Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

I love you made something and open sourced it, however your multiple mentions of $3.5 million ignores a lot of what goes into software development:

- Most of Spritz's work went into the R&D, not the actual code. Anyone can copy the end result.

- Zethos ignores a lot of the science that makes Spritz work so well.

- Spritz does localization, not just best-guess-English.

- Usability (as in, how do I even run Zethos on, say, a book?) is important.

- Spritz has an SDK for Android, iOS, JavaScript and more. They support Google Glass, watches, etc. Ubiquity is important.

- Marketing, bizdev, support, design, QA, legal, HR.

- Money raised is a horrible metric for code. Even revenue wouldn't work here.

Think about it this way: a ton of people cloned Flappy Birds in HTML when it came out, but none of them are worth anything. I could do a decent rendition of Facebook in a few hours, but that doesn't make me Mark Zuckerberg.

View on HN

> - Most of Spritz's work went into the R&D, not the actual code. Anyone can copy the end result.

conveniently ignoring the fact that most of it was not actually spritz' research. the only "extension" if you so will is that colored cursor. acereader[1] for example has been around for 10 years(or almost 10 years). go to google scholar, and search for saccadic eye movement. for example here is a paper from 1992! [2]. here's another one from 2006 [3]

> Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of text has been reported to foster higher reading rates than presentation in a continuous text (CT) format, possibly because scanning eye movements are minimized. We investigated how this might be relevant for persons with congenital nystagmus (CN).

the fact that spritz may even get credited with this is the very problem of our buzz society. i refuse to believe that creating a crossplatform sdk or "researching" the fact that using a fixed cursor to reduce said saccadic eye movement even further requires 3 million usd. don't get me wrong i'm a little happy that they created enough buzz for this to become popular. but if we really need that much money to do basic tasks, god help us.

> - Zethos ignores a lot of the science that makes Spritz work so well.

:D like what?

> - Usability (as in, how do I even run Zethos on, say, a book?) is important.

how do you run spritz? spritz is an SDK(!). it's not an ebook reader, it's not a website reader it's an sdk. it's up to you to integrate it in your app.

EDIT: this was written before parent appended SDK information to his post

> - Money raised is a horrible metric for code. Even revenue wouldn't work here.

> Think about it this way: a ton of people cloned Flappy Birds in HTML when it came out, but none of them are worth anything. I could do a decent rendition of Facebook in a few hours, but that doesn't make me Mark Zuckerberg.

your analogy is completely faulty. first of all mark zuckerberg didn't "make" facebook contrary to popular belief. second, flappy bird itself was already a clone that got popular, similar to spritz. third, no, you can't just roll your own facebook in a few hours. you can create something that looks like it, being far from functionally the same. spritz is different. create a spritz clone though? see below:

https://github.com/OnlyInAmerica/OpenSpritz-Android

the difference? it's not a library. meaning noone can really reuse the code provided in here. i doubt spritz is going to be that easy to integrate with academic pdf's. though i have a feeling that that's what they might be using their couple million funding on. i have a todo list that's at least 5 years old with a speed reader for pdf's in the list. but is it worth investing time in? sure, if you give me 3 million(i'm not actually being fully serious here, so spare me logical inconsistency analysis of my post)

[1] http://www.acereader.com/

[2] http://www.citeulike.org/group/6810/article/3309870

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16909075

EDIT: there have already been a few rsvp browser extensions for both firefox, and chrome over the last couple of years, but there never was any buzz around any of them.

http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/11/windows/internet/reasy-r...

http://youtu.be/MuszcoVL3lA

The major missing feature appears to be intelligent hyphenation. Long words should be broken up by syllable, not raw character count. it's missing the little hash mark at the focus letter as well, but that's an easy fix. intelligent hyphenation likely requires some real NLP work, or at least importing a real dictionary of some kind

You don’t acutally know what Spritz’ research exactly looked like. Maybe they tested thouthands of configurations (custom fonts, hypthenation, color coding of clauses etc.) to find that the optimal one is still rather simple (single words, monospaced font with one red highlighted, centered letter).

I want to see a decent rendition of Facebook that was made in just a few hours. ;)

Google+? Sure seems like they only spent a few hours on it anyway haha

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I don't have a study to back it up, but in my experience speed-reading multiple words at a time is much better for comprehension compared to the Spritz way of a single word. You can afford to slow down (which helps around blinks) and still have a high effective WPM rate.

I wrote http://velocireaderapp.com specifically to speed-read multiple words better than existing apps (splitting sentences around punctuation the way I prefer). From the emails I get, it seems most users prefer to read multiple words, with 2-3 being the most common length. I should track this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com