worth something, if only to show people how awesome steno looks when you're writing in it.

It's working! It's really working!

2010-04-05T15:02:00.001-07:00

Keytops for cheap

2010-04-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

I'm having my Python lesson on Monday, so I'm hoping that we'll be able to clear up the issue with having to press Enter between each stroke of the Sidewinder. Meanwhile, if any of you guys are actually entertaining the notion of purchasing a Sidewinder and turning it into a steno machine, I've found a good source for keytops:

Stenotech Steno Accessories.

You can get 'em in felt for $13, in rubber for $15, and in leather for $26. If this thing really takes off, I might try to arrange a bulk purchasing thing, but for now those are pretty decent prices.

Here's a Google shopping price comparison for the Sidewinder. As you can see, the best deal including shipping seems to be hovering around $60. If you can find a local store that sells 'em, you might be able to get one for a little less, but I'd figure $15 for felt keypads including shipping, $60 plus tax for the Sidewinder, about $80 total. I know it's not nothing, but it's a damn sight better than $4,000. Agreed?

Ploverwinder takes flight!

2010-04-02T19:12:00.001-07:00

I have to edit an entire play script tonight (I'm captioning a matinee tomorrow), so I don't have much time for a long post, but I just wanted to show off the fruit of this morning's labors. Some lovely people in the #python IRC channel gave me a brilliant line of code that was the last thing I needed to turn my Sidewinder X4 into an actual working steno machine... As long as you don't mind pressing enter after every stroke. Next I have to figure out how to make the program recognize the interval between when a key or group of keys is pressed and when they're all released so that it can delineate strokes automatically. For now, though, it's recognizing every chord I throw at it and translating them as cleanly as if it were coming from my Revolution Grand.

Anyone who wants to play around with it can download stenowinder.py and ploverbd.py (the dictionary file) at the github. Put them in the same directory. If you've got Python 3 installed, you should be able to just run the program without installing anything else. Let me know if that isn't the case. If your keyboard doesn't have anti-ghosting like the Sidewinder X4, you'll probably have to press each key individually rather than chording them, but at least you can get a taste of how it's supposed to work. I am ridiculously excited, but I'd better go do what I actually get paid for. More later!

How to speak with your fingers

2010-03-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

Now for the big question: Why do this? Why spend time and money developing a free program to let people type at 250 words per minute? What is steno good for?

I can think of a few groups that might benefit from free steno technology:

* People who don't use their voices to communicate, who would benefit from using a synthesized voice that can speak at conversational speeds.

* Writers, programmers, and other people who spend a lot of time working with text, who would like to set down their thoughts in a more fluent, natural way, rather than having to type them out laboriously, letter by letter.

* People who want to avoid or ameliorate the risk of repetitive motion disorders such as tendonitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.

* People interested in mobile/wearable computing and augmented reality.

* People who want to break onto the high score tables of online typing games, or who spent months teaching themselves the Dvorak keyboard layout for -- at most -- a 20% increase in speed, because they want to do everything as quickly and efficiently as possible.

* People who might be interested in court reporting, captioning, or CART (communication access realtime transcription) as a career, but who don't want to invest thousands of dollars in equipment, software, and training fees before knowing for sure whether it's the job for them.

I'll take the first group first and follow up on the other ones in subsequent blog posts.

Many people communicate without using their voices. Some are Deaf, some have cerebral palsy or other muscular disorders, some are on the autistic spectrum, and some have issues with their brain, tongue, jaw, larynx, or lungs which prevent them from producing comfortable or intelligible speech. Some of these people communicate using sign language. Others use assistive technology, including speech synthesizing software.

For example:

* Stephen Hawking

* Roger Ebert

* Schuyler Rummel-Hudson

* Alan Doherty

Not everyone who uses a speech synthesizer could benefit from steno. People with paralysis, like Stephen Hawking, don't have full control over their fingers, so they input text using rocker switches, sip-and-puff devices, or eye-gaze cameras. Schuyler Rummel-Hudson, who's 10, currently uses a small computer with pictographic symbols that stand in for common words and phrases. As she gets older, she might choose to switch to an alphabet-based system, but pictographs are sometimes more useful for people who have difficulty with fine motor control.

