Fly was created to make Plover, the open source stenography program, more accessible. For information about Plover see http://stenoknight.com/plover/.

Fly displays the qwerty keyboard onscreen and a word to type. The onscreen keyboard shows which letter or letters must be typed to complete the word. There are three modes: alphabet, word and lesson.

In alphabet mode, the aim is to learn reflexively where each of the alphabet keys are on the steno keyboard, for the left and right side. Some letters require multiple qwerty keys to be pressed.

In word mode, words from Plover's dictionary are presented. The difficulty of the word presented depends on the user's speed and accuracy, so that easier words are presented to start with, and as the user progresses the words get harder, since they have more letters in a chord, or are multi-stroke.

In lesson mode, words are read from plain text files in fly/data/lessons. These files have a directive at the top specifying how they should be used, for example whether words should be presented randomly from the file, or whether the words should be in order and presented as part of a sentence. Different lessons can be chosen in the options panel in the GUI.