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

161–170 of 213 posts

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#161

Post by pkghost »

ghc wrote: post #12

I've never thought much about my reading speed before, but after trying this and finding the deafault setting a bit slow, I decided to compare my natural reading speed. I was able to read the article I chose in about 85% of the time of the default 400WPM of the bookmarklet (I read the article first with a timer, and then reread with the bookmarklet), which would put me at 470WPM. With Squirt, I was only able to get u…

Great idea! I would love to experiment with different presentation modes. There's a discussion in here somewhere about using n-grams to choose the right phrase boundaries, which sounds like a much harder problem than I'm equipped to solve in a weekend :)

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#162

Post by dgfvd »

There's a bug that I can't really fathom:

when reading this paragraph:

"The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world. While studying children from the U.S., researchers have suggested a developmental timeline for what is called “folkbiological reasoning.” These studies posit that it is not until children are around 7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals and begin to understand that humans are one animal among many. Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood."

it seems to stop displaying words directly after the U.S., string. I had to restart it after that.

Another note: words that contain hyphens or em dashes are not tokenized so you get huge words that are impossible to read at speed.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#163

Post by wavesounds »

sirclueless wrote: post #159
pkghost wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey timtadh! Spritz Inc's blog ( http://www.spritzinc.com/blog/ ) has some interesting things to say about word recognition, primarily that it's related to a word's unique shape more than length. Words that are less than 4 characters long are actually harder to recognize due to their having more visual analogues than longer words, and words over 7 characters are start looking "long" more than any other shape characte…

That may be true for familiar words, but a long, uncommon word is unavoidably going to take more processing. Flashing "unforgettable" is probably fine, but I'd want a split second pause on "periodontia" or "imbroglie".

I agree, If the app could maintain a frequency table containing how common words are in normal usage and slow down more for the most uncommon words that would be awesome.

Until then slowing down for longer words at least would definitely help. This could at least be an option if the authors aren't convinced its a good idea yet, then A/B test the amount of usage for people who use the option compared with those that don't.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#165

Post by jamesfranco »

pkghost wrote: post #158
jamesfranco wrote: post #35

Does anyone know of a speed-reading API another than Spritz?

OP here. I'm using readability's old code (arc90) to extract text, and you can use squirt on any page you like--just embed a link with the same JS as the bookmarklet. If you want a real API, add a github issue ( http://www.github.com/cameron/squirt ) to remind me--it's on my project bucket list :)

Thanks for the reply! I thought Squirt used Spritz technology?

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#166

Post by nedwin »

pkghost wrote: post #156
iandanforth wrote: post #88

Using a "let me google that for you" link on the problem with software patents seems unnecessary. Why imply your users are lazy? At first I thought the contrast between "whose patents are pending" and that link was a great bit of commentary, but that link was an unexpected slap. I was expecting an EFF link.

Oops—did not wake up wanting to slap you :) My thought was more along the lines of "if you're not aware that this is a problem, here's a list of big/obvious headlines to pick from, or just walk away with the sense that there is an active conversation about the issue"

I clicked the first link and wasn't convinced. Surely you would want to find the most convincing article that you could find and link to that?

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#167

Post by ta9876 »

Mojah wrote: post #13

This project may consider a name-change, as googling for this after it's gone from the HN homepage will trigger ... interesting results. Especially if you're trying to show this to a co-worker in the office. Note to my boss: I'm sorry!

> on('squirt.again', startSquirt);

https://github.com/cameron/squirt/blob/gh-pages/bm/squirt.js...

priceless!

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#169

Post by ripperdoc »

Nice layout for this one, a tad better than OpenSpritz.

One issue: numbers with points get split up, which is very confusing. E.g. 16.4 becomes 16. and then 4.

Another issue: It sometimes starts reading out script code, e.g. here. http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2014/03/05/amazons-wa...

One feature request: Keyboard shortcuts to pause and maybe to step back or "zoom" out to see the whole last/current sentence before continuing.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#170

Post by MaybiusStrip »

Eh... I was one of the many developers that had the same idea to write a bookmarklet/extension implementation of Spritz. I completed something functional (a few hours of coding for any JS dev) and then discovered that there were at least a dozen repos in Github for the exact same purpose. Plus I realized I just couldn't get used to reading this way, so I gave up to focus on my job + other side projects.

Quite frankly this is a pretty lazy implementation. It doesn't even slow down for long words, and the highlighted letter is too far to the left most of the time. But the snazzy .io page and sleek interface probably will do way more for the tool's popularity than actually improving features, so kudos to the Author for the smart marketing.

I'm rooting for the open source versions.

Post reply on HN