StenoTray, Treal, and Tail

Little by little, Plover is transforming from a one-man band (initiated by Josh, taken over by Hesky) into a truly collaborative project. We've got new coders writing utilities and features for it all the time. The latest is StenoTray, by Brent. It's a Java utility that scans Plover's stroke log and dictionary to remind users how to stroke certain words. Just stroke out a word part or fingerspell at least four letters of the word you want to write, and StenoTray will show you how to do the rest. Here I'm trying to figure out how to write "antidisestablishmentarianism", and it handily reminds me that I've got a single one-stroke brief for it (SMA*IRM).



You can configure it to show you either raw steno or pseudosteno, depending on how comfortable you are with transliterating the letters on the keyboard; in raw steno mode, it would show you SPHAEURPL instead. StenoTray works in Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it's an invaluable utility for both steno newbies and advanced users. Check it out!

A few other exciting updates:

* Hesky has now implemented compatibility with the Treal steno machine, so if you've got one, you're in luck.

* If you want to view your raw steno notes as you write, there are now instructions on the Wiki. Linux and Mac users use the terminal, while Windows users need to download a free program called BareTail.

* John Keyes, the former owner of the @plover Twitter account, has generously signed it over to us, so if you want to receive pure, unadulterated Plover information on your Twitter feed (as opposed to the mixed Plover, CART, steno, day-in-the-life, and accessibility tweets you get on my stenoknight account), feel free to follow @plover.

* Also, just a reminder about The Plover Aviary, our user forum. Its focus is a bit different from that of the Plover Google Group, which is mostly feature requests, bug reports, and conversations about the future of Plover development. The Aviary is more for Plover users to talk about the best ways of learning steno, different steno theories, and record their daily practice log; that sort of thing. It was pretty quiet for a long time after its inception, but it's definitely been heating up in recent weeks, so feel free to give it a try.

Plover Lookup!

An extremely useful new tool has arrived on the Plover scene:

Plover Lookup!

It's a new tool by longtime Plover friend Zerk, brought about by this Aviary thread discussing how to decide which of the many steno outlines matched to a given word in Plover's default dictionary should be used by a novice steno learner. I made a canonical dictionary for Fly, Plover's Linux-only tutorial and drilling tool, but Zerk has upped the ante by including not only the canonical dictionary but also an automatically generated phonetic dictionary as well. It also lists strokes that aren't defined as canonical, alternate, brief, or phonetic, since none of us are patient enough to dig through and categorize the entire 160,000-word dictionary, and it's pretty impossible to write an automatic algorithm that can cover every intricacy of steno. I think this tool will help save a lot of new Plover users a whole lot of frustration. Thanks, Zerk!

PyCon Video

Here's the captioned video of my PyCon talk.

Here's the page with the slides and the uncaptioned YouTube version of the video. Hopefully when I give the caption file to the people in charge of the videos, they'll upload it to the YouTube version so that'll have captioning too.

Status of Current Tasks Page is Back

In preparation for my talk tomorrow, I've resurrected the Status of Current Tasks page on the Plover Wiki, which was pulled when the wiki went down a few months ago and which had fallen disgracefully out of date. It contains some of the top priority bugs and issues from the Github, plus ideas to improve and expand the Plover community in the categories of hardware, steno pedagogy, and general promotion of all things open source and stenographic. Go check it out, and if anything appeals to you, contribute!

Using Plover for Python

I gave a dry run of my PyCon presentation at the New York Python Meetup last night, and I think it went quite well! I think I've finalized my slide deck. Longtime followers will notice that I reused a few slides from my 2011 PyGotham presentation, but I've added and changed a fair amount of stuff. I think it's tighter and flows more smoothly than the old version. Anyway, as part of the presentation, I made a very quick video showing me using Plover to write a small snippet of code from my Codecademy Python Course. I also added a closed captioning track showing the pseudosteno for every stroke I was writing. It doesn't show me making new definitions or anything like that, since that feature is still being implemented (it's a little too buggy for release at the moment), but I think it gets across how easy it is to write quick, smooth, efficient Python code using steno. For some reason, when I tell people about steno, they often don't understand how a keyboard consisting of 22 letters can be used to write punctuation, meta keys, and commands, so I think this video is useful to demonstrate that it's as simple as defining PRENS as (), TA*B as the Tab command, RIPT as raw_input(", et cetera, and then just barreling on through your code without a second thought.

Vote for Mel Chua and Help Plover Win $1,000!

Mel Chua has been an ally of Plover since pretty much the very beginning. She wrote a fantastic article on Plover for opensource.com, helped me with steno pedagogical theory, came up with the idea of using lasers to manufacture the keytoppers, and has just generally been an unending source of inspiration and awe. She's an engineer, hacker, teacher, dancer, writer, open source advocate, and visionary.

She's currently a finalist in Oticon's Focus on People Awards:


Click here to vote for Mel!

She writes:

"If I win the first place award, here’s what I’m planning on doing:

1. Using the $1k given to me to offset cochlear implant medical costs.

2. Giving the other $1k to Plover, an open source software project that brings the cost of live transcription (Communication Access Realtime Transcription, or CART – think “closed captioning for real life”) from $4000 down to $40. Making this capability cheaper and more widespread (it’s very rare right now) would open up a ton of accessibility doors to people who struggle to understand spoken English (maybe they have hearing loss, or they’re still learning English, or have auditory processing disorders, or need to multitask and watch kids or cook dinner and are floating in and out of the conversation). It’s being developed by a tiny, tiny group of very excited volunteers and needs all the help it can get!

3. Working with the audiology department at Purdue University, where I’m a PhD student (in engineering), to use the hearing instruments for labs and demos to educate more students about hearing technologies."

So if she wins this contest, not only will she get $1,000 to help her pay for cochlear implants, but she'll give $1,000 to go towards development of Plover! Please vote and boost the signal. Mel is one of the most amazing people I've ever met. The Plover Project is incredibly lucky to have her on its side.

Please click here to vote for Mel!

TX Protocol Splitting Fix?

I don't know how many people have tried using Plover with the TX Protocol, but at least a few have reported that strokes get split apart. (It's a registered issue on our Github).

Hesky's attempted to write a fixed version, which can be downloaded here.

He writes: "Unfortunately, I haven't been able to reproduce the bug on my own but I've made a change that may fix the problem. If you've been experiencing splitting while using txbolt protocol with your machine, then it would be a great help if you would try this version of Plover and let me know if it fixes this problem."

If you've got a TX protocol machine, please give it a try, and let us know whether it fixed the problem. If not, more details on exactly how the splitting is happening would be very helpful.