Steno would almost certainly be a great help to people like Roger Ebert or Alan Doherty, though. They don't have lower jaws, but their fingers work just fine. Currently they're forced to type everything they want to say on an ordinary keyboard, either letter by letter or using predictive text systems, which require around three to four keystrokes per word. The very best qwerty typist can get up to around 130 words per minute, but normal conversational speed is usually around 180, and often goes as high as 260 words per minute. People who rely on qwerty keyboards to communicate face the choice either of playing back pre-written sentences or requiring long pauses between each sentence. Either way disrupts the natural rhythm of conversation.

Steno, by design, can be written as quickly as English can be spoken. It also allows for greater fluency of thought (which I'll touch on more in the segment about writers and programmers), because it works syllabically rather than letter by letter. For instance, I'll take a random sentence:

"Whether or not the application is completed depends on your full cooperation."

That's 78 keystrokes on a qwerty keyboard. On a steno keyboard? Twelve strokes in all, making it over six times more efficient.

Has anyone used steno for accessibility before? Well, obviously it's been used for nearly two decades by CART providers like me on behalf of Deaf and hard of hearing people, but none of my research has turned up any accounts of disabled people using steno on their own behalf to communicate. (If you do know of anyone, though, please contact me! I'd love to hear about it.) The reason is not too hard to guess: Steno is ridiculously expensive, and it's got a relatively steep learning curve. Steno software (which costs around $4,000) is designed primarily for court reporters, and is not completely compatible with text-to-speech applications. Steno machines ($2,000 to $5,000) are -- with a few exceptions -- heavy, bulky, and anachronistic-looking.

Virtually everyone who learns steno these days does it because they intend to make a career out of it. The cost of the technology is prohibitive to dabblers, hobbyists, and people who don't have the time or inclination to undergo intensive court reporter training. Plover is an attempt to eliminate the $4,000 software cost. I'm currently looking into low-cost solutions for steno hardware. Once those two barriers are removed, I think the training will largely take care of itself. It took me a year and a half of intensive practice to get from 0 to 225 words per minute, but I was writing at 100 words per minute after only a few months, and that was true of nearly all my classmates as well. Steno is so vastly more efficient than qwerty that even a beginning stenographer can outstrip the best qwerty typist relatively quickly.

People who use assistive technology are uniquely suited for the task. They're often at their computers for many hours a day and have a high incentive to learn everything they can about their equipment. It's almost a truism that people with disabilities are usually the earliest adopters and most dedicated power users of almost any new technology. Voice-to-text software, which has proven invaluable to people who are unable to type, requires as much if not more training time than steno, as I mention in my post on Voice Writing.

Steno can provide the same benefits in the opposite direction. In addition to people like Mr. Ebert and Mr. Doherty, who can't speak but are able to hear, steno technology could do a lot for my own clients, who are primarily Deaf and hard of hearing. Without having to hire a CART provider, people who are hard of hearing and don't know sign language can speak to each other using steno as quickly as thought, with no potential for misunderstanding. People who are Deaf and do use sign language rather than spoken English can communicate with Hearing English speakers by writing what they want to say in steno and using the voice synthesizer to speak for them, rather than having to rely on hand-written notes when interpreters aren't available.

Even people who don't have any problems with hearing or speaking might start to use steno, as a way to communicate in noisy clubs or libraries, or as a high-speed substitute for texting. I'll write more about that in my wearable computing post, but the bottom line is this: The more people communicate using steno, the more universally accessible our society will be.

Qwerty is a venerable and popular input system, but at its best it's only a third as efficient as human speech. Steno is every bit as efficient as human speech, and it's been forced into undeserved obscurity by its high entry cost and inaccessible design. Plover is an attempt to fix that. I'll keep you posted.

