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Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read

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Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read

#102
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also obnoxious and utterly frustrating as an end-user. (I know that’s not the aspect of it you’re remarking on but rather the monetisation, but I find their demo just so painful and the entire idea quite ill-conceived. Scrolljacking is always bad. Stop trying to take over the page flow and just make it a normal page that I can scroll as I desire.)

I think the idea is great but the greediness on display here kind of disgusts me. Here is something that could legitimately be useful for many people, help the consumption of human knowledge when open-sourced, but instead it is patented and monetized to the maximum extent. Super distasteful.

I believe we’re talking about different things. I’m talking about fullPage.js, but I think you’re talking about Bionic Reading.

Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately I had to make bad experiences That has to be the most unfortunate choice of wording ! More seriously though, does BR work in your native Swiss German ?

Sorry for my bad English traceroute66... I came across BR during my studies as a typographic designer. There was a language problem there. That's why I realized that reading and listening are completely different. You can understand a language by listening to it. But reading the same language does not mean that you can understand it.

No problem, but the second half of my question was genuine.

I can't imagine this working too well with German words ? e.g. how much of Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung, Lebensabschnittpartner or Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän would you need to highlight ?

I don't speak German, but surely with compound words, your concept doesn't work that well ?

Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read

#104
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ich danke Dir vielmals noeltock. Ja ich hatte bereits zwei Browser Extensions (Chrome, Firefox) als Beta-Versionen. Aber die Erkenntnis war, dass sehr viele Websites — da diese ja individuell erstellt werden — keine gute Experience ergab. Deswegen habe ich mit Silvio Rizzi (Reeder5) getestet, wie es am besten nutzbar gemacht werden kann. Hab aus Fehlern gelernt, aber wir denken dass es viele Entwickler gibt, die BR i…

The problem is that since you've patented these 3 lines of code, I'm not sure many other can legally write a browser extension for this functionality. I'd like to use this in Safari on iOS, for example, but... I can't.

Just change the logic ever so slightly, I’m sure it’s possible to do this in many ways.

Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read

#106

There is a similar technology that flashes the words in place as you read. I remember it making the rounds a few years ago. https://spritz.com/

There's an open source version that works as a simple bookmarklet here: https://github.com/ds300/jetzt

Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read

#107
post #22

This does indeed seem to work for me, but the repeated emphasis on the patents and trademarks makes me suspicious. It looks like a company who cares much more about patent royalties than about their invention - whom I would never be willing to give my money to. Having seen the principle, I could write a browser extension in an hour. I suppose I'll have to wait 25 years (or whatever the French patent expiry length is)…

> I suppose I'll have to wait 25 years (or whatever the French patent expiry length is), though.

Is that how patents work in general?

I always thought (and could be very wrong here) that if a patent exists for something but you've developed an alternative something in total isolation without seeing the patent then you would have free reign on how to design and develop your thing without violating the patent.

Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read

#109
I can totally see how it could benefit some people but for me I don't find it works, I feel like it forces a slow on few letters words or group of words that I could have read in one glance. Also I tried a bit of speed reading and I feel like I already read faster than I can process information and that my eyes are not the bottleneck when deep reading.
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