Out with 2018, in with 2019

I spent the last few days on the couch, using Plover to do some transcription work on my Alienware laptop's NKRO keyboard with my feet up while a virtual fire crackled in the background. It was remarkably relaxing! I'm so grateful to have this amazing versatile software at my fingertips, and it's been so cool to see the community really coming into its own this year, especially on the Discord channel. I'm so grateful for all of you and the beautiful geekiness you each bring to our little corner of the ultra-efficient text input world! Looking ahead, I expect great things.

Rokit's Plover Lookup Webapp

Just a quick link today: Rokit's Plover Lookup app allows you to easily search for entries in the Plover dictionary from your browser and add words to a custom list for later reference or practice. Quick and useful! Thanks, Rokit!

Using machine stenography in pen shorthand: Pen Steno

Longtime Plover community member and steno enthusiast Kevin Knox (codepoke) has invented a method to represent machine steno strokes using pen-shorthand-like techniques. As a fan and user of steno, I tried to learn Gregg shorthand and found it frustrating. You need to relearn all sorts of briefs, deal with phonetic conflicts, and just generally speak a whole new language compared to the one we use on our steno machines. Kevin took this frustration and actually did something about it, and I'm very excited to share what he's prepared with The Plover Blog.

Open Source Fellowship + New Version of ROPE

The Recurse Center is offering up to $10,000 coding fellowships in NYC for people working on open source programming projects, and 50% of that money is reserved for women, trans, and nonbinary people of color. If you fit one or more of those categories and feel like applying for a programming retreat, we would be mightily pleased if you consider Plover (or other open source steno-related software such as a steno learning game) as a potential project in your application!

Also, the Anki deck ROPE (Remembering Outlines in Plover Easily) has been updated with several new one-stroke outlines, as well as stories to help you remember how to stroke them. Useful stuff!

New Debugging Release of Dotterel

Nimble, author of Dotterel, the Android steno input app that tends to work a bit more smoothly than Brent's older Steno Keyboard app, has released a version of Dotterel with crash reporting, which is very exciting, because I've been having trouble running it on my Samsung tablet, and I'm hoping that if a handful of people test this app on a variety of hardware and OS versions, Nimble will be able to get enough information to make the app a bit more robust. Running the app on my tablet is part of my master plan to teach steno to my 2-year-old, so I'd be really happy if y'all could give it a try.

Highlights from the 2018 OSP Community Survey

Well, we exceeded last year's survey tally, with 103 responses! Here are a few of the highlights, but please feel free to go check out all the details at the survey site.





Thank you to everyone who responded! I love the friendliness and enthusiasm of this weird little community, and hope very much that we can preserve that as we continue to grow and mature in the future, while bringing the power and fun of steno to ever larger and more diverse groups of people.

Steno With a Screen Reader!

Check out this fantastic video from professional Italian stenographer Daniele, who uses JAWS, a popular proprietary screen reader, alongside Plover:


I've said for years that screen reader users (most of whom, like Daniele, have some degree of vision loss) are ideal candidates for professional stenography, since they tend to have extremely rapid and well-developed auditory processing capabilities. I'm thrilled that there's now one fewer barrier to steno for people who use screen readers. Marvelous work, Daniele!