The Sidewinder X4 is here

2010-03-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

It arrived today. This evening I cut up a couple of my old leather steno keypads, and laid out a steno machine on its keys.

This is a terrible webcam shot (I'll try to get a proper one with my partner's digital camera later), but you can sort of see the shape of the thing if you look for the non-illuminated black squares:

And here it is with the equivalent steno letters superimposed on the image by means of Microsoft Paint. Yeah, we're pretty high tech up in here.

I've tried it out, and the touch is actually not that bad. Some of the twistier steno outlines are a little awkward because the keys are quite a bit closer together than on a regular machine, but the anti-ghosting is working like a dream. I wrote the phrase "So is this working?" in steno six times and got this:

avarwdvlru
vaarwdlvru
avawrldvru
avarwldvru
avarwdvlru
avarwvdlru

AV or VA is "so" (SO)
A is "is" (S-)
WR or RW is "this" (TH-)
DVL or DLV or LDV or VDL is "working" (WOG)
RU or UR is "?" (HF)

The order doesn't matter in steno, so this amount of key-recognition consistency should really be all we need to make a relatively functional machine. I'm very excited. My Python tutor can't meet next week, but the week after that we might try to get the Sendkeys issue resolved, or we might backtrack a bit and see if we can get this $60 steno machine (plus $10 worth of keypads) working with our dumb terminal version of Plover. How amazing would that be, huh?

Figuring it out

2010-03-23T13:09:00.001-07:00

Well, my tutor and I didn't get any code written today; the lesson was taken up with trying to make SendKeys work, with next to no success. The problem is that SendKeys was written for Python 2.1 and was last updated in 2003. We've been writing Plover in Python 3.1, so it doesn't work. Our options are:

* Figuring out a way of updating SendKeys so it's compatible with Python 3.
* Revising Plover so that it's compatible with SendKeys as it is (might be tricky because pyserial requires Python 2.3 or later; plus my heart bucks against the idea of regressing backwards into the unsupported Pythonic past.)
* Finding an alternative to SendKeys -- possibly using the script found in the last comment of this?

On the hardware side of things, I just ordered a Sidewinder X4, which I mentioned in an earlier post. If it's really true that multiple keys of the keyboard will be recognized as chords, maybe I can train my fingers to ignore the slight misalignment between rows and learn how to play the qwerty keyboard like a steno machine. That is:


QWER   TY   UIOP[
ASDF   GH   JKL;'
    CV   NM

would map to

STPH   **   FPLTD
SKWR   **   RBGSZ
    AO   EU

I tried a little bit experimentally on my laptop's keyboard, just mashing keys into a Vim window ("just mashing keys into a Vim window" came out as "mapfdsxkejrlscn;wxoianfmpdimn", but I think some of the letters weren't recognized, since my Lenovo's keyboard doesn't have any anti-ghosting abilities), and it feels weird, but I think it might be possible with practice. The main barrier I'm worried about is that of determining spaces between strokes. Steno machines register keypresses once all of the keys have been lifted; qwerty keyboards register keypresses as soon as each one is pushed down. Will it be possible to put in some sort of software hack that registers each stroke as finished every time the keyboard realizes that none of its keys are being pressed?

Wacom + Keypads = Steno?

2010-03-16T20:58:00.001-07:00

Could this be an answer to our steno hardware problem? It talks about unlimited multitouch, up to 20 fingers or more. If you program in a steno keyboard layout and stick some keypads on there for ergonomic feedback, could that serve as a poor man's Lightspeed? The question is whether it'll actually be cheaper. Low-end drawing tablets have gotten quite reasonable in price; I saw one at Staples the other day that boasted multitouch (meaning up to three inputs at a time) and went for only $50. But this looks like a flagship model, and I know some of the top-of-the-line drawing tablets go for several thousand. Still, there's a lot bigger market out there for those than there currently is for steno machines, so if the price comes down in a year or two we might have our solution.

