Another piece of free software from the Dasher team!
Tapir - a simple 12-key disambiguating keyboard.
By Piotr Zielinski.
Tue 9/5/06: Dasher version 4 launched.
Tue 7/2/06 EyeTech Digital Systems (Quick Glance) are featuring Dasher in their email newsletter.
Turkish training text provided by Bulent Celasun now on the Dasher Download page.
Keith Vertanen's Speech Dasher prototype is available for windows. The idea of Speech Dasher is, you speack your text and use a speech recognition system first, then you use Dasher to correct the bad guesses of the speech recognizer. To install, you just need to extract the zip file and then run the SpeechDasher.exe file. It will default to using the Microsoft SAPI recognizer, to use Dragon you need to go change this in the Options->Speech Options menu. It should work with Dragon 7 or 8.
There is now a training text for Lithuanian on the download page.
New colour scheme intended for red/green colour blind people
Sat 16/7/05: Dasher working in Korean -
for this to work, you need a font that understands how to combine the elementary
vowels and consonants of Korean into the syllable characters.
This works in Dasher 3.2 under linux (Ubuntu operating system) if you select one of the
korean fonts. (Apparently microsoft windows is behind linux
on this: MS's korean fonts do not do combining.)
For this version of Korean you need
this alphabet file
and a training text that is
in DECOMPOSED form
like this one. [We need a bigger training text!]
You can decompose
a regular "combined" korean text
such
as this
by using (eg)
decompose.pl korean.txt training_korean_KR.txt
Thanks to Son Yeoyoung and Matthew Parker for help.
We plan another version of Korean, using
the
nested alphabet
when Dasher 4.0 is released (October 2005).
Sat 16/7/05: Dasher working in Persian
New project idea, suggested by a visitor from the the NLM foundation -- could Dasher be useful for hyperlexic people who do not communicate verbally?
Iain Murray pointed out this video game SF Cave (which works in your browser); a lot like one-button mode of Dasher. In fact what it's most like is the now-abandoned metronome mode. (The button in SF cave determines the acceleration, rather than the velocity.)
Tue 5/7/05 Would you like it to be easier to distinguish between the apostrophe (') and comma (,) in Dasher? In the latest alphabet for English, we have introduced two modifications: (1) we render the apostrophe in the dasher display using ⍘ (an underlined apostrophe) by specifying this alphabet symbol:
At the same time, we have added a TAB character, shown by a diamond (◊),
to the English alphabet.
We've coloured its square white/grey, like the other space-like characters.
Here is the alphabet entry.
<s b="9" d="◊" t="	" note="TAB (represented by a diamond)"/>
We have made the same changes in the following alphabets:
Danish
French
German
French with combining characters
It would be great if users could let us know if these enhanced alphabets give any
problems.
Alphabets and training texts for
Mon 13/6/05 DasherViewTriangle screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2
New Korean nested alphabet for 2350 syllables
Two-button Menu Dasher and three-button Direct Dasher: User Trials by Ingrid
koyama has implemented a javascript version of button dasher (with no language model)
Button Dasher paper published: Efficient communication through one or two buttons
Colour file style sheet
You can now see your colour.xml file visualized via XSLEnhanced eyetracking mode
Fri 3/9/04 In the latest windows release, enhanced eyetracking mode offers- improved dynamics for easier un-zooming;
- automatic calibration of the eyetracker, correcting systematic errors in the y-coordinate.
Languages
July 2004: Lots of new alphabets added - Dasher now supports 80 languages, from Azeri to Zulu. Please see this table of Alphabets supported by Dasher to see what help we need.Speech-Dasher prototype
Keith Vertanen has made nice videos of his prototype speech-recognition/Dasher hybrid. www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/kv227/videos/PPM wrapper
For people who want to play with Dasher's PPM module:
Here is a link to an example program which uses PPM without the rest of Dasher. You'll need to get the Dasher source tree from CVS and put the files from the zip in a subdirectory below the 'Src' directory. PPMTester.zip
(by Keith Vertanen)
Tue 10/8/04:
Dasher's PPM model is now available in convenient COM packaging. The DLL, test harness, and source code is available at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/kv227/
The COM object's API is documented in ProbModel_API.txt. Let me know if you find any problems.
