Speed Reader

I spent a small portion of my free time this week working on a small Java application that would help me do a bit of speed reading.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, you can read more about it on the wiki article here.  The basic idea is to increase the speed at which you read words by trying not repeating the sound of the word to yourself internally.  A lot of the tools out there will help you do this by taking a large portion of text and flash each word in front of you very quickly.  ZAP Reader or Spreader are both online tools which do this quite well.

However, as a challenge to myself, I worked towards writing one up using Java.  Suprisingly, the applicaiton itself wasn’t that hard to write up, I had a working prototype within 4 hours of coding!

So here it is, Jama’s Speed Reader!

Features

• Paste words into it to read words very fast!
• Adjust the reading speed (words per minute, or WPM)
• Can display multiple words “per flash”
• Can pause on larger words
• Can pause at the end of a sentence
• Will combine english honorific titles so that words like “Mr. Jones” will appear on the same screen, instea of “Mr.” and “Jones” seperately

Screencast

And now for the first time, a screencast!

Download

• Executable jar
• Source Code (MIT License)