At first glance: wow that's ugly. Then I read it. Fast. Consuming nearly at a paragraph at a glance when I usually can digest only a fragment of a sentence up to a couple of sentence. It's not attractive, but it is clever and innovative - well done!
Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
221–230 of 273 posts
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of those are works that should be speed-read. Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Epictetus, the Qur'an, and (above all) the Bible should be rolled around the mouth, tasted deeply, and either made a part of you or thoroughly spit out if they are found indigestible. If your mechanical reading speed is the limiting factor in reading these works, you're doing it wrong.
Why the Bible above all?
Very many concepts, words, metaphors, etc come from the King James translation.
Ignoring any religious stuff - it's a good read.
EDIT: corrected my st / king error!
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#223This has been around for a little while, hasn't it? Like, a year or two at least? I'm reasonably sure I've seen this website before... Not to say it's not interesting / not a valuable submission. I love the idea, and it seems like it might help me read faster, which is always cool. Just wondering if my memory is correct.
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#224Hmmmm... I'm sure it'll need a linked scientific study to actually back up the claim. (And every speed-reading product I've seen has usually had a decrease in comprehension rate...) It's a clever idea, but anecdotally, from my experience, I'm finding it slows down my reading -- I'm having a hard time processing the blurbs because I don't read "linearly" -- I scan content to find the relevant parts, and the color chan…
I don't understand why you'd change foreground colours instead of background colours.... Either way, quick experiment shows it to be horrid for me.
This fails because paper does not EMIT light. A white background on a screen essentially forces people to read text off the surface of a light bulb all day. Dumb.
At least every modern GUI except the Mac's allows you to set up a decent, non-inverse color scheme like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/528235909/in/set-7...
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why the Bible above all?
Because the King James bible had considerable effort to translate original texts into best possible English, preserving meaning but also creating a suitably "glorious" text. Very many concepts, words, metaphors, etc come from the King James translation. Ignoring any religious stuff - it's a good read. EDIT: corrected my st / king error!
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#226>A study designed and carried out at Stanford University showed an average reading speed increase of over 10 percent for first time users of BeeLine Reader. Many seasoned users experience speed increases of 25 to 30 percent! So why isn't the study linked? Regardless of whether or not the claims are true, who in the hell decided for red and blue for the demo's default? The blues/grays themes look okay. IMO, saturated…
I took their test and came out 2% faster (likely statistical noise more than actual improvement). Regardless, I attribute the improvement to the obscure content in the non beeline reading passage. I'm curious what others experienced?
Then I took it again with a different subject but I timed it.
It took me ~81 sec to read the colored, ~92 to read the black. It said I read 23% faster with BeeLine. What gives?
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
What techniques do you use? I read at around 600wpm, and increasing it by 50-100% seems pretty daunting.
I trained a bit speed reading when I was in higschool from some book that was translated from Russian (sorry, no idea what was the book) the main idea there was to: 1) not saying words with inner voice 2) not reading letter by letter (seeing whole word at once) 3) reading by connected words not only word by word 4) there was eye training exercise, the idea was that you had to train vision a bit to be able to read mor…
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#228Nice! Can BeeLine be made to work with MagicScroll? Currenly if i click one bookmarklet the other one breaks.
BeeLine doesn't detect line breaks.
Instead it puts a span around every character and sets its color manually.
Anyway the individual spans cause issues for MagicScroll but it should be relatively easy to retrofit MagicScroll to add the beeline gradient to each line.
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why the Bible above all?
Because the King James bible had considerable effort to translate original texts into best possible English, preserving meaning but also creating a suitably "glorious" text. Very many concepts, words, metaphors, etc come from the King James translation. Ignoring any religious stuff - it's a good read. EDIT: corrected my st / king error!
A point of view on King Jame Bible: https://bible.org/article/why-i-do-not-think-king-james-bibl...
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#230well, it significantly mangles things on The Guardian. basically, all of the little "NSA" tags in this article: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/governm... get wiped out, making the text difficult to understand. Also, be careful to wait for it to work. I didn't think it worked and clicked it a second time. I ended up with funfetti colors, not smooth gradients.