Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly • Hacker News Board

Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly

#41

Post by bootload » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 3:16 AM UTC

A couple of things I noticed:

- No check on JS being blocked. Trivial but the site just gives a blank stare.

- When loading the first time the RH Google adverts advertise competitors before your app.

- Why are you flashing 1 word at a time?

The first 2 are trivial, the third I'm not so sure about. In any speed reading that I've read about or tried the emphasis is on being able to increase the chunk of text the eye/brain can input and comprehend at once. When I added some text to read I (surprisingly) could comprehend the text at default speed. The speed however was not fast enough. And I got the distinct impression the reading flow was broken up by word instead of sentence. So I then tried a quick experiment using the tool to read the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading entry.

Surprisingly it worked pretty well. I got through the article pretty well. I even read on the pro's and con's of "centre-based" text vs whole word chunking and agree this one works well after you get used to it. One thing I did notice was large words can be missed if shown infrequently. I also tried to move the text to left justification. It did not seem to solve this. It would be interesting if you had some training tests to calibrate your speed and check your comprehension. Read a 1800 word essay, answer some questions to see if you are reading at your optimum.

All in all, the app works for me.

Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly

#42

Post by bootload » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 3:19 AM UTC

Andi wrote: post #15

This is crap. You read a TEXT. A text is not just an array of words but an array of words linked to each other in context. So you don't get information out of your text very well if you see one word after each other. It's useful to go back and re-think what you have read sometimes. The other drawback is that information is unequally distributed in the text and some parts can be read in a quicker way than others. Text…

"... You read a TEXT. A text is not just an array of words but an array of words linked to each other in context. So you don't get information out of your text very well if you see one word after each other. ..."

That was my first reaction as well. The difference is I tried a quick experiment to see if what I thought was what was actually happening. While individual words read out do appear chunked maybe gains in reading can be made by pre-parsing the text. I noticed it was much like reading a piece of text out aloud and the only stumbling blocks long words.

Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly

#43

Post by albertcardona » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 3:54 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #34

soundsop wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the MindMap software you're referring to: http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/mindmap/main.php ?

http://freemind.sourceforge.net FreeMind is the best product out there because of its speed and its emphasis on folding. The latter part might not make any sense until you play around with it for a while and start making really big maps.

Folders in a file system, accessed from a terminal, do it for me. And find/grep traverse them when I need to.

Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly

#44

Post by Baltropreneur » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 4:12 AM UTC

remanc wrote: post #27

Just thought I'd weigh in since I'm the author of the app. I was pleasantly surprised to see my little pet project from a couple years ago make it onto hacker news, since this is the first site I go to to read my daily news. Anyway, the intended purpose for spreeder is not to supplement your reading (I personally don't use it for that purpose), but rather as a training tool. The one (and probably only) thing I got ou…

Awesome all around! Congrats!

Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly

#45

Post by jgamman » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 8:32 AM UTC

i've always thought this would be useful for reading books using an iPod nano screen or cellphone etc. i'm sure that if your commute was long enough, you'd find a pleasant rather than arduous speed for reading after a couple hours practice. The earliest reference i can think of for this idea was a Heinlein novel where he basically described web/hypertext (not sure where he picked it up, he was pretty upfront about only needing to be 6 months ahead of the pack to appear to be a predictive genius! ;-)

Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly

#46

Post by eru » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 11:08 AM UTC

mtrimpe wrote: post #20

nickb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a speed reading course long time ago and even though they had some interesting points about how to read, it was mostly filled with complete bullshit. Comprehension always trumps speed. I'm always surprised by people who say "I've read that book in an hour" or something like that. When I read, I get hundreds of ideas and have hundreds of questions in my head and I usually either write them down or look up the r…

You should try PhotoReading ... the basic principle is that you 'scan' the pages once and then skim through the book in your mind, at your leisure, focusing on comprehension of the text. Not that I ever learnt how to do this though, not even after I put a full 15 minutes of effort into it. Concerning this kind of spead-reading; in my experience it's great for alpha-subjects (is that English? It means non-scientific i…

I chose a subject with higher information density.

Re: Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly

#47

Post by louislouis » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 5:18 PM UTC

wow what an awesome app. I love it! I'm a slow reader cos I subvocalize and re-read words all the time. So many times I've stumbled on an interesting article but gave up reading cos it took too long. Now I can just blast it into this app and get it done.