Mirabai and I were briefly discussing the possibility of steno on a
mobile phone with a touch screen. Below is a transcript of what
transpired. The older messages are at the bottom -- progressively more
recent as you scroll up.
Whaddya guys think? I changed the layout of the keyboard so that the
vowels are stacked on eachother. That way, you could swipe any vowel
combination with a single movement.
http://ploversteno.googlegroups.com/web/stenooonew.jpg?gsc=vx5iIAsAAAAbRMltTswjbrew192ooFHL
http://ploversteno.googlegroups.com/web/stensample2.jpg?gsc=vx5iIAsAAAAbRMltTswjbrew192ooFHL
If these links don't work go to the group pictures. Link on the right
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All of it, I'd say! But especially the images. They're fantastic.
On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 10:54 PM, Stanley Sakai
<
sta...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
That sounds good. I can probably do it right now in fact.
How much of the email should I copy?
S
On Sep 6, 2010, at 7:20 PM, Mirabai Knight wrote:
Feel free to watermark it with your name -- you did all the work,
y'know. But if you could post it to the group
(
http://groups.google.com/group/ploversteno), I think it'd look better
coming from you. You can even copy-paste from the email you sent me.
Then if we get some good responses, I'll post the pictures and the
better comments on the blog for further promulgation. Whaddaya think?
Yours,
M.
On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Stanley Sakai
<
sta...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
You should watermark it with
plover.stenoknight.com or something
before you do that, but I'd be intrigued to hear what the others would
have to say about something mobile steno.
With regard to not having enough dead space. if you've ever tried any
of the swipe applications that I had mentioned, they manage to be
incredibly accurate even with a full-sized QWERTY keyboard.
Like one time just to try it out I swiped "animation" (which has a lot
of path overlap if you were to take a finger and trace the path on a
qwerty layout) and "animation" was the first word that it predicted.
But maybe if it (the keyboard) were drawn out in a grid that takes up
the entire lower half instead of little keys it would make the letters
more forgiving targets. I put the image on my iphone and it seemed
okay, meh.
Isn't the Palm one called ANIHORTES or something? a 3x3 grid I think?
It's a great idea but it still falls short because you still have to
type letter by letter, in the correct order unassisted and focusing
hard on the screen. How many times have I almost mowed someone down
trying to text and walk at the same time with my entire field of
vision focused on trying to get my index finger to hit D instead of S
-- I've lost count.
Plus one of the arguably most elegant things about steno is that it
has the left and right banks and a fixed sequence of letters. Not to
mention that AOEU summarizes practically every vowel in English.
I practically get within inches of the point at which I curb-stomp my
iphone every time it incorrectly spells a word as i peck away at it
mindlessly. Steno is phonetic -- even a word like "decision" has three
elements: the SD, EU, and GS. That's more than an enough for the damn
phone to figure out what I meant. On iphone qwerty however: s -back- d-
e-s-u -back -i- d -back - s-i-o-n. Fuck it. *CURBSTOMP*
I don't know what to say about the issue of charging money. I mean,
Unix is technically open souce. Apple just happened to jazz it up and
sell it for 100$.
Yes, I am very frustrated, bitter, and annoyed that technology sucks
because people can't learn anything better than QWERTY.
-S
On Sep 6, 2010, at 6:46 PM, Mirabai Knight wrote:
This is tremendously intriguing. I had an old Palm Pilot that used a
Swype-like interface with its stylus, and I do admit it was pretty
nifty. I think that there would need to be slightly bigger "dead"
channels or gutters between the rows so you could bypass keys that you
didn't want on the way to ones you did. But honestly, I would totally
use an app like this. It wouldn't be as good as real steno, but I bet
you're right that it'd be a damn sight faster than any other mobile
app out there. Hmmmmmm... Okay, I'm definitely gonna think about this.
I agree it's tempting to make it a paid app (because I think you're
right that other steno people would pay money for it), by way of
raising funds for Plover, but I also don't want to pervert the
mission, and I really am convinced that the only way steno will
actually go mainstream is if the entry bar is set as low as humanly
possible. I really like the way you think, though. Damn. Do you mind
posting this to the Plover google discussion group and seeing what-all
they have to say about it? You make a hell of a pitch, but I worry
that I'm too dazzled by the idea of steno on my phone (steno on my
phone!) to point out any potential flaws, if they even exist. I think
there's a lot to this, though. Thanks for passing it along!
Yours,
M.
On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 9:36 PM, Stanley Sakai
<
sta...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
I've already begun to brush up on my Java.
And I would imagine that every stenographer in America, without
exaggeration, would go completely ape shit if this came out.
I actually just realized however that the vowels should be stacked so
that you could connect them more easily:
A E
O U
This way you could swipe the separated strokes AEU in a "7" shape, AU
in a backslash swipe, AOE in a "V" shape, and OU as just a dash rather
than two separate taps which obviously widens the margin for error on
such a small device. And since the strokes have distinct shapes, it
would be easier to understand for a device than say, a swipe that
incidentally fell right between AO and AOE.
Plus there's the added benefit of not requiring ANY new hardware. It
takes advantage of the fact that though a phone is way too small a
device to chord on but are excellent at recognizing swipes vs. taps.
-- though the feat of a full steno keyboard may be possible with an
iPad but how would you steno without constantly looking at your
hands?!
Instead of D-E-C-I-S-I-O-N -- 7 taps on the god-awful touch screen
QWERTY, tap(S) swipe(TK) swipe(EU) swipe(GS). OR you could make it so
that if you zigzag over the ST and K keys down (starting on S), up,
down(ending on K) and you could just swipe directly from EU to GS.
The Shapewriter and Swype products work extraordinarily well
considering how much more orthography matters in making a swiped
QWERTY keyboard. Steno has much less fine distinction in that the
letter order is so restricted and in this case can only be entered
sequentially left to right, top to bottom -- STKPWHR.. you know the
rest. :)
Why in the hell should anybody be required to type every letter of
every word into a computer, ever?
Oh, and about the buttons. ABC gives you a QWERTY (or dvorak) layout
if you would rather just type out "Nikolai" than taking a chance with
your dictionary, having it untranslated, then having to define.
The define button would let you add to your dictionary while
untranslates you can directly touch to define.
The star key will act more like the Phoenix R-R disambiguator thingy
since you can't really incorporate it into a chord. So: K-U-T
translates to "can you tell" into the composer but once you hit star,
"cut."
And I guess you would have to program it to wait for you to continue
entering more strokes until it finds a match in the dictionary rather
than if { fingerLift == true; } translateChord; like on a real steno
machine.
So what do you think? I actually tried "writing" on it just by poking
at my laptop screen and it seems like this would have incredible (50wpm
+) speed potential. I don't doubt a seasoned stenomaster could bang
out 80 or 90. Though I doubt this would have any mainstream appeal
since it requires the dreaded things called learning and practice for
a novice.
Stan
--
Mirabai Knight, CCP
917 576 4989
m...@stenoknight.com
http://stenoknight.com