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- Hacker News
- This is really cool!
The scrubbing feature is neat.
I wonder if you could create a browser plugin for this? It could either:
- Replicate the entire app in a panel.
- Integrate with the app - so it forwards the selected text/page for the app to process.
Perhaps another idea would be to offer a widget people can embed on their site like a "Speed Read This Page" button.
I really enjoyed playing with it.
If you could somehow make it easier to integrate with different environments - it would be something I could see myself using regularly.
by jodysalt - Nice. I made a similar thing as a TamperMonkey script that I can turn on and off on any website, it even includes a speed-controlled-voice that can read it for me.
One small annoyance with your app is the instructions in the welcome were tiny. Took me well over a minute to figure out how to control the thing, until I finally found those small hand icons in the right corner. You should consider adding these to the first page of welcome using a large-er size or something.
by kesor - Very interesting, thank you for making it and releasing it for free!
Do you get faster as you practice reading like that? I read ~50-60 pages per hour in English. That would be maybe 375-425 words per minute and also seems to be about the maximum I can more or less follow with ReadKinetic just trying the demo text.
Although, I don't feel like I understand quite as well what I have just read and it felt a bit aggravating? Almost anxiety inducing for some reason. Maybe it's just because it is a new thing and I'm not used to it.
Also, as others have mentioned, the controls took a bit of time to figure out.
by flowerbreeze - Great idea, great execution! Took me a while, but I got used to controls. The only small annoyance i had was the “saved” notification popping up making me miss a few words. Would love a “zen” mode with no UI other than the text.by dithernaut
- i have tried variations of this many time, it personally doesn't work for me. the word flashes into my brain, and i can keep up with "reading" at high wpm's, but the whole sentence doesn't register. i am not seeing the forest because of all the trees.by hazn
- Sounds like a pointless endeavour to me. This infinite efficiency quest for speed reading is chief pursued by those who don't read regularly, and so don't understand that ones comprehension comes from the pauses, the page turns, and the backtracks which make up reading traditionally. If one has no time to digest, are they truly reading a book or just an impromptu script?by dombiscoff
- I have a similar project for speed-reading in the terminal: https://github.com/0hAodha/ogma
It works on plaintext, but you can define pre-processing hooks to convert, e.g., a PDF or webpage into readable content using the config file.
by ohaodha - I like that there is a fallback to read the full text, but why are there two such app modes? I think if the main (non-popup) one should absorb the other's features like scrolling and bookmarks.
For some texts the layout is also important to understand the context. Poems, structured text, paragraph breaks. If you read word by word and stumble into block of structured text, it's a lot of friction to figure out. I would love a background low fidelity representation of paragraphs, like the minimap in code editors, with the current word highlighted there. It could be passively monitored for places to switch mode to reading the full text, and to keep spatial orientation around character dialogs and such. It would have to not draw attention to itself though.
The theme circle icons are not useful, they should preview text background and color.
I see Dyslexic font is already built-in!
Code is not available? It would be fun to hook this to browser extension to fast-read article in a ReadKinetic popup.
I didn't mind the controls at all, they are obviously for touch and not mouse and it seems inspired by video player controls. This is a kind of app that you spend hours with, so better to have more features and options than to be beginner friendly. Very nice app, I like it so far.
by jmiskovic