
Squirt: Speed read the web, one word at a time - danlev
http://squirt.io
======
return0
This kind of things are gimmicky at best, and an awful reading experience at
worst. The time it takes for your eyes to adjust to the blinking letters is
larger than the saccadic movement, and a single saccade reads a bunch of words
instead, allowing you to both comprehend the sentence immediately, and also
easily skip back-forward in case of errors.

~~~
sillysaurus3
On the other hand, I found it incredibly useful. My mind often wanders when I
read, and Squirt solves that.

I found their choice of color scheme jarring. They highlight a specific letter
in blue for some reason, and you get a strange optical sensation after staring
at that shade of blue for too long. I had to download their js and css, rehost
it myself, search through it for the color code, and change it to black. But
then I found it very useful.

~~~
Torn
I suspect that's done to help anchor your focus, i.e. so your eyes don't move
too much

~~~
nnnnni
Perhaps adding a little bit of grey to the blue would help?

------
jmstout
Previous HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7385634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7385634)

------
orillian
While it is pretty interesting for quick reading of small snippets of text it
begins to fail when trying to build up a comprehension map of a large body of
information. Especially if that information is of a highly technical nature.
The lack of comprehension is compounded; the more unfamiliar you are with the
concepts at hand.

One of the things that we do without thinking about it is make associations
between things we know and things we don't know when reading. This allows us
to provide a framework for the words and phrases we don't understand using the
ones that we do, thus pulling the meaning out of the context. Spritz and by
extension Squirt does not allow you to create these links because you don't
retain the full breadth of the context for each word as you are reading them,
and with no built in method for jumping back or forth through the information
being presented it fails to allow these bridges to be built, and this lowers
comprehension.

Now take something like this and implement an interface that tracks the users
eye movement via a webcam to allow the flow of words to jump backwards and
forwards through the surrounding information might work. But you would have to
do some pretty impressive eye tracking and do it all with as little delay as
possible to make the flow smooth, no matter what direction it goes. That said
jumping back in the information would probably be jarring if the text just
starts to flow in reverse. So one would probably have to jump back with some
kind of visual cue to a pointer further back in the text and then continue
reading forward again.

Also I'd love to see this implemented where it shows a sentence at a time. I'd
be interested in the overall improvements to retention and understanding that
would be gained with a reduction in potential top speed per word read. How
drastically does speed fall off when you do this?

------
jackweirdy
Isn't this just a clone of Spritz?
[http://www.spritzinc.com/](http://www.spritzinc.com/)

~~~
arkj
Cameron does give credits to Spritz on his page.

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mbrock
I think this kind of thing is pretty interesting... For me, the reason I can't
use it for most stuff I read is that I often need more time to
process/understand certain words and names. On the first article from
Instapaper that I tried this on, I was fed a sentence containing the words
"doxological peregrinations." That threw me off, and then I knew I would have
trouble keeping up. It'd be interesting if there was some nonintrusive way to
dynamically adjust the speed. I also found it confusing when first names and
surnames were separated, because I tend to recognize a person's name as a
whole entity. Spritz seems to use longer pauses for commas, which seems
helpful. But I really miss being able to see the whole sentence I'm
"reading"...

~~~
mercer
For me it's more than just the sentence that I miss reading. I miss the
context of the entire paragraph and, to a lesser degree, being able to see the
preceding and following paragraphs.

I recently rediscovered the joy of reading longer pieces that take their sweet
time to build up to a point, or to explain something complex. These texts are
generally both longer _and_ denser than, say, blog posts, and while paragraphs
don't always _require_ repeated reading, I usually find myself skipping back
and forth between them to get a good mental image of the way they relate to
each other.

I think tools such as this might be useful for reading relatively simple texts
(blog posts, biographies, certain novels), but if anything I want to do _less_
of that in the first place.

------
jawns
You'll notice that in the site's Acknowledgements section, the first to be
credited is "Spritz Inc, the company whose patents are pending" [1].

Also in the acknowledgements is a link[2] titled "The problem with software
patents."

Essentially, Squirt's creator, Cameron Boehmer, is letting everyone know that
he has appropriated patent-pending technology because he rejects the idea that
the method should be patentable. (Whether a court will disagree with him and
impose a fine is, apparently, a chance he's willing to take.)

\---

[1] [http://www.spritzinc.com](http://www.spritzinc.com)

[2]
[http://lmgtfy.com/?q=the+problem+with+software+patents](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=the+problem+with+software+patents)

~~~
joshcanhelp
They even have their own bookmarklet:

[http://www.spritzinc.com/where-can-i-experience-
spritz/](http://www.spritzinc.com/where-can-i-experience-spritz/)

Squirt is prettier but the functionality looks identical.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I remember looking for this when spritz first came out and thinking - oh great
I have to wait for all of these different platforms to integrate the spritz
API to use it. Glad to see there is a way to use it.