Version 3.2
Mon 27/10/03. Version 3.2 is ready. This page has informationBreath Dasher
Fri 15/8/03. A new way of using Dasher has been created: a breath mouse moves the mouse up and down the screen as your breath is in and out respectively. In the first trials, an expert Dasher user achieved ten words per minute by breath alone.More control mode development (Fri 25/7/03)
Application control mode is now fully integrated into the Unix code, and is almost complete in the Windows version. We hope to make a new release including this code shortly, but you can check out the CVS version to try it now.International Phonetic Alphabet (Sat 12/7/03)
With an appropriate XML file, Dasher works in the International Phonetic Alphabet (screenshot). If anyone can advise us on how to make this feature useful to users of phonetics, please let us know.
Gnome application control (Sun 22/6/03)
The current CVS version contains code that allows applications to be controlled from within Dasher. Take a look at this screenshot in order to see Dasher being used to enter text into a word processor - the bold mode was switched on and off entirely within Dasher. Code to add the same functionality to the Windows version is currently being worked on.
Beta version of Dasher for MacOS X (Tue 10/6/03)
A beta release of Dasher for MacOS X has been made. This version is still under development and so may behave unpredictably, crash, eat your files or be generally miserable. Download it from the download page. Thanks to Doug Dickinson and Iain Murray for their work on this port! Click here for a screenshot.
Dasher support IRC channel (Fri 2/5/03)
There is now an IRC channel for Dasher support and development issues. Simply connect to irc.freenode.org and join #dasher.Palm developer volunteers wanted (Thu 1/5/03)
A port of Dasher to the Palm has been impractical up until fairly recently due to the low refresh rate of the screens and relatively slow processor More recent hardware solves both of these problems, so we're looking for volunteers to look at porting Dasher to PalmOS. If you're interested, please contact Matthew Garrett at dasher[AT]mrao.cam.ac.ukAnonymous CVS access now available (Thu 1/5/03)
Anonymous CVS access to the Dasher development tree is now available. To download the current source, run
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@coll.ra.phy.cam.ac.uk:/home/cvsroot/dasher login
and press enter at the prompt. Now run
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@coll.ra.phy.cam.ac.uk:/home/cvsroot/dasher \
co -r stable30 dasher3
and the CVS tree will be downloaded.
MacOS X port in progress (Thu 1/5/03)
Thanks to Doug Dickinson and Iain Murray, an experimental version of Dasher is now running under MacOS X.
Dasher 3.0.2 released (Tue 8/4/03)
Dasher 3.0.2 has been released. This version includes the following changes:- Fixed bug regarding acceleration at edges of the window
- Introduced keyboard control mode (intended for switch use)
- GTK2 interface for the Unix version
Dasher 3.0.1 released (Tue 18/3/03)
Dasher 3.0.1 has been released. This version includes the following changes:- Improved prediction
- One dimensional input mode
- Increasable font size
- Various other bug fixes and feature enhancements
Get it now from the download page
API documentation
Documentation to help developers porting Dasher to other platforms is now available from hereDasher 3.0.0 released
The final version of Dasher 3.0.0 has been released. Get it now from the download pageNew project manager
Thanks to funding from the Gatsby foundation, the Dasher project now has a new software development manager and researcher, Matthew Garrett. Matthew will coordinate contributions to the source code and feedback from users. Please see the development page for the recommended feedback methods.VERSION 3!!
Wed 27/11/02: Version 3 is now released for Windows and Linux. You can download it from the Dasher download page. Windows versions for (windows NT, windows 2000, windows XP) and (windows 95-98) are available.
Version 3 is a complete rewrite of Dasher. It should have all the key features of version 1.6.8, and is intended to be far more development-friendly. One of its new features, which we expect many users will appreciate, is the "automatic copy" option, which has the effect of copying the written text into the cut'n'paste buffer whenever dasher is stopped. (Enable this option using the menus.)
Version 3.0.0 prerelease 2 supports several English alphabets. Support for other languages will follow soon. Portuguese is the first language in the queue.
Further information about Dasher version 3
A port to ipaq-running-linux is also being made by Hanna Wallach.
Version 3 was written by David Ward, Iain Murray, Phil Cowans, and Matthew Garrett.
Feedback on version 3 should be sent via the metafaq system please, or else by email to dasher-at-mrao.cam.ac.uk.
Tue 1/10/02:
cliffn has written a front end for dasher v1.6.8 in VB5 which allows to run
Dasher, allows one click to save the text into a file, and
allows the file to be read aloud. With a shortcut to the text file
on your desktop it is easy to edit and copy and paste to another app.
Tested only on Win 2000 but available for download with a right click
on the file name (StartDasherFS.exe) from:
www.datasolutions.co.nz/Download;
this exe file should be put in the dasher folder alongside dasher.exe.
