Plover covered on opensource.com

[Mel Chua]

The opensource.com article on Plover finally got released -- see "Typing
at 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system"
at
<http://opensource.com/life/11/12/open-source-changes-face-stenography-and-possibilities-hearing-impaired>

(I think the URL is an artifact from the old suggested article title
that I changed, and they may be missing some embedded videos -- checking
into that -- but wanted to get the word out here asap.)

--Mel

[Mirabai Knight]

Woohoo!!! Thank you so so so so so so so so much! You are THE BEST.

--
Mirabai Knight, CCP, RPR, CBC
StenoKnight CART Services
917 576 4989
m...@stenoknight.com
http://stenoknight.com

[Mel Chua]

>> The opensource.com article on Plover finally got released -- see "Typing at
>> 255 WPM shouldn't cost $4000: Plover, the open source steno system" at
>> <http://opensource.com/life/11/12/open-source-changes-face-stenography-and-possibilities-hearing-impaired>
>>
>> (I think the URL is an artifact from the old suggested article title that I
>> changed, and they may be missing some embedded videos -- checking into that
>> -- but wanted to get the word out here asap.)

They fixed it -- now there are videos embedded in the post.

[Matt Thomas]

You are a great evangelist Mirabai.
Sent in Transit (mst)

[Michael Roberts]

On Jan 13, 9:45 am, Mel Chua <m...@melchua.com> wrote:
> The opensource.com article on Plover finally got released

And on that note, hello! The opensource.com article hit Hacker News
about three hours ago, and the scales fell from my eyes. I'm a
Windows user (yes, yes, for historical reasons, but in my favor I do
have a Unix beard and a Unix fileserver hanging on my router) and a
technical translator who types upwards of 1.25 million words a year.
That's just the paid work - God only knows how much more interacting
with people. So acceleration will directly impact my bottom line, and
I fully intend to spend every freaking second of my fifteen minutes of
free time per day on Plover.

Michael

[Matt Thomas]

That's awesome Mike.

Sent in Transit (mst)

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Roberts <viv...@gmail.com>
Sender: plove...@googlegroups.com
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:34:03
To: Plover<plove...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: plove...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Plover covered on opensource.com

[Matt Thomas]

Are their good briefs for coding?

Sent in Transit (mst)

-----Original Message-----
From: "Matt Thomas" <m...@cril.edu>
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:35:26
To: <plove...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: m...@cril.edu
Subject: Re: Plover covered on opensource.com

That's awesome Mike.
Sent in Transit (mst)

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Roberts <viv...@gmail.com>
Sender: plove...@googlegroups.com
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:34:03
To: Plover<plove...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: plove...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Plover covered on opensource.com

[Matt Thomas]

I mean some of you code with a steno keyboard, right?

Sent in Transit (mst)

-----Original Message-----
From: "Matt Thomas" <m...@cril.edu>
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:36:19
To: <plove...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: m...@cril.edu
Subject: Re: Plover covered on opensource.com

Are their good briefs for coding?
Sent in Transit (mst)

-----Original Message-----
From: "Matt Thomas" <m...@cril.edu>
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:35:26
To: <plove...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: m...@cril.edu
Subject: Re: Plover covered on opensource.com

That's awesome Mike.
Sent in Transit (mst)

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Roberts <viv...@gmail.com>
Sender: plove...@googlegroups.com
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:34:03
To: Plover<plove...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: plove...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Plover covered on opensource.com

[Michael Roberts]

On 1/15/2012 5:36 PM, Matt Thomas wrote:
> I mean some of you code with a steno keyboard, right?
>

*I* never have - I've heard of a couple of people who do, but unless
you're directly doing transcription I think most people consider the
cost of entry way too high. Actually, that's precisely the reason I've
never pursued steno.

Until today.

[Josh Lifton]

Welcome aboard! Please post bugs and suggestions here or on
launchpad.net/plover.

Cheers,
Josh

[Josh Lifton]

On Sun, 15 Jan 2012, Matt Thomas wrote:

> I mean some of you code with a steno keyboard, right?
>

> Are their good briefs for coding?

I don't yet know of anyone who uses it for coding. It would definitely
take some work customizing the dictionary using meta commands before fluid
coding would be possible.

Josh

[Mel Chua]

On 01/15/2012 05:34 PM, Michael Roberts wrote:
> On Jan 13, 9:45 am, Mel Chua<m...@melchua.com> wrote:
>> The opensource.com article on Plover finally got released
>
> And on that note, hello! The opensource.com article hit Hacker News
> about three hours ago

As a side note here: there seems to be a *ton* of interest in Plover --
I just got a little backchannel ping from Mary Bitter, who moderates the
education channel on opensource.com, and she said that by the end of day
on Saturday it already had over 1,300 views -- even before it hit Hacker
News. I have no idea what the count is now.

So yeah, definitely on to something here. :)

--Mel

[Josh Lifton]

As further evidence of this, take a look at the download numbers for the
various releases of Plover at https://launchpad.net/plover/+download. The
latest release outpaces the other releases by so much that I'm still not
convinced it's not the result of a spider downloading the tarball every
hour.

Josh

[Mirabai Knight]

Dunno about downloads, but in terms of webhits, according to Google
Analytics, I've been getting about 60 to 90 hits to the entire
stenoknight.com site (including the Plover pages) per day. Yesterday I
got 1,432 hits, and today I've gotten 883 so far. Pretty freaking
awesome. ('8

Oh, also, I just put up a new Donation page up, after a recent donor
expressed that he'd like to know in more detail where the money would
be going to: http://stenoknight.com/plover/donatepage.html

Feel free to pass it around! As of now I've been giving all of the
money to Josh, since he's written an overwhelming amount of the code
and has donated countless hours that he could have been using for
paying work (or, y'know, taking care of his awesome new baby). But if
we get more money and I'm able to pay him back for the work he's done
so far, I'll start passing it along to other Plover devs whenever I
can. I'm unspeakably grateful for all the volunteer hours everyone's
put in so far, and the last thing I want is for anyone to starve or
lose business due to the time they spend coding on Plover, so if I can
help to compensate people for the work they're doing, I will. I
personally have no intention of keeping any of this money; getting the
software made and promulgated to the world is more than payment enough
for me. So far I've donated about $4,000 of my own money to Plover
development, plus $1,000 worth of captioning work in exchange for
code. We've gotten $225 in donations, and tons of free code from
various Plover users -- not just on Plover itself, but on the Plover
Demo, the Plover Wiki, and the fantastic drilling/training program Fly
-- and well-wishers. I can't thank any of you guys enough. This
project has gone from an idle wish that my proprietary software didn't
suck so much to an actual living community. A thousand, thousand
thanks for all your suggestions, signal-boosting, bug reports, feature
requests, coding expertise, and words of encouragement. It's a damn
beautiful thing.

--
Mirabai