Speed reading software for Chinese?

[Pengyou]

When I was in primary school, my school had a reading lab with machines that were supposed to help us read faster. They would project the text one line at a time and would slowly cover up the text, from left to right. The cover up speed could be varied, to help people improve their reading habits. Is there an app like this for a pc that can be used with Chinese?

[ManManLai]

Not sure what apps like this are available for the PC, but my partners and I were in fact recently having a conversation about this sort of feature and whether it would be useful in a phone app.

After using the machine, was there any "test" or evaluation to assess its effectiveness?

Matt

[dnevets]

Is this of any use? http://spreeder.com/app.php

[Olle Linge]

I have been looking for online tool that do this without any success.

Is this of any use? http://spreeder.com/app.php

No, because that tool treats Chinese texts as one word (no spaces). This is the case for most services I've found, which makes them useless for Chinese.

[imron]

I'm actually currently working on a tool that will do just this, and that handles Chinese text properly.

No timeline for when it will be finished, but probably not before the first half of the year. I've been thinking about splitting parts of it out in to separate tools (for segmenting and analysing text) which I'll probably end up doing as that part is almost ready to go.

[icebear]

Imron - that sounds great.

What platform do you plan to offer it on? As I heavily integrates an iPad into most of my studying/Chinese consumption it would be great if it was iOS, but if going for a web platform (to be inclusive) it would be great if it was Safari/Chrome friendly, including on mobile tablets that can't run flash.

[imron]

Initially windows, with other platforms to follow. I decided not to go with an online tool because it strikes me as the sort of thing that people might want to use offline too, plus I also wanted the ability to process large files if necessary, which is more convenient offline because you don't have to worry about hosting issues, plus it's generally more performant.

[Pengyou]

yes, the program I used in primary school had a pretest and post test for the whole module. For the app you are working on, if you do it in C+++ it should not be so difficult to port to differant environments. Apps put online in China....well, to me that is like keeping your spare set of keys in a pot of set concrete When you need them, you can't get at them.

[imron]

Yep, it's c++. The core segmenter and analyser and a bunch of the main program already works across the major 3 desktop platforms (windows, osx and linux), and it's portable enough that it wouldn't be difficult to bring it to other platforms. It's just the GUI I need to work on for each one and windows is the GUI I picked first.