Numbers are working. Now what?

2010-03-15T13:48:00.001-07:00

I just had a great Python session with my tutor, and we've gone about as far as we can go with our current dumb terminal version of Plover. Everything is translating properly, including numbers. The new version of the dictionary contains all the entries I use with my proprietary software. It's all very exciting.

But I'm still the only person using Plover. It's very useful when I'm outputting my CART display to one computer using my proprietary software and echoing it on another computer using Plover. That's a pretty specific activity, and if there's anyone besides me who thinks it would come in handy for them, they haven't said anything to me about it. No, in order for this thing to do what it needs to do, it has to output to the operating system, just like any ordinary qwerty keyboard does when you plug it in and start typing.

My first volunteer beta tester uses Fedora, so whatever I use to rig the output has to work on Linux. I'm on XP, so we need a Windows version too. I wish I could use the same code for both -- and if anyone reading this has an idea of how to do that, please let me know -- but from the brief research my Python tutor and I did before the end of today's session, it looks like we're going to have to use something like SendKeys for the Windows version and... I don't know. Whatever GOK uses in Linux? This is all very much uncharted territory for me, so I'd love advice from anyone who knows how to get input from a Python program and use it to emulate keyboard output. If you've got any ideas, comment here or email me: plover@stenoknight.com.

Plover is getting uglier...

2010-03-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

But it's all to the good! In the first version of the dictionary file I uploaded, I just took out all the entries that weren't plain text, so Python wouldn't blarf on them. This time I've actually gone through and changed the metacharacters to typographic symbols like ^ (caret); this makes the output of Plover look much uglier than before, but it means I now have my fingerspelling alphabets back, and as soon as we pipe this stuff out to external programs, we'll be able to use those characters to tell Plover when to capitalize a word, when not to insert spaces between translations, and all that good stuff. So hold your nose and have a screenshot!

Why Plover?

2010-03-14T17:50:00.000-07:00

I first came up with the idea of learning how to program by writing open source steno software more than three years ago. I've been geeky all my life. I've been an internet addict since I first discovered Gopher and Usenet in '93. As a teenager, I spent my time reading The Jargon File, watching Sneakers, and calling up every BBS in my area code repeatedly and obsessively. I steeped my brain in old-school cyberpunk and thought somehow that coding knowledge would come to me automatically, by osmosis. Never happened. Both my brothers and many of my friends are programmers, but somehow I never wound up actually sitting my butt down and teaching myself how to code. Now I'm pushing 30, making a good living at something I love, but I feel my brain getting slower and less plastic every year, and so at long last I'm taking steps to fix the mistake I made in my youth. I'm learning Python, one hour a week, and in the process I'm making something that might do some good for a fair number of people.

I'm planning a post that'll talk about the various things I think Plover might be good for, but for now I just want to talk briefly about how the project got its name. I remember walking around Fort Tryon Park, trying to think up something snappy, easy on the ears, not too flashy, that actually had something to do with stenography. At first I was fond of Stentor, but it turned out to be taken already. I tried anagrams of "stenotype" and "stenographer" but got only "Testy Peon" and "Nasty Gopher", neither of which inspired me. I thought I'd go to the great natural philosopher Nicolas Steno, but when I proposed naming my program after his Latin name, Stenonis, my better half quite rightly laughed herself senseless.

Finally I decided that, since none of the obvious "This is a program about steno!" names seemed to work, I'd come up with a name wasn't necessarily related to steno, but which could be used to show how insanely cool steno actually was, once you figured out how it worked. I wanted to show the powerful, flexible ambiguity of the keyboard, the way a single chord could translate to "slung" or "shrunk", "apple" or "amp", "squarer" or "sierra", "castle" or "cavil". I wanted to show how a single steno stroke could represent two syllables and half a dozen letters. I also wanted it to sound distinctive and useful, a word that was familiar enough not to sound alien, but not so common that it was mundane.

