Zap Reader Blog

In late August I received an email from Katrin Dietl, a journalist for “Tomorrow“, a German digital lifestyle magazine. She wrote, “In every issue of ‘Tomorrow’ we present a ‘Web-Personality’. These are people with great, new Web 2.0 ideas. I found your web site and I really love the Zap Reader. And I think it works great! So we would love to present your Zap Reader to our readers.” I can’t read German, but I’ve scanned in the article for my German readers. If not, here are Katrin’s questions and my answers:

How did you get this great idea? Why did you create Zap Reader as an online program, instead of as an installed program?
There are a number of excellent speed reading programs available but none of them really fit my needs. They all had to be installed on a particular computer. I use several different computers at various times during the day and a variety of operating systems: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP Tablet Edition, Mac OS X 10.3, and Linux. None of the programs that were available would work cross-platform and even if they did, I would have had to pay to license them on all those platforms.

I decided to write my own speed reading program when I read an interview with Brad Isaac at LifeHacker.com. In that article he mentioned that he uses a program called Speed Reader Plus to read articles and books on his Pocket PC. I downloaded and tried out the program. While I think it is an excellent program, I thought that it was too much trouble to have to convert the text on the desktop and then sync it to my Pocket PC to read it. I said to myself, “If I could just do this in a web browser and speed read it there, that would be convenient enough that I would really use it. A few days later, I had a prototype up and running that would allow me to speed read in a web browser, regardless of which platform I was using, as long as I had an Internet connection.

When and why did you develop Zap Reader?
I developed the original proof-of-concept program in June of this year, about two months ago. I had read some books on speed reading and understood that the way to read faster was to limit eye movement and to read words in groups. Once I had the core program working, I realized how true this was. I could read faster, I had a higher level of concentration on the material, and even at 600 words per minute I typically comprehended the material as well as I did while reading at my normal 150 words per minute. These realizations caused me to want to continue developing the program for my own use and to share it with others as well.

What can I do with the Zap Reader?
The feature set continues to grow. Some people will copy text from a web site, email, or other document and then paste it into Zap Reader to speed read it. I also have a nice suite of tools to help you get text into Zap Reader: a browser bookmarklet that allows you to select text on a page and then click the bookmarklet in your toolbar to load that text into Zap Reader; Greasemonkey scripts for the Firefox browser that ads “Zap Read This” buttons to your online email, news, and other programs; and plugins for blogging programs like WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad.

Once the text has been loaded into Zap Reader you have a control bar that allows you to start and pause the reader, increase or decrease your reading speed, and go back and forward through your text. There is also a progress bar to indicate your progress.

When you click on the “Play” button the words will start to flash on the screen. The default setting will display one word at a time at a speed equal to 300 words per minute. You can also change your settings to display more words at a time and increase or decrease your preferred reading speed. Personally, I usually set it to read 2 or 3 words at a time at a rate of 600 to 800 words per minute. I will go slower on some texts that have more complex language. Overall I’ve realized that the more I use it, the faster I can go with it, and the faster I read even when I’m just reading the newspaper, a magazine like “Tomorrow”, or a book.

Whats the Maximum Speed I could read with the Zap Reader?
I’m not really sure what the maximum speed is at present. I haven’t coded a “speed limit” barrier but my guess would be around 1,500 words per minute or so.

There are so many offers about Speed Reading. Why should I use the Zap Reader?
I think there are a number of things that set Zap Reader apart from the other speed reading programs. First, it runs in a browser and doesn’t need to be installed—so that means that you can use it from any computer you want, regardless of the operating system. Second, is the number of tools that are available, or soon will be available, to get text into Zap Reader. Why would anyone want to use a program that limits the types of content that can be read or makes it take so long to convert and prepare that you could have just read the text without using the program and have finished sooner. Third, Zap Reader is totally free. I may charge for it later, but I plan to always keep a free version available, even if it has a few less features.

