Stuart Hacking

Or rather, here are a couple of images. Sweet, Innocent images of Apple keyboards. The first of which has been left blank, for your enjoyment; the second is a rendition of the Dvorak layout on OS X (as best as I can map it – it seems to be correct on my MacBook)

These images are fairly harmless.  They go from being harmless to useful if you drop one of them into “/Applications/Mavis Beacon/Resources/English.lproj/Keyboard.png”.  (Substitute the correct path to Mavis Beacon if necessary, and don’t forget to back up the original keyboard image.)

Ok, Part 2 went pretty well.  At least I’m now looking at the correct layout on screen.  I’ll do a bit more work to neaten it up at some point but for now I’m happy it’s there at all.  Now if only it were possible to remap the positions of the keys themselves.  Stay tuned.

Hope this was helpful.

Self, Software dvorak, hack, typing

In order to cast off the shackles of messy typing I grabbed a copy of Mavis Beacon 2008 for Mac- only to discover on installation that Dvorak support has been dropped since version 5.  The website has this to say:

 
After installing Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing® 16, you want to know if practice lessons for the Dvorak keyboard layout are available in the program. The remainder of this note provides additional information.

The Dvorak layout is an alternate keyboard layout. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing® 16 does not include lessons for the Dvorak keyboard layout.
 

Notice an interesting use of past tense in this statement but I guess I should have done the research first.  Who’d have known the #1 typing software didn’t support Dvorak?

Here is part one of a solution to fix the problem.  Downloading mb_abcdvorak will give all the lessons (1 – 29) of A Basic Course in Dvorak already converted to The Mavis Beacon custom lesson format.  You can import these by going to the Media Center.  If you wish you can also download txt_adbdvorak which simply contains the text for the lessons.  All I’ve done is the boring work of conversion – Many Thanks to Dan Wood for producing the course.

This is all well and good but when you are actually running Mavis Beacon that little helper keyboard still shows qwerty layout.  How can one get to the stage of learning the Dvorak layout without learn it separately first?  In Part 2 I will provide an alternative keyboard graphic using the Qwerty layout.  (I will peobably also explain how to use this within Mavis Beacon unless the EULA explicitly states not to – but providing a picture of a keyboard violates no EULA!)

Further to that I will investigate changing the positions of the keys used by the animated fingers and highlights which appear in the software.

Self, Software dvorak, hack, typing