Glass orb with reflection of the landscape in it

ReadPal is an interesting looking piece of software. It claims that it lets you read faster than you might otherwise on screen.
I’ve had a look, and I think that it could have some uses – the first problem I ran into was the fact that it only integrates with IE, not with Firefox (didn’t even bother trying with Flock). I also wasn’t keen on the fact that it wanted to run at start up – though I can see that would be useful if you decided to use it a lot. Images don’t get incorporated – which could be an issue if they are vital to the text. Another big problem is that it doesn’t currently work with .pdf files. I’ve also found another issue – they’ve supplied it with several files; but no way of bookmarking where you have got to. So, though I have started Huckleberry Finn, I can’t get back to the same point again, without remembering where I got to (you can zoom to say 23% – but you’d have to remember where you’d got to).
I tested it with a Word Document – and I can see the powers that it could have.
If it worked with Firefox, and .pdf – and, ideally allowed the user to select chunks of text (as ReadPlease does for example) – then I think that it would be a very powerful tool. I’d also be interested (long term) to see if they have a version that works with a PDA.

So, in summary – good idea, but needs further work.

Via: Lisa Valentine

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