Did you ever try to sell your great idea (for example to Yahoo!)?
I haven’t sought out a buyer, but if someone like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, or any other company, is interested in purchasing the Zap Reader brand, code, and business model, I’ll be glad to talk to them.

And now some privite information. How old are you?
I’m 39 years old now and will turn 40 on Christmas day this year.

Whats your job?
I work full-time as the Senior Webmaster for a large credit union. Like most people with a web development skill set, I also design web sites and write programs for other businesses. A friend and I started a company about 6 years ago called OP Loftbed. That business primarily sells plans for people to build loft beds and bunk beds. I run that business along with my wonderful wife, Sandy. My favorite thing to do is to write web based programs like Zap Reader, The Ruler Game, and The Email Cleaner that improve people’s lives. My mission statement is, “Empower. Challenge. Advance.” If I can write programs and develop ideas that will empower, challenge, and advance people then I’m happy. If I can make a little money doing that then I consider that to be icing on the cake.

Where do you live?
I live in a small town in North Carolina called Thomasville. Thomasville is known around the world as the home of Thomasville Furniture Inc.

What do you do in your free time, when you are not developing new computer programs?
With everything that I have going on, I’m known for telling people that I don’t idle well! Even with the number of things that I have going on at any time, I am also very active in my church—I work on the media team, teach Bible study classes and computer classes, and work on the church web site. I am thankful to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for blessing me with my talents and skills—I don’t ever want to take my relationship with Him for granted. I enjoy going to the movies, eating at various restaurants, and just relaxing with my wife Sandy. We’ve been very happily married for 17 years and are child free. I enjoy irritating our little dog, Muffin.–she’s a bichon-poodle mix. I also enjoy hiking and canoeing. That’s my way to relax and get away from everything else. My wife calls it my “defragging time”. I have to admit that even then I do take my Smart Phone with me and I have had to do some server maintenance via my phone in the middle of the lake on a few occassions.

After I wrote my script to Add a “Zap Read This” Button To Blogger Sites, Marjolein Hoekstra adapted that script to add a “Zap Read This” button to her TypePad blog, CleverClogs. She also spent quite a bit of time tweaking the script to make it more compliant with the W3C standards. Thanks, Marjolein!

Get the full instructions and code snippet in the Zap Reader Tools section. Look for “Zap Read This” Button for TypePad Blogs“.

If you implement this on your own TypePad blog, please let me know about it by emailing me at webmaster@zapreader.com, posting a comment or trackback to this post, or making a post in the Zap Reader Forum. I would love to create an index of “Easily Zap Readable Blogs!”

It appears that a number of people are using Zap Reader to speed read entries from Wikipedia. I frequently do some of my own research there as well so my latest Zap Reader Tool is a Greasemonkey script to add a “Zap Read This!” button to every encyclopedia entry you view in Wikipedia.

This script doesn’t just send the text of the page to Zap Reader, but it also does a lot of clean up to make the text more easily read: removes all tables since they usually contain data that doesn’t translate to Zap Reader very well, removes the [edit] links, removes all the links to footnotes that are in square brackets, removes all the areas near the bottom that contain text that isn’t really Zap readable (External links, Media, References, See also, and Further Reading).

You can download and install this script from the Zap Reader Tools page.

Here is what it looks like in use:

As always, this script is still in Beta and may be buggy. Let me know if you experience problems.

A number of people are using Zap Reader in their daily study of the Bible—not only for increased speed, but for greater focus, concentration, and comprehension.

BibleGateway.com appears to be the most popular web site for reading the Bible online. BibleGateway.com offers a large number of translations to choose from, it’s easy to find the passage that you want to read, it’s easy to navigate and customize, and you can even listen to the passage if you want!

When I wanted to Zap Read something from BibleGateway.com I experienced two problems. The obvious one is that I had so select the text that I wanted to Zap Read and then use copy/paste or the Zap Reader Bookmarklet (available on the Zap Reader Tools page) to get the Bible passage into Zap Reader. The other problem was that I would also get all the verse numbers and links to footnotes. I found that this made it a little more difficult to focus on the passage being read.

