31–40 of 85 posts
Such a solution applies for text only instances. How would you solve it when graphs come into play? Display a graph next to it and pause the text?
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.
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Nice! Intuitively, i thought there would be a toggle to play, and that I would be able to maybe pause by holding, and then scrubbing up/down (or left/right). But great work! Will try on a longer text.
Yeah the toggle is there-double press and it locks it into playing continually. But if you didn't find it, that’s on me because it’s not discoverable. There is that line of text at the top which says hold to read, left/right to scrub, and obviously if that isn’t making clear there is another mode of play lurking just behind a gesture no one ever brings up. I did default to hold because the read stops the instant you…
After reading a bit longer, I have one more nit on the auto mode. I expected a single tap to take me out of the auto mode. Again, awesome work!
Very nice implemenation re usability. I have seen this before, somewhere, years ago - perhaps even on HN. Such a solution applies for text only instances. How would you solve it when graphs come into play? Display a graph next to it and pause the text?
Epub makes it manageable because the images are just files in the zip. They are positioned at a set point in the spine, so I know exactly where in the word stream a figure belongs. Show it there, pause, and wait for a press to continue instead of auto advancing. You can pace text, but you can't pace a graph. There’s no sensible way to guess how long someone needs to view it.
The detail I keep reconsidering is captions. Right now, a caption flows into the stream as regular words, so you see "Figure 3 shows the relationship between" appearing one word at a time with no figure in sight. Those should be linked to the image and displayed alongside it instead.
Your question also made me realize that tables should probably be images too. Extracting text flattens a table into a series of values in reading order, which is worse than useless. Rendering the region as an image and pausing would be much better than what I do now.
Pdf is more challenging since I’d have to determine which images are real figures and which are rules and logos. Storage increases significantly too; everything is stored in IndexedDB on your device. So, a book full of plates is very different from a novel. I’ll probably need to downscale on import.
Where did you see it before? I’d really like to check out how they handled it.
There seems to be no way of changing the WPM setting after startup.
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…
I already have the info on paragraph and chapter breaks in the reader already, so this is more of a rendering issue rather than info display. The reason why I particularly like your first suggestion is that it lets you know something like a poem or different paragraph style is about to start so you can change your reading pattern accordingly rather than stumbling into it when you're already in prose mode reading at 400 wpm.
On the 2 modes thing, I feel like there isn't really a good reason to do it the other way. It was more that it happened that way rather than it needed to happen that way, and you're right that the main one should probably scroll and have bookmarks rather than making the user make a choice between 2 different interfaces.
Theme circles is definitely a solid suggestion, being a more practical implementation of visualising the underlying theme. Being able to see the actual colours of the background/text rather than an abstract blob is good, so that's a definite maybe.
Code isn't public yet, but extensions are something I've wanted to try for a while. In fact, someone sent me an email this morning asking precisely for that, to be able to paste a link and read articles. It can't be done directly in the page because of CORS policies, and doing it server side would involve routing the reading of articles through my server which is probably not ideal for everyone. An extension that pulls the article from whatever page you're on would be the most ideal version of this, from a privacy standpoint, so I'm considering it.
And finally, your last point is actually the first pushback I've had all day on the controls/interface. As far as 4 other people having difficulty finding the thing, I think you're right that something needs to be done, but I don't think hiding the options behind discovery is really the answer. There is a conflation in my brain between 'controlls are easily found and accessible' and 'controls are not hidden beneath layers of menus/bookmarks', and I think it's a false conflation, I had been treating them as one. Thanks for that.
I like it. Feels solid and cool. I read a lot of books with some images and graphs how they get processed?
Thanks. To be frank, the images and graphs are the weak spot at the moment. The parsers extract just the text layer and that’s the extent of it, so images are just discarded and you don’t even get told there was one. Tables are worse than dropped - PDF extraction de-flattens them into a stream of values in reading order, so you just get a torrent of disconnected numbers flitting past which don’t mean a great deal. I…
There seems to be no way of changing the WPM setting after startup.
Was just about to say that. Beyond that, it's pretty cool though so far.
Which would be a great answer, except that several other folks have made the same comment today, so I'm afraid it's my fault and not yours. I checked it myself; the hint line in the reader says "Hold to read · ←→ scrub" and nothing about speed control. You followed the instructions I published, which were wrong. Just fixed it; a discoverability pass is now at the top of the queue this week.
Thanks for flagging it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah the toggle is there-double press and it locks it into playing continually. But if you didn't find it, that’s on me because it’s not discoverable. There is that line of text at the top which says hold to read, left/right to scrub, and obviously if that isn’t making clear there is another mode of play lurking just behind a gesture no one ever brings up. I did default to hold because the read stops the instant you…
Oh okay, didn't notice it! Yeah, maybe the discoverability. After reading a bit longer, I have one more nit on the auto mode. I expected a single tap to take me out of the auto mode. Again, awesome work!