All things music, programming and…
Shavian

  • On typography

    On typography

    I had a very productive spell of delivering new tools for writing and reading Shavian. I even started a blog.  And then I went silent for a spell, at least from your perspective… in reality I have been going down a number of rabbit-holes.

  • On learning Shavian

    On learning Shavian

    I first learned about Shavian from that fantastic Robs words Youtube video, back in early september of 2024, my curiosity was piqued, and the next day, I wanted to learn more, so I found a website where I could learn the letters. To my delight, the letters made sense to me, and I memorised them…

  • Shaw-Spell web UI

    Shaw-Spell web UI

    I’ve been tinkering away on Shaw-Spell, improving the way lemmas, forms and word senses are grouped in the dictionary. But a more interesting change is perhaps the web UI I created for the dictionary this weekend. It was a fairly straightforward adaptation of the macOS one: an intermediate form of the dictionary was already an…

  • Shaw-Spell

    Shaw-Spell

    Tl;dr:I have created native Shavian spell-checking and dictionary services for macOS, now available here! As you will have gathered from my writings here and on Reddit, I’ve been tinkering away on some tools for the Shavian alphabet: The two tools I found were missing from the arsenal were a dictionary and a spell checker. Well,…

  • On compounds as ligatures

    On compounds as ligatures

    As a programmer, I spend a lot of time reading text in monospace fonts. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Consoles and terminals use monospace fonts. IDEs [IDEs, the programs programmers use to write programs] use monospace fonts. And as a programmer who recently has taken to writing a lot v…

  • On word-signs

    On word-signs

    The other day, after an interesting discussion on Reddit, I found myself going back to the source, and re-reading Peter Mccarthy and Kingsley reads writings from Androcles and the lion, and Reads Guide to shavian spelling from 1963. Aye came across a number of things eye had either totally forgotten about, or just hadn’t really…

  • On the quest to find a better shavian keyboard layout

    On the quest to find a better shavian keyboard layout

    My obsession with Shavian has been getting out of hand of late – or a different way to putt it is that its gotten more serious. Take your pick. I’ve been thinking about keyboard layouts and building a lot of keyboard related software [and hardware!] Of late, and I thought I’d like to tell you…

  • Shaw Type

    Shaw Type

    Having gotten more and more serious about Shavian of late, I found myself wanting to practice typing using my favourite Shavian keyboard layout. I couldn’t find a tool, so I tasked Claude code with building one for me. The results are here: Shaw-type. I am already seeing the benefits of practicing with it: I am…