An iOS speed-reading app (http://velocireaderapp.com) for ebooks. I have a day job so this is an after-hours side project.
It's cool to me because it's something I use myself, almost every day. It's so effective I even get ePubs for any book I've just bought in paperback, just so I can read it in my app. I've got an endless list of planned features to experiment with, so it's fun in more than one way. And I like to think its users like it too!
That's pretty cool. When you're reading, at any point did you feel 'choppiness' of what you were reading, or do you get used to it? When looking at the trailer, I was finding my inner voice was more robotic than reading normally.
I find that the subjective choppiness goes away when I speed it up. For me the sweet spot is about 500 words per minute, with up to 3 words at a time (I say 'up to' because sentences are chopped up based on punctuation marks, and then smoothed out to leave about an equal number of words in every segment. This is a rough description). The sweet spot also depends on the sort of book being read.
I guess it's like watching a movie on a suboptimal screen, or at an suboptimal angle, etc. After a while you're mindful only of the movie, not of the viewing experience.
It's cool to me because it's something I use myself, almost every day. It's so effective I even get ePubs for any book I've just bought in paperback, just so I can read it in my app. I've got an endless list of planned features to experiment with, so it's fun in more than one way. And I like to think its users like it too!