Show HN: Artiklur, a new kind of speed reader | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Artiklur, a new kind of speed reader

artiklur.com

28 pointshudbuddy29 comments

This was too slow for me. I'm not sure what problem it solves, but maybe I'm not the target market. The user interface was good and I thought it was certainly superior to those speed readers that just flash up individual words or phrases.

Apologies for this! I didn't realize until just now how intense this is on the CPU. On slower machines the speed wasn't hitting its actual rate due to lag.

I lowered the word count per page and it seems to be running much better. The scrolling feature also adds a performance hit that I did not know about, so I have disabled that by default. Running at full capacity, the app should get up to about 900-1000 WPM which is about 4* average adult reading speed. Sorry for all the issues guys :( It's really cool when you get into it, I promise. I'll continue to try to resolve issues as they come up!

I found it a lot more comfortable once I got it up to 6-700wpm, though I'm not sure I'd switch to it over reading the regular way - but I can see keeping it bookmarked for when I encounter the occasional wall of text with no or few paragraph breaks. I feel like I would prefer the text to slide rather than page, having it all change at once is a bit disorienting and seems to be at odds with the basic design concept. But it's early days and obviously you're going to go through a bunch of iterations.

Anyway, I think it's the best speed-reading tool I've seen, and I'm usually very negative about apps of this sort.

Wow, that's impressive. I'm most comfortable around 300-400 :p I really appreciate your feedback! And that's an honor to hear. I tried to make it very customizable, and do find that sometimes I prefer the text not move at all (achieved by unchecking 'Scroll Automatically'). I hope you'll continue to use it, and I'll continue to improve it :)

Shame it doesn't work at all on IE 9; I have to use IE at work, and I do a lot of reading here, so this tool would be fantastic if I could use it... or even see what it does.

For texts that are suited for skimming, perhaps less interesting texts, I can see tools like these being useful.

But I hope you're not reading novels this way. Increasing the speed might help you finish more books, but to what end? Should books also be one of those areas in life where we constantly have to perform and stay on top? If I read Pride and Prejudice I'll do it for my own enjoyment, at whatever pace I like. I kind of like that no one is timing my reading.

> If I read Pride and Prejudice I'll do it for my own enjoyment, at whatever pace I like.

...and some people will want to read it fast, with a tool like this. There are more nuanced answers to why someone might want to speed read certain texts but in response to your post I believe that is enough.

Even as an avid reader, I know there is a time and place for different techniques and there's no harm in general to using tools like this (even for novels, etc.). I do think that people should, if they can, learn to enjoy reading at some point and that if this became the norm for reading in school there would be a problem, but until then...

I wholeheartedly agree. I chose those texts for their accessibility and simply as a demonstration.

That said, I would encourage folks to try it on stimulating pieces as well. It's great for keeping your mind focused. And as I state somewhere in the site, with all of the options I've built in, there really is no pressure to read quickly.

This despite the fact that it can certainly be used for speed reading as well.

The text I was reading scrolled off the top of the page as I was reading it. Also, I found the scrolling kind of distracting. Though perhaps it's not meant to scroll so fast at all?

Edit: This was on the latest Chrome, on MacOS10.9.2 btw.

Ah, this is a bug I thought I had fixed. (I don't have the resources to test on Safari unfortunately.) The text is supposed to remain almost stagnant on the page while the text scrolls to keep it in place. If you disable automatic scrolling it can function normally though.

The format solves the problem of wanting to reread a previous sentence.

One of the main problem with speed readers is it can't handle user pauses. I may want to ponder on a point but speed readers can't pause. May be a eye tracking system can help but then how do you handle someone wanting to reread a passage. Maybe some other gestures are needed or go the KB/mouse/swipe interaction way.

The problem with your format is also that it takes space while spreeder app displays only a single word but has the problems I mentioned above.

I actually created this app just for myself initially to solve that exact problem. If you left click while you are reading, the text will come to a halt, allowing you to catch up. There are many other shortcuts like this, highlighted at http://artiklur.com/Shortcuts

if you add user interaction then the spreeder app concept itself can be optimised.

The way you get to read fast is because your eyes don't have to scan text and can focus on one area. With your app, your eyes move around and that slows down the reading to the extent that you ask why bother.

Speed readers IMO are useful to scan through documents and ideally targeted at those functions.

I would contest this. Scanning our eyes and being able to look back to previous words as we read is an important part of comprehension and is something that physically cannot be done with an app like spreeder.

Not mention, scanning words is much more natural for me!

Yes. Scanning is needed but not for all use cases.

If you add user interaction, then spreeder could add a sideways pop up widget that showed the whole paragraph with highlighted word. That solves the problem of reading quick as well as pausing and scanning back.

My concern was that your app didn't help me read quick. Maybe it was the issues you mentioned. Are you sure you can read it quick if the app is optimised?

I've been a horribly slow reader my whole life, but more than that I'm just easily distracted. I find with Artiklur i can read at about 400wpm average for 20+ minutes with equal comprehension.

I really encourage you to give it a try (I think I've fixed the issues--just make sure auto scrolling is off if it doesn't work on your device). I'm not trying to sell anything here, I just took the time to clean it up so other people could try it too. I really love it.

Also, very interesting point about spreeder. I'm not sure it would feel the same, but i'd like to see it

The fact that you have to move your eyes though, doesn't that defeat the innovation speed readers are bringing onto the table?

I dig it, I'm going to give the bookmarklet a go. I appreciate the keybinding of space bar to pause, thats a big pain in the tookas with RSVP apps, i find. Adding simple keybindings for increasing and decreasing speed on the fly would be killer, as I found myself fiddling back and forth with the mouse until I found a comfortable speed.

WASD for increasing speed and turning pages :) http://artiklur.com/Shortcuts for the full list of keybindings

At first I found the text scrolling to be distracting, so I turned it off. Then I tried turing on text masking. Frankly the whole process seems to be distracting because that did not help either. Unhiding the text just causes my eyes to jump around rather then focus on the text i'm reading.

Can't believe nobody has mentioned Spritz. http://www.spritzinc.com/

Try it out. You're welcome.

I mention Spritz in the website http://artiklur.com/About

It looks cool but please please please add a number to the "Speed" slider. There's currently no way to tell how many WPM I'm reading at.

It really seems to help focus attention. It would be interesting to do some research on this and see if reading retention improves (as well as speed).

On Firefox for Android on a tablet, this site is pretty broken.

Seems to be fairly broken on Firefox (Nightly, at least) too, though in somewhat different ways.

I'm curious what your issues look like. I've tested it on all I can (IE10+, Firefox latest, Chrome latest, Droid Chrome and iPhone Safari), and all seem to work quite well. The scrolling feature does get hairy on slower devices due to hardware limitations.

don't understand. I pasted some text. Then pressed play. A couple of words were highlighted (out of 20ish) before the remaining darkened text flew off the page.

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