Passive Haptic Learning for Computer Stenography

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

More Laptops with NKRO!

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

Dotterel: Steno for Android!

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

New Weekly Released!

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

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

Changes

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

Stenograph USB plugin

Diamante and Luminex owners, rejoice! You can now use your writers over USB with Plover. Just install the Plover Stenograph USB plugin, by our fantastic lead dev Ted. It might not work on Stenograph machines that are older than Diamante and Luminex, but still opens up a huge swath of pro steno users who might be curious about Plover. There's also a dictionary import/export plugin for major CAT software, including Eclipse, CaseCATalyst, and DigitalCAT. That one is still in testing, so if you install the plugin via the Plover 4 plugin manager and run into any problems, hop on the Discord and send a note to @marnanel, the developer. Slowly but surely we're building the bridge between the open source and proprietary worlds! It's very exciting. Even if court reporters still want to use their court reporting software for their daily court or deposition work, they can now use Plover for captioning or even just for using their steno machines with their computers for text input, novel writing, chatting with friends, or all the other hundred things that Open Steno fans have been using steno for over the last seven years, but which has been largely inaccessible to professional steno users. Anyone from the pro steno world who's induced by this post to dip a toe into the Plover world, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think!

Guest Post: Mechanical Keyboards UK Meetup!

New Plover user Miles writes in his blog:

I am new to the world of stenography. As a designer, I do not often have to type large volumes of text, so might not be a typical user. However I was so impressed by some of Mirabai's talks online that I decided to build myself a mechanical keyboard in order to learn steno as a hobby. Both learning steno and tinkering with keyboards turn out to be a lot of fun!

A large part of the appeal of mechanical keyboards has been the inventiveness of the devices and the spirit of the community, so when an opportunity arose to meet some of the community and bond over discussions of keycaps and switch stems, I jumped at it. The latest meetup of the MKUK subreddit was held on Saturday 24th February. I expected to enjoy looking at and tapping on many beautiful keyboards, but not display anything of my own. However while discussing the event on the Plover Discord Group, I came up with the idea of setting up a little Plover demo for people to try out at the meetup. As an enthusiastic beginner at stenography, I thought this would be a great way to spread the word about the open steno project and a good icebreaker at an event full of people I'd never met.

The venue was a basement meeting room in a Waterloo hotel, full of keyboards and enthusiasts. The event was buzzing and well attended, and I arrived in good time to get the laptop and keyboard set up and have a good browse around the room. There were also some generous giveaways throughout the session.

Although the idea was for my demo to be self explanatory, there was not quite enough information for a complete novice to try typing with any success, so I spent much of my time at the event standing by my laptop, talking people through the concepts of stenography and showing them how to stroke their first few words. Most had not tried stenography before, although I did meet one lapsed Plover user. The reception was even more enthusiastic than I had hoped, with a lot of interest, especially when I mention the potential typing speeds of 200+ wpm.

I answered many questions about my setup, Plover, and stenography in general, from

How would I type paraphernalia?

for which Plover's "Lookup" function came in very handy, to

is it very bound to the English language?

to which I answered "Yes, but steno theories and keyboards exist for many languages!" (see the Plover Discord Group's multilingual channel for more on this). One of the most interesting questions I got asked was

How did the first (pre-computer) steno machines work?

To answer I fired up the Plover "Paper Tape" and explained that early machines recorded strokes on paper tape that would be later hand translated. Having these features to hand made Plover a joy to demonstrate, and I enjoyed chatting to everyone who took an interest.

I've detailed my setup below for anyone who is interested, along with some thoughts on improving it next time. I had a great time at the meetup, and would love to have a go at demonstrating Plover again in the future, especially if I manage to build up some fluency in stenography. Thanks to all the welcoming folk of r/MechanicalKeyboardsUK and to Mirabai for inviting me to write this post!

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Demonstration Setup

• Macbook Pro, running:

  • Plover 4.0
  • Learn Plover Excercises at Steno Jig, open in a Safari window, chosen because it offers hints in the form of a keyboard layout, which is very helpful for complete beginners
  • Open Steno Project website open in a second Safari window
  • An overlaid persistent window with the Learn Plover! cheat sheet, using the Helium browser.

• Let's Split keyboard:

  • Standard layout with a layer added in QMK for stenography using the TX Bolt keycodes. Using these keycodes instead of letters allows me to still use the qwerty laptop keyboard without switching Plover output on and off.
  • Kailh speed silver switches, light linear switches with a high actuation point.
  • Blank white PBT keycaps (Cherry profile I think).
  • Some handy letter stickers donated by my partner.

Improvements

There are a few things I would do differently if I were to set up a Plover demo again. Hopefully this will be useful to anyone else who wants to demonstrate Plover in a similar context.

• A step-by-step guide to making your first word, printed on paper with large text and diagrams. This would help anyone trying out the demo when it is unattended. I think the first chapter of Zack Brown's Learn Plover! would be ideal for this purpose if it could be boiled down to a single sheet of paper.
• Provide handouts or cards for people to take away with details of Plover and the Open Steno Project.

• Display names/links for:

  • The Open Steno Project website
  • The Plover Discord Group
  • The Plover subreddit
• Find time to make a demonstration to a larger group. This was not really suitable for this event, but would be a good way to boost interest.

This post was written (mostly) using Plover at around 8wpm :)

Photos from Miles and the_pokemon_kid

Many thanks to Miles for this fantastic post! I wish I could have been there, and I hope that more Plover users will be able to spread the word at similar mechanical keyboard meetups around the world!

Wanted: Novice Level Steno Hero Songs

Steno Hero, as many of you know, is great fun for stretching your steno skills with some very fast, very challenging music.

But wouldn't it be nice to have some songs that beginning stenographers could play as well?

So Ted has drawn up some guidelines for writing novice level Steno Hero songs, which use simple vocabulary -- mostly small phonetic words and common briefs -- sung at a manageable tempo for people who are first starting out.

He writes:

Here are the top 100 English words:

the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, I, it, for, not, on, with, he, as, you, do, at, this, but, his, by, from, they, we, say, her, she, or, an, will, my, one, all, would, there, their, what, so, up, out, if, about, who, get, which, go, me, when, make, can, like, time, no, just, him, know, take, people, into, year, your, good, some, could, them, see, other, than, then, now, look, only, come, its, over, think, also, back, after, use, two, how, our, work, first, well, way, even, new, want, because, any, these, give, day, most, us

Some other good core words for steno, easily briefable:

always, awful, okay, eazy, water, drop, all right, welcome, love, together, request, familiar, follow, question, ask, continue, nothing, nowhere, nobody, understand, minute, important, today, tomorrow, other, every, everyone, everybody, everything, forever, of course

Meta vocabulary:

keys, chords, board, stroke, steno, hero, Plover

Simple words, in the format CVC, like mom, pop, tough, John, map, etc. should be fine as well.

If you can put words like this together into a few simple rhymes, post 'em here or to the Discord or put them on your blog and link us to them. If a tune comes in your head and you're able to record a demo, all the better. We'd love to hear what you come up with. We have some funds that we might be able to put towards commissioning and recording more polished material, but we're hoping to get some good stuff from the community to start out with.