Simian Speed Reader
Simian Speed Reader is my second iPhone app and it’s now available via iTunes.
It’s based on the ideas of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. There are several good online versions of this presentation style, and iReadFast is pretty awesome if you have a Mac, but I wanted one for the iPhone.
So Far the biggest hurtle is getting books to the app in an easy to understand way. I think what Zach Bedell has done with BookShelf is pretty smooth, but also out of my expertise. Also, if you find you don’t like the RSVP style, but still want to read books on your iPhone, do go download BookShelf, I think it’s the best out there right now. A close second is the free Stanza, but it’s overly complicated to get the books on your phone, and they often come across as “unknown.”
What I’ve done is set it so you enter a web address where the a .txt file is located. The file needs to be plaintext since any formating would just need to be stripped back out.
In order to get files from your computer to your iPhone you pretty much have two option:
1. Send it to the web:
There are lots of free servers out there you can use.
2. Set up a server on your machine:
OSX – You’ve got Apache built in, you’re a rock star and so is your OS. Download This: simiansrhelperosx.zip open it, Doubleclick the applescript to start apache, enter you password, and drop anything you want into the Web Documents alias folder. You can go into system prefs then sharing, to turn it back off again. You can also go there to find out your computer’s address if you don’t know it already.
Simian Speed Reader OS X Demo from zyrotin on Vimeo.
Windows – Go get Http File Server and run it. Let it add to your right-click menu. It will tell you your address up at the top. Drag in .txt files or right click and select add to hfs.
I’ve included two books from Project Gutenberg to get you started. My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Project Gutenberg is an incredible resource for free ebook, and most of them are already in the format Simian Speed Reader likes.
If you have questions or comments either leave them in the comments or e-mail me at joshua dot lowman at gmail dot com.
