All things music, programming and…
Shavian
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Sound-writing
In 1972, Kingsley Read’s work on phonetic alphabets was shown to the world in the exhibition Sound-writing 1892-1972, at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in Reading, England. Read wrote an essay in accompanying catalogue, which I have reproduced here with the kind permission of the staff of MERL special collections.
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Shave is my favourite e-reader
I started out making the e-book functionality in Shave just with that goal in mind: converting e-books. Little did I know when I started building the reader functionality, that it would soon become my favourite part of the entire ap. I have now entirely stopped reading in Apple-books, my previous reader of choice. Why? Because,…
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Shavian typing speed
If you’ve played Shaw type, you may have noticed one frustrating aspect of the gameplay: your score is for a great part determined by luck. If you draw short words, you have fewer characters to type, and so your time is shorter, and you end up higher on the leader-board. This had been bugging me…
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Shaventic coding
My efforts in developing shavian tools have not stalled—to the contrary: of late, I have taken to working on multiple frontiers concurrently: Shave engine improvements, new Shaw-type features, the finishing touches on my IOS keyboard ap, and much, much more.
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The Pitman Collection
In early April, I visited the University of Bath to look at section D of the Pitman collection. I took thousands of pictures, and will be semi-regularly adding posts about what I found there.
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Announcing Shave 1.1
Shave 1.1 is out! A new version of the bidirectional Shave transliterator, with an all new E-Book reader, a Shavian web proxy, collaborative editing, support for Custom Fonts, and so much more.
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On the Shave Architecture
Accompanying yesterday’s post announcing Shave I thought it might be interesting for some of you to learn a bit more about what is going on under the hood in the tool. It will come as no surprise that it started out life as a clone of Dave Coffin’s python transliterator. That tool was the best…
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On Shave
I’ve been teasing you all with talk about my own transliteration tool for quite some time. I hadn’t released it, as there were some features I really wanted to have nailed before letting you guys get your hands on it. The wait is over. I just released a web UI for my shave transliterator so…
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English Needs the Shavian Alphabet
Everyone who tells the story of the Shavian Alphabet retells the story of the Shaw Will and alphabet competition. It’s a lot like filming a new Batman movie: the theater, a boy and his parents, a dark alleyway, a gun, and pearls raining to the ground. They’re both dramatic. What the Shaw story doesn’t ever…
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Shcrabble
I should say upfront that I neither enjoy nor am particularly good at Scrabble — and I suspect those two facts are not entirely unrelated. None of which stopped me from spending yesterday building Shcrabble, an online, real-time multiplayer Scrabble game played entirely in the Shavian alphabet, in a single sitting with Claude Code. It’s…