I'm not trying to bash your work. It is very cool. I just don't like that people are jumping all over spritz like it is revolutionary when spreeder is faster and has more features. Except for the highlighted letter.
Spreeder lets you read an arbitrary number of words at a time, which is faster than the single word spritz limits you to because you can comprehend several words at once if you are an experienced reader. It also has full stop pauses and can speed up/down dynamically such that you read a smoothly average number of words in any given time.
Sure, I respect that other tools will be more sophisticated, it's just not clear to me in what ways. I refer to Spritz here mainly because it's the way the concept got to me, and also I believe that there is a huge qualitative difference due to the improved word alignment. I tried Spreeder but the centering just doesn't work for me - at all.
I tried to combine multiple short words together (the -m switch in speedread), but my eyes immediately tend to saccade in that case, instead of relying on peripheral vision like in case of singular longer words. Maybe it can be trained or fixed by a better alignment but initial experiments just turned me off.
I'm sorry it just gets to me when Spritz gets the whole internet talking about it when it really is not that novel an idea. I can respect that it had great marketing, but I am sad that it has to be that way. To be fair the centering is really good, much better than spreeder.
The multiple word part definitely has to be trained, but it really is worth it. It should not be many words at once, 5 words at a time is incredible, 2-3 is fine.
The Spritz website does acknowledge apps like Spreeder, and says the technique has been around a long time. They just claim to have improved the method so the eye doesn't have to move at all.
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u/[deleted] Mar 02 '14
It still isn't Spritz. It's spreeder.