Ted's StenoFest Talk

Today on Ted's Patreon Page, he posted a link to his StenoFest 2019 talk on YouTube, along with the following:

I recently posted my StenoFest talk from February 2019. It was a talk aimed at professional stenographers to introduce the idea of using their steno machines outside of work, as well as present the Open Steno Project mission. Feel free to check it out, and view the index in the description to jump to sections that interest you.

As for Art of Chording, I'm currently balancing between being busy at work and lots of Plover development happening in preparation for v4. I look forward to resuming on the textbook, but it won't be until a new Plover release (which I am so totally pumped about!!!) See you soon!

Two Vietnamese Steno Systems!

I discussed two Spanish systems for Plover last week, and this week, I've got two Vietnamese systems for you:

Plover_Vi by user202729, and Plover_Viet by illustrious steno vidder Aerick. I don't know Vietnamese, so I can't speak to the pros and cons of these two systems, but there's a discussion about them on GitHub that might prove illuminating if you're interested. I love seeing new languages come to Plover, especially in multiple flavors. Great stuff.

Plover + Melani + Spanish

I last posted about a Spanish system for Plover back in March, but here's an alternate one, this time using the MIDI keyboard-based Melani system, originally developed for Italian. Co-author Noelia Ruiz Martínez has apparently recently recorded a podcast episode describing her career as a realtime Spanish captioner and describing her system, so I'll definitely be posting the link to that as well, when it's available. I love learning about new multilingual Plover systems!!

The Steno Grind

There's a new web app called The Steno Grind, designed to help users drill lessons from Ted's marvelous steno textbook The Art of Chording. It's slick, simple, and fun. Many thanks to Noah for this lovely resource!

Emily's Steno Symbol System

Check out this great Python dictionary for typing symbols in steno in a systematic way!

Emily says it allows for "consistent symbol input with specification of attachment and capitalisation in one stroke."

This dictionary was created with the following goals in mind:

* Have a consistent method to type (pretty much) every symbol
* Specify spacing and capitalisation of that symbol in 1 stroke
* Hackable and understandable to anyone who finds it useful :)

It's absolutely ingenious and beautifully documented. Fantastic work! Check it out!

A Whirlwind of Plover Activity!

After a well-earned hiatus, our dauntless developers Ted and Benoit-Pierre have immersed themselves once more in the Plover codebase, resolving issues, fixing bugs, thwarting security vulnerabilities, and implementing a new continuous release schedule! As of this blog post, the most recent continuous release was delivered to the Plover Github only four hours ago, but you should click back through their recent updates to get a sense of the tremendous quantity of work they've been doing lately. It's incredible! More to come, I'm sure, but I'm so impressed and grateful to see the amount of care and attention they've been giving our beloved software. All accolades to Ted and Benoit-Pierre, and the many other contributors who have submitted bug reports and code contributions over the years!

EcoSteno Prototype Review!

The lovely people at Nolltronics just sent me a prototype of their new EcoSteno, and it's a gorgeous machine!! Full disclosure: I'm extremely biased in favor of tented machines, and like the TinyMod (though with a somewhat bigger footprint and wider spacing between the hands), the EcoSteno is built on a flat platform, but aside from that personal idiosyncracy, it's hard to find any flaw at all with this beauty. It connects via USB-C and can switch between steno, qwerty, symbol, and NKRO steno layouts, which makes me hopeful that I might be able to get it working on my kid's Chromebook (which I've had a little trouble booting into dev mode so that I can install Dotterel on it, but I'll keep working on it). If so, this might be an ideal first machine for him! The EcoSteno uses featherlight (20gf) Kailh gChocs, which are low travel and extremely comfortable. I'm extremely impressed with this little number so far. It's still a prototype, of course, and probably won't be released until it undergoes a few more iterations in firmware and/or hardware, but it sure is close to being perfect, as far as I can tell. I expect great things!