Finally I hit on it: PHROFR. In most steno dictionaries, the steno outline "PHROFR" is defined as "moreover". PH- is pronounced as "M", and the "R-OFR" bit sounds pretty much the way it looks; put them together and you get mrovr, which is easy enough to parse. But because HR- can also be pronounced as "L", PHROFR is also the way you stroke the word "plover", a charming little wading bird of the subfamily Charadriinae. Court reporters use the word "moreover" a lot more than normal people do, because it's used so often in legal contexts. Since I intended to write the first steno program that almost entirely neglected the very specific needs of court reporters (sorry, guys), I thought that using the zoological rather than the legal reading of the stroke would not be out of place.

Plover is also one of those words that's not pronounced the way it's spelled. It's PLUH-VER rather than PLOE-VER, and the idea of using a non-phonetic word for a phonetically based system amused me. Finally, there's the whole obnoxious Web 2.0 trend of naming programs after random verbs and then adding an -R to the end without an intervening E, and it drives me mad. I figured Plover would be my way of fighting back; it sounded like a helpful utility to use whenever you needed to get some serious plovving done (whatever that might mean) but it was a proper English word, with a proper -ER ending instead of the ubiquitous tacked-on -R.

So... Plover. One stroke, two syllables. Counter-intuitive pronunciation to give the in-crowd a feeling of leetness. Cuddly little bird logo just waiting to be drawn. It might not be hard-bitten and foreboding like what I would have chosen back in the '90s, when I dreamed of being a teenaged gargoyle; but now that I'm grown up and boring, I think it'll do quite nicely.

Steno machines on the cheap

2010-03-09T14:35:00.000-08:00

I bet you that there's plenty of people who are interested in tripling their typing speed but don't intend to make a career out of it. Steno could be of great benefit to them, but steno machines cost big bucks. Right now you can get ugly, bulky, ancient student machines for about $700 at the cheapest, and they have none of the ergonomic benefits of a machine like a Gemini ($1,000) or a Revolution Grand like I've got ($2,400), or even a Lightspeed ($2,000). Incidentally, did you know that the technology used in the Apple iTouch was purchased from a company that had been using it to make low-cost steno machines? Apple put a stop to that, of course, and we've been waiting for an affordable touch-based machine ever since. Story here and here.

I have high hopes for the MSI computer I posted about below, but the video showed only two channels of multitouch. That might be the case only for the prototype; if it's that way in the final version as well, we'll just have to keep on waiting. Then, of course, there's the question of how the haptics will work even if the multitouch is fully functional. Will they be laggy? Insufficiently well delineated? So well delineated it's impossible to touch two keys with one finger? Who knows? Maybe a keypad overlay system, similar to the LightSpeed's, can work where haptics don't; it's something to consider.

But until our dual-screen fully multitouch magic bullet comes along, what solution is there for people who don't want to drop a minimum of a grand on some bit of tech that they're not sure they'll ever use? There's a cheap ($60) qwerty keyboard from Microsoft that can supposedly recognize up to 26 keypresses at once. How possible would it be to strip the keys off and use the key-recognition circuitry with a new steno-based layout? I know very little about hardware hacking, but my Python tutor has done a fair bit of it, so I intend to bring this up to him once we're a bit further along in Plover's development. My instinct is that it will probably be possible to rig up something that works but that it'll be trickier to come up with something that's both comfortable and reliable. I'm holding out hope for the dual-screen solution because that makes it as easy as pressing a key to switch between qwerty and steno layouts, which seems pedagogically ideal. But if we could really rig up working steno machines out of $60 keyboards plus some minor parts and labor customization -- maybe even make it into a kit for hobbyists to assemble themselves -- it might give people a low-risk incentive to pick one up and play around with it.