I have been working on a Greasemonkey script to add a “Zap Read This!” button to the beginning of any passage viewed on BibleGateway.com. It’s now ready for everyone to try—you can get it yourself on the Zap Reader Tools page. This script overcomes my previous two problems so that now I don’t have to select the text to read, and it automatically strips out: the verse numbers, the links to footnotes, and the footnotes themselves. You can see the script in action in this screenshot:

As always, this script is still in Beta and may be buggy. Let me know if you experience problems.

If you are a serious Bible student you absolutely must try this script!

I’m also planning to post an article with more ideas for using Zap Reader in your Bible studies. If you would like to share your own hints and tips for studying the Bible with Zap Reader, email them to me at webmaster@zapreader.com. I’d love to hear about them.

I just added quite a few new options to the “Settings” page. Prior to this, you could only set the number of words at a time and the words per minute. New features include:

• Font: Choose the font that you want Zap Reader to use. They fonts are listed in sets of common fonts that are found on most computers. If the first font in the list isn’t installed on your machine, it will look for the second one, and if that isn’t installed, it will look for the third one. The fonts in each set are similar.
• Bold: Check this box to make your font display in bold. In my opinion, bold fonts seem to register in the mind a little faster.
• Alignment: If you want the text you are reading to be on the left or right hand side of the screen instead of the center, you now have your choice.
• Font Size: Choose your font size in pixels between 5 and 60. I’ll add more options here if a number of people find these inadequate.
• Font Color: The default black on white may be too much contrast for some people. Use the color picker to choose a color that you like better.
• Background Color: If you don’t care for the white background on your Zap Reader screen, then change it to something you like better with this option. Doron emailed me a link to Light Text on Dark Background vs. Readability. It’s worth reading, but the bottom line is that you have to choose what works best for you. Now you can!
• Auto-Play Cweaver posted in the Zap Reader Forum that he wanted Zap Reader to start playing as soon as it loaded without him having to click the “Play” button or strike the “P” key. If you check this box then Zap Reader will do just that.

And as a special bonus, many people requested that Zap Reader “rewind” when you finish reading a passage. It now does this automatically, so if you want to read the passage again, simply click the “Play” button or hit the “P” key on your keyboard.

For some reason, some browsers will occassionally not set the cookie properly. If you experience this, just try again. It usually seems to work the second time. I’m still working on finding the common thread and cause of this bug. In the future, you will have an option to store your settings in a database on the server, instead of in a cookie, so your settings will be persistent across every computer and browser that you use.

If you’re curious, here are the settings that I’m currently using:

As always, this is a Beta release, so let me know if you experience any bugs.

For the past few days I’ve been looking at what I read, how I read, how I would like to read what I read. That’s been the driving force behind the latest set of tools that I’ve written. As I mentioned yesterday, I use Yahoo! Mail for newsletters and subscription type email. I use Bloglines as my news aggregator. I currently subscribe to about 90 RSS feeds and I’m way behind on my reading.

For much of this, I can simply scan the articles to get what I need, but sometimes I really want to read the article word for word. The Zap Reader Bookmarklet doesn’t work on frames based sites like Bloglines so that meant that I either had to use Bloglines Mobile or copy the text to my clipboard and paste it into Zap Reader. I really like the feature set of Full Bloglines and after creating the Yahoo! Mail button, I decided that it would be nice to just have a “Zap Read This!” button in each of my Bloglines posts. So, I wrote another Greasemonkey script to do just that. You’ll find it in the Zap Reader Tools page.

As always, it’s still in Beta and may be buggy. Let me know if you experience problems.

I have a Yahoo! Mail email address that I use primarily for ezine subscriptions, and discussion board subscriptions. I’ve been working on Zap Reader for the past several weeks and neglected much of my reading there. As I started to work through those messages this morning I thought, “It would be nice to just have a “Zap Read This” button on the page that would put me one click away from Zap Reading each message.”