------
krmmalik
I want this as a mobile app, and I want it to be able to read anything I throw
at it. Right now, I have "readquick" on my iPad. I haven't checked if it can
read PDF's but I think it can, so that helps me read most things as I can read
anything that's in my "Pocket" list. But, Read Quick doesn't do the color
highlighting which seems to be the killer thing here.

So. Are you going to give me an iPad app that integrates with Pocket and can
read PDF's or integrate with Kindle and iBooks? That's when it becomes super
useful and I would definitely sign-up and if you let me try it for long enough
to make sure I'm happy with it, then I'm also willing to pay.

~~~
brianbreslin
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/readme!/id877697552?ls=1&mt=...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/readme!/id877697552?ls=1&mt=8)
Readme licenses the spritz tech.

Does readquick let you import existing PDFs?

~~~
krmmalik
Thanks for that link. It's a very useful find. Maybe I _will_ be able to read
Atlas Shrugged in a day after all. ReadQuick seems to be more about reading
the web, so it serves well as a complement to Pocket. Not sure if it can
handle PDFs. I just took a look and can't seem to find a way to do it.

Generally speaking, I do find ReadQuick has a very elegant UX, so I'd much
prefer to use that app for all my reading needs. Just a shame it doesn't
employ spritz technology and support for ePubs etc.

------
libraryatnight
I see a lot of comments showing Spritz, but this concept is completely new to
me and this is my first time trying something like this.

I've spent the last hour or so using this bookmarklet to read various articles
and I have to say this is really cool. While I love to read, it's usually in
short bursts because I get distracted. With this I went through a couple
longer articles without changing tabs, or coming back to them. This really
helps with my ADD.

I'll likely Google later, but is anyone immediately aware if there have been
studies on this style of reading for people with ADD?

------
bagosm
I have tried this in the past. I dont know if it's the same product or other,
but same idea. My main problems where that I want to pause, maybe google some
words or terms or person, go back to previous sentence, or skip some sentences
alltogether. It gave me a lot of trouble because I couldn't find the text I
wanted to highlight/rightclick/google etc, so I ended up taking more time for
the same text.

That being said, I do believe it has it's uses. Maybe on a mobile device,
maybe for literature only.

------
dang
Submitters: before posting, please check whether a story has had a major
discussion recently, as this one has:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=squirt.io#!/story/forever/0/squirt...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=squirt.io#!/story/forever/0/squirt.io)

The cutoff is about a year, so we're burying this submission as a dupe.

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Houshalter
I like readline better:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readline/hjbkmfadm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readline/hjbkmfadmomgaokjodomncmbgmmodona?hl=en)

You can highlight the text you want to read or hover over a paragraph and
click it while holding alt.

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sgarbi
Great idea! I would suggest adding an option to read the highlighted text so
as to make sure you can get the plugin to work even when it can't detect the
portion of the page where the article is.

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moron4hire
This is ludicrously wrong. Real speed-reading requires reading _multiple_
words at a time.

~~~
nnnnni
To me, speed-reading is "reading very quickly". I don't think that the exact
_method_ really matters all that much... or at least it shouldn't.

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_mikz
Amazing name.

~~~
hisem
Well... from the previous HN discussion I had Squirt in my favorites bar,
until I did a work presentation and realized the name could be misinterpreted!
I then quickly deleted it.

~~~
buro9
How could it be misinterpreted?

~~~
hisem
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_ejaculation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_ejaculation)

------
rkv
Only problems I see with this are (1) Blinking (2) Might have to simplify
vocabulary

------
dletozeun
Interesting idea but I just blinked and missed a word, too bad.

------
pron
> Average readers read between 120 and 200 words per minute

I don't know if that's true or not, but my reading speed is over 500 wpm, and
I'm not even a native English speaker. At that speed, Squirt makes me seasick.