Getting there

2010-03-08T14:57:00.000-08:00

It's been a very productive few days. We've made it so that any number of asterisk keys are translated as only one asterisk; same thing for initial S- keys. We've made it so that an asterisk pressed by itself will delete the last stroke from the buffer. Finally, I changed stenoworking.py (the version I've been using as a dumb terminal while providing CART for a client using two computers with my Revolution Grand's dual Bluetooth output streams) so that it now displays the entirety of the buffer with each stroke, rather than just the last stroke in the buffer. It might look busier, but it's actually quite useful, because now when I delete misstrokes on the client's display (which is running Eclipse, the $4,000 proprietary steno software) I can confirm that I haven't deleted too few or too many. Here, have a screenshot!

This needs to come out very soon!

2010-02-28T17:36:00.001-08:00

Hands-on video with the MSI Haptic Dual-Screen Multitouch Laptop

And it needs to be wildly popular, and I need to have Plover ready by then. Yes? Yes. Here's hoping, on all counts.

Two things

2010-02-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

One, Plover now has a Github account: http://github.com/stenoknight/Plover

Two, Plover Software, unaffiliated with the Plover Steno Project, has graciously put a link to this blog on their webpage, so it's only right that I return the favor.

Here's their blurb:

"I’m an independent software developer, working on a variety of projects. Current interests are the Twitter API, and iPhone/iPad software development. I’ve also done a lot with Amazon Web Services. You can also find me on Twitter, at @plover, or reach me via email at john@ploversoftware.com."

Plover lives!

2010-02-20T19:12:00.000-08:00

Well, a lot has happened since August. Starting in November, I've been taking weekly lessons with a Python tutor, and we've been working together developing (to be honest, he's pretty much done the developing, with me looking on trying to understand what's going on, adding occasional steno-specific interjections) our first working version of Plover. And, for a generous definition of "working", we've gotten relatively far!

Stenoworking.py

Ploverbd

If you've got a steno machine that uses the Gemini PR protocol (e.g., Gemini2, Gemini Piper, Evolution, Revolution, or Revolution Grand), you can use the two files above to display steno translations in a terminal (I think it should be platform independent since it's just a .py file, though I haven't tested it in anything but Windows XP). Stenoworking is the main file, and ploverbd is a modified version of my personal steno dictionary.

What it does:

* Translates words and phrases of up to 10 strokes in length.

* Displays raw steno when it can't find a translation.

* Updates the 10-stroke buffer so that new longer translations supersede older shorter ones.

What it doesn't do:

* Output to anything other than the terminal.

* Incorporate suffixes, prefixes, or punctuation.

* Delete strokes using the asterisk.

* Treat the double S- as a single S- or any combination of asterisk keys as one asterisk.

* Look very good if you concentrate on anything but the last line of text on the screen.

* Work with anything other than a Gemini PR protocol machine.

* Work with any dictionary other than the one I've turned into ploverbd, which involved stripping out and altering a lot of important entries.

I'm going to keep working on these issues week by week, while learning more about unit testing, version control, text parsing, and all that good stuff. If anyone out there is actually interested in the code and has the ability to play around with it, I'd love to hear from you! Go to my website, StenoKnight.com, and drop me an email. Plover is entirely free and open source, currently being developed by J. Lifton and M. Knight.

More to come!

2009-08-15T01:44:00.000-07:00

The Plover Project is not dead! I'm just taking a bit longer to learn Python than I should. But slowly, slowly, I'm getting there. I just spent a lovely week and a half with my brother, the programming wizard, learning the ins and outs of classes, objects, and Tkinter. When I get back to the city, I'll keep working on my little proto-steno programs, and hopefully by the end of this year I'll have a little more than I had at the end of last year. This stuff is too important to give up on.

2008-07-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

Yet more good news on the hardware front, courtesy of Gotta Be Mobile. Software will quickly be the only hurdle left. I'd better get to it, and quick -- only two years until this baby gets released!

