reading posts

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, iPhone, Web

Read it Later introduces iPhone app

by Jay Hathaway Apr 13th 2009

Read It Later is a service that lets you bookmark webpages to, as the name would suggest, read later. We first covered it when it was just a Firefox extension, but it's evolved quite a bit since then. The new iPhone app is particularly nice, offering offline reading of your saved pages, and a text-only reading mode that brings to mind the similar Instapaper app.

Read it Later's iPhone app brings all of the web features of Read It Later elegantly to the iPhone. Even without an Internet connection, you can view saved pages in their original form or as plain text. Quite importantly, the iPhone app also syncs article with the web version. If you buy the pro edition of the app, you can also save things from Safari in your iPhone via a bookmarklet.

Tags: articles, bookmarks, iphone, read-it-later, reading

Filed under: Productivity, Web services

If you don't like the way it looks, read it with Readable App

by Jay Hathaway Apr 6th 2009

Readable App is a bookmarklet you can use to display text from any webpage in a more easily-readable format, according to your preferences. If that sounds familiar, it might be because you've heard of Readability, a similar service I covered on Download Squad recently. The author of Readable App knows about Readability, acknowledges he borrowed some color settings from it, and offers a list of ways his app is better. He actually makes some good points.

When you click the Readability bookmarklet, it reloads the page you're reading and styles it according to your Readability settings. Readable App, on the other hand, shows a lightbox-style overlay that you can click out of to show the original page. This is definitely more convenient, especially when you take into account that neither Readable nor Readability works properly on every page. If you hit a page it can't display well, it's faster to click out than to reload. Other than that, the choice between the two comes down to which site's selection of styles you prefer.

Tags: readability, readable-app, reading, text

Filed under: Internet, Text, Utilities, Windows, Web services, Google, Freeware

Free app downloads any Google Book Search item as PDF

by Lee Mathews Feb 19th 2009

Google's Book Search already provides PDF download links for all the public domain title it indexes, like the works of William Shakespeare. It's a handy way to peruse titles later when you don't have high speed internet access available.

Suppose you want to check out a title like the February 1976 version of Ebony Jr. Then what?

You could manually browse it one page at a time and save each image, or you could fire up Google Book Downloader and let it do the heavy lifting. Locate a title in Book Search and find its code in the URL (http://books.google.com/books?id=ub4DAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_hpmagazines). Copy and paste it into Book Downloader, and select what you want to save.

Press save selected, and Book Downloader will automatically combine the saved images into a PDF for you to read later.

Edit: forgot to mention earlier, .Net 3.5 is required.

[via Google Operating System]

Tags: books, google-book-search, pdf, reading

Filed under: Internet, Web services

Classic Reader Offers Free Classic (duh) Literature Online

by Lee Mathews Sep 25th 2008

If you're in the mood to read some classic works of literature, head over to Classic Reader and check out their massive library.

No special software is required, as everything is prsented in standard HTML format for reading right in your favorite browser. The library currently contains more than 3,400 works by 346 different authors, including Ambrose Bierce, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe, and - of course - Shakespeare.

The works are fully indexed by genre, and the five most recent additions are listed in the top-right corner for quick access to new titles.

It's an ad-supported site, but they're kept to a minimum and aren't very invasive. If you'd prefer, you can also purchase the library in DVD or CD format. It's a pretty good deal at less than $20.

A little intellectual stimulation for free is never a bad thing. As for me, I'm going to go finish reading Sun Tzu's Art of War.

[via Free Download a Day]

Tags: books, classics, culture, reading

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Blogging, Web services

Bloglines finally gets a redesign

by Chris Gilmer Aug 27th 2007

Bloglines has just packed a bunch of new features into its online news feed searching, subscribing to and reading service, and it all begins with a start page.

Bloglines headlines its new feature developments with a personalized start page. This is the page that brings everything together in a quick and easy view with an AJAX interface. There is nothing like starting feed reading off with a view like this to help you distinguish and gravitate towards your top interests first, before they get lost in a sea of unread material. Users can also now drag and drop feeds to add them into a three panel interface. To make things even easier, Bloglines has integrated mouse over previews to get a quick snippet of the content for a more in depth look at the article. Two other views are also available to complement the three panel view, a full view, and quick view mode. The quick view lists out titles for an easy news scan, with the full view listing out full article content.

This new redevelopment comes more than two years after the Bloglines acquisition by IAC interactive, the company that owns the popular ASK search engine. It can be accessed at http://beta.bloglines.com.

Tags: ajax, ask, bloglines, feeds, iac, reading, rss, start page, StartPage, web2, web2.0

Filed under: Design, Internet, Kids, Text

Create books with friends at Mixbook

by Chris Gilmer Aug 14th 2007

Forget about Google Maps mashups, why not enter the new world of book mashups.

Mixbook is an online tool that allows friends to collaborate and create pages for a book, then mash them up all together and create one loving publication. Layouts and backgrounds can be put together with images and text to create these 8x8" books that can be both printed and viewed online.

Nothing is more meaningful than giving a book, let alone a custom one. Book prices start at $9.99, and get increased August 15th to $12.99.