The easiest way to accomplish this was to write a Greasemonkey script for Firefox. You will find that script in the Zap Reader Tools page. First you will need to install the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox and then close and restart Firefox. Once you have done that, visit the Zap Reader Tools page and right click on the link that says, “Zap Read Button for Yahoo! Mail” and choose “Install User Script.” After that, whenever you view a message in Yahoo! Mail, you should see the “Zap Read This!” button at the top, just like in the screen shot below.

I know that several of you have talked about writing Firefox extensions for Zap Reader. Greasemonkey is an excellent way to get a script working really quick. As with the other tools that I have released this weekend, keep in mind that these are very early beta, and practically alpha, releases so they may be buggy. If you do experience any problems, please let me know. If you write your own useful scripts to integrate with Zap Reader, let me know about those as well and I may add links to them on the tools page too.

Enjoy!

After writing the “Zap Read This Post” Plugin for WordPress, I was wondering if I could do something similar for one of my Blogger.com blogs. A Blogger template can be edited, but there is no access to any of the server side code. Having access to a server side scripting language makes adding a “Zap Read This” button quite easy. Without that access, I had to write something that was rendered part in the template loop and part in the client browser using JavaScript. You can see the script in action at the Lake Thom-A-Lex blog.

Since this really isn’t a “download”, I’ve added a link on the Zap Reader Tools page to an instructional page about Adding a “Zap Read This” Button to Each of Your Blogger Posts. After the installation instructions, I explain how each line works.

I want to write some FireFox extensions for certain sites, and I think that the techniques that I learned as I wrote this script will be useful in those extensions as well. If you plan to write your own extensions to send text to Zap Reader, you may find the techniques explained here to be valuable information. They may also work with other blogging systems for which the user can edit the template but doesn’t have access to the server side scripting language.

If you implement this on your own WordPress blog, please let me know about it by emailing me at webmaster@zapreader.com, posting a comment or trackback to this post, or making a post in the Zap Reader Forum. I would love to create an index of “Easily Zap Readable Blogs!”

I have just released the “Zap Read This Post” plugin for WordPress. You can download it from the Zap Reader Tools page. Essentially this plugin will add a little button before each of your blog posts that says, “Zap Read This”. When a reader clicks on the button it will load the text of that post into Zap Reader for them to speed read. If you don’t like the image that I use for the button, feel free to create your own, or even replace the image with a text link by editing the plugin code.

If you implement this on your own WordPress blog, please let me know about it by emailing me at webmaster@zapreader.com, posting a comment or trackback to this post, or making a post in the Zap Reader Forum. I would love to create an index of “Easily Zap Readable Blogs!”

If you are interested in writing any tools to send text to Zap Reader, it’s actually quite easy. The tool just needs to store the text in a field named “PastedText” and post that field to www.zapreader.com/reader/. Marjolein Hoekstra emailed me earlier today and let me know that she has created an experimental TypeList Item for http://www.cleverclogs.org. If you create a useful plugin that you would like to share with the Zap Reader Community, let me know and I’ll see about adding it to the Zap Reader Tools page.

Note that I’m calling this a 0.0.1 release and so it may be buggy. If you install it and experience any problems, please let me know.

Gustav has listed the most frequently discussed enhancements into one poll. Take a moment to cast your vote for which enhacement you most want to see implemented. Remember, the best way to make Zap Reader work for you is to get involved in letting me know what your needs are. The options in the poll are:
- Font
- Color (Foreground/Background)
- Font Size
- Alignment
- Same Size Words (text justification)
- Pauses (Paragraph,Punctuation)
- Blank Text (for new paragraph)
- Choose number of characters at a time instead of just words

If there is an enhancement not listed here, be sure to submit it in the Zap Reader Enhancement Requests Forum.