2008-07-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

I've set my eclips timer to zero. As you can see, that means it can
only translate one-sillable words correctly, but it's useless for
anything that takes more than one stroke. But that's okay, because
I'm using it to break up a script in vim, so I don't
really need to write anything in the way of words. It's slow going
for the time being, because I don't have the commands bred into my
finkers properly yet, but I ants pate that it'll feel pretty natural
after I've been at this for a few hours. When I said one sillable, I
meant one-stroke. But I think I'll let this stand as a testment to
the pointlessness of timers. If I increased the lag, all my words
would translate properly, but I'd be unable to edit effectively. This
way I can't use my steno machine for writing, but at least I can use
it for editing. I'll get the victim commands set in my finkers --
that should be vim commands, obviously -- and then later, down the
road, once moreover is working -- ha! And that should be moreover.
Plover! Mover. That's hill airious. All this thinking and planning,
and I haven't even gotten around to putting the word Plover in my
dictionary yet. That was finker spelled. I'll have to recollectify
this. Oh, lordy. What an embrassment. I hate timers. Hate them,
hate them, hate them. All right, enough examples of mistranslates.
I'll get back to training my finkers into using vim on the steno
machine.

2008-07-02T08:40:00.001-07:00

With respect to that last entry, there's also capitalization and hyphenation to consider. If I write "one of a kind" and then stroke HAO*IPB three times, how smooth is the redraw? How do we make Plover understand that it needs to hyphenate backwards, skipping words that are already hyphenated? So with each stroke we get "one of a-kind", "one of-a-kind", et cetera, until it's full up. The response needs to be quick and natural. Most people don't count how many words they want to hyphenate; they just stroke the command until things look right.

2008-07-01T06:48:00.000-07:00

The problem with Plover being first and foremost a keyboard emulator is that steno revisions are frequent and necessary. An example: SRAEUG, by itself, will be rendered "vague". But if you then type "REU", it needs to turn into "vagary". And then if you add "S", it needs to turn into "vagaries". The natural solution is to send backspaces before sending the new letters. But do you backspace the whole word, or do you determine how much you need to change? And if you do the whole word, will it be intrusive? Sometimes you need to delete 10 or more letters for a single stroke. How quickly will that be done? Will the rollback be annoyingly slow or make it feel like there's a slow response time, or is there a way of making it instantaneous? Another alternative would be to use Ctrl-Z or Shift-Back Arrow/Delete, but those aren't foolproof ways of deleting previous words in all programs; they're soft conventions. The other steno programs solve this problem by keeping words in the buffer, but I hate that, because when you do want something displayed instantaneously, it means you have to flush the buffer manually, which gets incredibly tiresome. I'll just have to see how the backspacing idea works out. Possibly we can incorporate options for word deletion that can be customized to particular programs.

2008-06-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

I haven't cracked the book in ages (been reading pulpy novels instead), and I was gonna go to the next NYC Python meetup, but it's on the same night as my ASL class. I've still been thinking constantly about Plover, but to no real end; I feel like the project has stalled. I wish I could find a programming buddy to get together with. I corresponded a bit with someone who was advertising for a Python tutor on Craigslist and said she'd pass him along if he wound up being any good. Haven't heard from her in a while, though, and I'm not sure I could afford a tutor. My brother's been good as gold, corresponding with helpful ideas and novice projects over the internet, but it's hard to put the time aside when you don't have to answer to a physical face. I've also been struggling to make as much money as possible with my freelancing gig, which has run up against my slackier impulses. Diligent, incremental independent work has always been my weakness, and it's the one thing I need to instill in myself before I die. I want this program, both to use myself and to distribute to people who could get a hell of a lot out of it. I want to learn how to program, for the geek cred and for its own sake. I need to freaking get started.

2008-06-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

Idea for Gemini's extra buttons: one alt, one ctrl!

2008-06-10T14:13:00.000-07:00

And this is even better. Come on, future! Get here already!