9/02: This text file gives Margaret Cotts's instructions for using Macro Express to connect Dasher 1.6.8 to etriloquist, and further information submitted by other users.
EndPage Alias TabletPC.html HiddenPage Tablet PCSpecial features of Dasher for the Tablet PC
Tue 29/11/05: Tablet PC version David Ward has got version 4 of Dasher working on the tablet PC.
Here's how David intends the tablet PC version to be used.
- Go to the 'Control' Preferences. Please switch OFF the "start on left mouse click" (to avoid accidental taps on the screen stopping Dasher).
- Switch ON "stylus" control.
- To start Dasher: tap, or tap and hold, or tap and drag the stylus (it's exactly like starting with the Pocket PC - just touch to start).
- To stop Dasher, Either DOUBLE TAP on the screen, or Switch on the "stop on idle" option, and use idling to stop.
- More about idling: Stop on idle stops when you are exactly stationary, but NOT if the stylus is in contact with the screen. If we can connect to the Tablet API this can be improved by detecting whether the pen is near the screen. I know this stopping mechnism isn't perfect (esp for mouse users), but I found that a time of 1000ms is quite good and rarely got any false stops. To stop, I tend to point somewhere near the centre, and let go straight away.
Tilt control: an additional way that the tablet PC can drive Dasher is via its tilt sensor. The Toshiba Tablet PC has a tilt sensor, and Seb's page about Toshiba tilt sensor provides a tilt utility (with a four-point calibration procedure) that talks to Dasher version 4's socket utility. To use this, start Dasher and start the tilt utility, in either order. Select Preferences->Socket, and check the 'use the socket instead of the mouse' option.
Tablet PCs
Fri 3/9/04 - report by David Ward
The windows version of Dasher works quite nicely on a MS Tablet PC, with no modifications to Dasher.
The pen glides across the screen very nicely and still works with the pen lifted up to 1cm from the screen. I found that my pen frequently lifted from the tablet when using Dasher (unlike PocketPC where it is easier to maintain pressure) so I switched off 'start on tap' and went for 'start on space' instread.
Also, I had to make Dasher no larger than about 12x12cm because of the distance that my hand had to travel.
Typing text into applications works fine -- identically to plain Windows.
Finally, TabletPC has a special input panel (containing character, handwriting recognition and on-screen keyboard) but as far as I can tell, there's no way to add Dasher to the panel.
Combining-accents in French
For many European languages, we feel it might be most natural to write using the 26 latin characters (a-z), plus accents that are added afterwards. [This is how Unicode's designers encourage us to represent accents also.] Using this new alphabet, and setting the Dasher edit-box font to ClearlyU, I got this idea working nicely. In this first prototype, the new accent group is contained in an orange box, and the accents themselves appear in yellow boxes. All the accents (acute, circumflex, cedilla, grave) were written in this way in the screenshot shown.
Latest information about VERSION 3
Known bugs
If you have previously installed another release of version 3, then The windows 2000 version starts and shows nothing but a green square. To fix this, Click options->alphabet, and select any alphabet except "?", then click OK.
Alphabet handling
Proper documentation about alphabets will be provided in the future. Meanwhile, here are some notes from Iain, and from a user who has figured it out!
Alphabet handling in Windows
Dasher stores
new alphabets and looks for user training files in:
Documents and Settings\
[Earlier versions of windows simply put dasher.rc in the \Program Files\Dasher directory - giving all users the same settings.]
This makes cleaning out test versions of Dasher and hacking the alphabet file directory hard, as it may not be an obvious place to look. However, it is how Windows apps are supposed to behave. Dasher makes an API call to ask where to save this data; it isn't just making this path up.
People wanting to hack the alphabet file directly will probably find it fairly obvious (once they've found the file!).They'll need a text editor that can deal with UNIX text file format. (Not notepad, but anything decent should do.) Otherwise the file will lose its line breaks and be hard to read.
XML purists might want to consult alphabets.dtd for the formal specification.
Others may need to be reminded to use UTF-8 encoding if they use anything outside ASCII.
I am not sure all international issues have yet been fixed - so people creating alphabets may still run into problems.
How to make your own alphabet - examples
"I want numerals!" - You can use numbers right now. AFAIK, you can edit the file alphabet.xml to include any of the basic 7 Bit ASCII characters.
If you want to, you can download a modified alphabet definition. It provides an additional alphabet named "mixed limited +nums". This does two things in addition to the standard "english/limited" alphabet:
- it provides numbers
- it arranges small/capital letters beneath each other, which was optional in dasher 1.68.
The location to put this will depend on your OS.