Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

squirt.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 213 posts

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#71

Post by gagzilla »

felipeerias wrote: post #43
Touche wrote: post #24

Really like it. The only downside is that you have no idea how far along in the article you are. Would be nice if there was a % complete shown somewhere.

You would have to move your eyes to check it.

It should be possible to change the color of the selected letter to indicate where you are on the page. Alternate option could be to position the word on the (current) vertical line to indicate where you are on the whole page. I'd like to believe that if the text is reasonable amount- the transition for either would be gradual.

Hoping the open source fairy sprinkles some dust on this one.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#72

Post by devindotcom »

It's fun to see these ideas multiply and combine, but experts on reading comprehension seem to think RSVP didn't work even back in the 70s when it was being first tested:

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/not-so-fast-speed-read...

Comprehension was worse than skimming, apparently. I can see this as a thing to flash headlines/latest news to you but anything longer than a sentence or two... not so sure.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#73

Post by robertjwebb »

eik3_de wrote: post #58
gohrt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think german words like this would benefit from automatic syllable colorization -- slightly changing the shade of grey to make the syllable boundaries more obvious?

Not sure. E.g. 'Kinderbetreuungsmöglichkeiten' means 'child care possibilities', that's three words in one. I suppose the brain just needs more time to parse that. But just counting characters to determine delay won't cut it, since 'Mississippi' is quite quick to parse.

Couldn't you split compound words so the components appear in sequence? e.g.

Kinder- -betreuungs- -möglichkeiten

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#74

Post by _dark_matter_ »

seferphier wrote: post #70
timtadh wrote: post #45

What I noticed using this to read a couple Ars Technica articles was it worked really well for short words. But, if a longer complicated word appeared, at say 600 wpm, I would miss it. It seems like an adaptive algorithm based on word length would improve the speed even more allowing it to go faster on short common words and slow down on longer unusual words. Also, there is bug that sometimes causes two words to appe…

Agreed. They need to slow down the speed for longer words. Otherwise, it would be perfect.

It seems that Spritz splits long words into multiple parts, using - on the ends of the components. That seems easy enough to implement.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#76

Post by jvanenk »

timtadh wrote: post #45

What I noticed using this to read a couple Ars Technica articles was it worked really well for short words. But, if a longer complicated word appeared, at say 600 wpm, I would miss it. It seems like an adaptive algorithm based on word length would improve the speed even more allowing it to go faster on short common words and slow down on longer unusual words. Also, there is bug that sometimes causes two words to appe…

It's also doesn't work well for hyphenated words: 'step-by-step' and 'hastily-implemented' are flashed up all at once.

(Regardless of whether or not those are properly hyphenated.)

Edit: But this is still very cool.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#77

Post by yukichan »

yuchi wrote: post #5

This is very well executed. But it doesn’t work on HTTPS :\

Yes, this (Chrome not allowing the script to be run) is a good thing. The bookmarklet javascript needs to be served over HTTPS and any communication it makes also need to be over SSL. Seriously if you aren't defaulting to HTTPS for your website and or service in 2014 you're doing it wrong. Plain text HTTP needs to go the way of telnet.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#78

Post by mr_spothawk »

kybernetyk wrote: post #38
philmcc wrote: post #6

I'm pretty sure this is just a big middle finger to Spritz. In the most hilarious way possible. Or am I misinterpreting the acknowledgments? ;)

Uhm, what's the difference between Spritz an Squirt.io? I've looked at both demos and I can't see much difference in the concept. Though the Spritz website is more ... ehm ... bullshit bingo compliant it seems. Am I assuming right that the joke lies in Spritz being a VC funded startup and squirt.io just a weekend hack?

>Am I assuming right that the joke lies in Spritz being a VC funded startup and squirt.io just a weekend hack?

Squirt.io was in stealth mode for 6 years!!

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#79

Post by AlexSolution »

I've tried several of these, and I really think jetzt https://github.com/ds300/jetzt is the best one. It has a progress bar, keyboard shortcuts, and I particularly like the way it wraps words in enclosing elements - like quotations and parentheses - when the word being displayed is within the enclosure.
Post reply on HN