SpeedReader

  ATTENTION: I have no time to continue developing SpeedReader. If you want to
  pick it up and continue working on it, please contact me! Or just take it over
  and start working :-)    
                               Have fun, Martin Ankerl

SpeedReader helps you improve your reading speed. It is:

simple,
interesting,
challenging, and
fun to play with.

From a developers point of view, SpeedReader is extensible (Plugins), and as simple as possible (but no simpler). I only add functionality if it improves the above stated goals of SpeedReader. It is written in Ruby. [Why ruby?]

Show Me!

Everybody loves screenshots. So, here is one that shows the Speed Reader plugin. It currently plays back Arthur C Clark with 3 phrases per seconds, and a maximum width of 18 letters which results in 522 words per minute for this text; which is a speed quite above average. The mini overview on the right highlightes the currently displayed phrase, which gives a good overview of where one currently is in the file.

How?

SpeedReader comes with several different modules, each focusing on a different aspect necessary for speed reading.

These trainings are available:

SpeedRead - Train your comprehension. SpeedRead is also a pretty cool method to read large text files.
Flash - Improve your eye span
FlashWars - Train comprehension and eye span with this game. What is your highscore?
ReadTest - Gauge your reading speed.

Installation

You need to have [Ruby] and [FXRuby 1.0] installed. If you use windows, you just need to download and install [Ruby windows installer].

Download the [latest version of SpeedReader]
Extract
Start

Known Bugs

I have stopped working on SpeedReader. I need someone who wants to take over development! Here are some things that need to be done:

SpeedReader (version 0.6) does now work with FXRuby 1.2 and 1.4 (after some adjustment in the code, replacing fox12 with fox14).
The highscore window can be closed with the ESC key.
If you cannot start speedreader any more, the configuration file has commited suizide. Please remove the file .speedreader from your home directory (for windows users, this should be in the directory C:/Documents and Settings/yourusername
The mini-overview windows has problems with very large files (about 2 MB).
SpeedReader is slow when loading large files. I am pretty shure this can be done about 10 times faster.

Feed Back

FeedBack - Please tell me what you think about SpeedReader!

I use the FeedBack page to create a ToDo list.