2008-05-28T07:30:00.001-07:00

This is potentially fantastic news. If Microsoft is really serious about promoting touch interfaces and puts enough money into the concept to make it a genuine phenomenon, we could be obviating the whole hardware problem in just a few years. As I've said before, the biggest issue with promoting steno to geeks is the price. Geeks like to play around with stuff before they commit to it, and when you're talking $5,000 steno machines (huge, heavy, and ugly as sin into the bargain) plus $4,000 software, there's just no way you're going to attract anyone who hasn't already determined to singlemindedly build their career around it. There aren't many instantaneous fanatics like me, nor should there be. I want steno to be primarily an auxiliary system to facilitate high speed composition (of text and code), communication, and portable computing. Writing and distributing Plover freely will, with luck, take care of the software issue. Cheap computers with built-in touch interfaces will eliminate the hardware shortage. Add haptic feedback (which should come in the next generation of widespread touch interfaces) and ultra-portability and you're gazing at my bright utopian stenofuture right there.

2008-05-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

I found Learning Python! I thought maybe it had dropped out of my jacket pocket or been left somewhere, but it's been buried in the bottom of my closet this whole time. I've been a dreadful slacker with this blog, but I hope once I can find some relatively steady work for the summer (which is where most of my directed energy has been going) I'll be able to get back to Plover with a clear conscience.

2008-04-16T10:35:00.001-07:00

Plover must take arguments in its command line. It's very frustrating not to be able to enter "eclipse 0416ap.ecl -mz_edit" or something like that and have the program open up the file of my choice, applying the settings of my choice, all in one step. Instead I have to open Eclipse, then select the user settings I want, and then open the file manually from the menu. Frequently the last-used file in a particular user folder isn't even on my most recent files list, since all my students' classes are aggregated together.

2008-04-11T17:47:00.000-07:00

Yet another Eclipse bug:

I suppose it's conceivable that this one might be attributed to human error, though if it is, I need to find what the error is so I can never make it again. Am I inadvertently turning stitching on? What the hell's going on? It's happened twice, and as far as I can tell all I've done to cause it is use the "?" key (set to "Find above - RT" in Hyperkeys) to find a word earlier in the document while my steno machine is still realtiming. This is what happens, and the only cure I've found is to stop translation and start another one in a new file. Seriously not cool.

2008-04-11T15:10:00.000-07:00

Another baffling Eclipse bug:

The text was intended to be in all caps, but when I started writing, it came out mixed case. So I closed the file and started a new one. Now, going back to the transcript of the original file, I find that it appears to be mixed case initially (top picture), but as soon as I press page down, it transforms into all caps (bottom picture). Page up, and it's mixed case again. What in the flurgh?

2008-04-09T12:16:00.000-07:00

A wacky bug in Eclipse:

As far as I can figure out, I defined -FP as {FLUSH}, and so every time I tried to write FPLT and it came out FP (as it often does), instead of a period, I got what appeared to be dead space. The first line is what it looked like on screen; the last line is what I originally intended. But the middle line is what I got when I positioned my cursor after the word "tidbits" and pressed "." to insert a period. Now, how the hell did that happen? And what does it mean for Plover, if anything? Something to consider. I've now defined -FP as {.}, so here's hoping that'll solve the problem.

2008-04-08T18:29:00.000-07:00

It's ridiculous that Eclipse prevents multiple occurrences, and that I'm not able to have different user settings apply to different opened files. So I'm unable to set Eclipse running, start a job with the user settings of the student's next class, and then open another file up with another student's settings so that I can get some transcript editing done without having to worry that the class will start and catch me unprepared to start writing immediately.

2008-04-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

I NEED A QUARANTINE FUNCTION, ARRGH!

Could I write a plug-in module as a sort of precursor to Plover, to plug into Eclipse? I might try. It's maddening not having one.

2008-04-08T07:49:00.000-07:00

It's all getting more complicated. But, to be fair, more interesting. Back when I've got actual content.

2008-04-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

Proper toggle; going to to gonna after the fact.