[via ehub]

Tags: book, book mashup, BookMashup, collaboration, creating, custom book, CustomBook, design, reading

Filed under: Business, Internet, Text, Utilities, Web services, Adobe, Social Software

myFeedz social newspaper from Adobe

by Chris Gilmer Feb 19th 2007

Adobe released its first look at the newly re-branded myFeedz.com social news site on Friday. The website learns what users like and keeps up with interests in order to serve content. It all started when InterAKT launched their public beta last August, and sold to Adobe a month later. The service is now located deep-within Adobe's Labs, who have been on a web 2.0 kick lately. myFeedz is aimed at finding what's important for the user out there in the crazy overpopulated field of content feeds from the web.

myFeedz helps users keep track of and sift through the endless amounts of information and trends they are interested in, all the while offering relevant information as to their interests. Users begin by importing RSS feeds from favorite websites using OPML, dropping a list of keywords, browsing articles by tags, reading, writing, and rating articles. Articles can then be saved and archived for later reading, and RSS feeds can be exported for you topic of interest.

The site was extremely slow during my testing. Still being in the "lab" format, little issues can be expected. I just hope they get things sorted out fast; This seems like a great little tool!

Tags: adobe, articles, feeds, interakt, news, opml, reading, rss, web, web 2.0, Web2.0

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Productivity, Web services, Google, Social Software, Unix

Google issues updates and fixes to Google Reader

by David Chartier Nov 28th 2006

Since I'm a card-carrying Google Reader convert, I've been loosely following the discussions in its Google Group. I'm constantly impressed with how active some of their engineers like Chris and Mihai are in the conversation, and just the other day they announced some small but much-requested updates and bug fixes to Reader, including:

First and foremost: An "Add to folder" menu after using the subscribe bookmarklet, the Firefox 2.0 subscribe button and the "Add to Google" button
The "Feed actions..." menu lets you rename the feed and change its folders
Some IE 7 display bugs have been fixed
Some IE 6 display bugs have been fixed
OPML import should be more tolerant of invalid characters
The filtering that can be done in the settings page now handles multiple terms (separate them with spaces)
The settings page should display faster when you have lots of subscriptions

Nothing major, though that 'Add to folder' button is a God-send (Google-send?) for adding new subscriptions and easily filing them away without breaking one's workflow.

Tags: bugs, fixes, google reader, GoogleReader, management, organization, reader, readers, reading, rss, update, updates

Filed under: Games, Internet, Kids, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Freeware

Starfall.com - teaching reading comprehension and phonics

by Jason Clarke Nov 14th 2006

I was first introduced to Starfall.com by my mother-in-law, who specializes in teaching reading and life skills to adult special needs students. Her classes use the site very successfully to assist in learning to read. She first suggested we show it to my son when he was two, and I was surprised to find that he loved exploring the site, and watching the animations. Now just three years old, he regularly chooses exploring Starfall as one of his favorite computer time activities.

As a free resource, Starfall is staggeringly deep. There's an enormous amount of content for children to learn from, but even more surprisingly there's a large supply of freely downloadable content for parents and educators. Starfall does sell supporting printed materials to go along with the site, but seem to offer most of those products for free in the form of PDF downloads.

Starfall was created by Stephen Schutz and his wife Susan Polis Schutz, who co-founded BlueMountain.com, the animated greeting card site that you probably received a ton of cards from in the late 90's. In a story of truly giving back, Stephen Schutz was a student who had difficulties learning to read, and trailed behind his classmates considerably. So it seems his desire to help make learning to read easier for youngsters comes from a very personal place. You can read more about their story on the About page.

Tags: learning to read, LearningToRead, reading, reading education, ReadingEducation, Starfall, Starfall.com

Filed under: Fun, E-mail, Web services

DailyLit: Bite-sized literature in your inbox, daily

by Jordan Running Sep 14th 2006

Not enough time for reading? Want to catch up on the classics? DailyLit might be just what you've been looking for. It's a simple service that will email you classic literature a few pages at a time, so you can split up your reading over the course of a few weeks or months. How long it will take you depends on how long the work is and how often you receive it. You can set the delivery frequency to every day, every weekday, or every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You can also tell DailyLit it to send you the next part as soon as you've finished the previous. There's dozens of novels of various lengths available, most of them by familiar authors ranging from Homer to Lewis Carroll, plus nonfiction works by Marx, Descartes, and many others. If you're looking for a little culture, delivered daily, DailyLit is definitely worth checking out.

Tags: books, dailylit, email, fiction, literature, nonfiction, novels, reading

Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Freeware

ZAP Reader: Web-based speed-reading trainer

by Jordan Running Aug 15th 2006

Want to read faster? Try ZAP Reader. It's a free web app that will, in theory, as much as quadruple your reading speed. It works like this: You find some text you want to read fast, you paste it into ZAP Reader and hit Play, and ZAP Reader starts flashing the words on the screen. You can control the speed it goes at (it starts at 30 words per minute) and pause it, and you can skip backward or forward. I tried it and was surprised at how fast I was able to push myself, though I found that only being able to see one word at a time made my brain skip a beat on words I'm not used to, in particular trade names. ZAP Reader also has a bookmarklet which, when clicked, will automatically feed any text you've selected into ZAP Reader. You can see a video of ZAP Reader in action after the jump.

Tags: free, reader, reading, speed, speedreading, web, zap, zapreader

Filed under: Blogging, Web services

How readable is your web site?

by Jordan Running Dec 29th 2005

Have you ever wondered if your writing is going over your readers' heads? No, me neither. But in case you're curious like me about the readability level of your web site, Juicy Studio's Readability Test will tell you. Just enter a URL and it will give you a bunch of data about its readability including its Gunning Fog Index and Flesch-Kincaid Grade which are supposed to tell you how much schooling a person needs before they'll be able to understand what you've written. According to the readability test Download Squad's Fog Index is 7.74, or somewhere between Mark Twain and Reader's Digest.

Tags: flesch-kincaid, gunning fog, readability, reading

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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