I find it counterintuitive that this helped experienced readers more. It didn't make a difference for me in their test, and I read constantly. I would suspect this line coloring would help a less experienced reader more.
Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
21–30 of 273 posts
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#22Is there any scientific evidence supporting this?
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#23Totally reminds me of the days when Yahoo messenger was used, and they had that fading, gradient text. Super cool.
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#24Anyone else the numerous AOL chat plugins that used to do this back in the day? e.g. http://www.tpasoft.com/fadeit/
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#25I read a lot and I read really fast too. So line skipping is a problem, especially on longer lines.
This thing combines the old Readability bookmarklet with the gradient. I saw the improvement right away, following the line is much easier now!
tl;dr - this is awesome!
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#26can i get this as a firefox extension?
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#27>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 red and blue and probably the two worst colors to use together in a design.
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#28Interesting concept. Do they have a research paper out describing the results in more detail?
A couple of problems: 1) beelining doesn't work well with links in text 2) Doesn't work on Hacker News at all.
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#29I'm initially inclined to dismiss this as ugly and distracting, especially with the default colors being very similar to the traditional link/visited HTML colors. It would be worth exploring further if the claimed improvements are true. I'd especially be interested in exploring ways to incorporate this into better designed color schemes so that it doesn't look so much like a unicorn vomited on the page while preservi…
"Nice" colorschemes are probably less useful here since nice usually means harmonious. The point is to maximize your brain's ability to unconsciously distinguish them, so red/blue is a good choice if you need a lot of help. If you're more sensitive to colors, then the grayscale is probably a better choice.
Re: Show HN: Ditch Black Text to Read Faster, Easier
#30At 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!