A week ago I noticed zapreader.com, a site that makes it relatively easy to teach yourself speedreading. At least 1000 people also bookmarked it and from personal experience I can say: It really works quite well. In a nutshell, it takes a bunch of text and splits it into words. It then displays each word (or a block of two, which works a bit better in my opinion) in a huge font in the middle of your screen, for a fraction of a second, before moving on to the next word.

However, the ZAP reader itself has some annoyances so I decided to fix them.

Thus, I present: the (mac only!) desktop app version of zap reader. Download here: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMac.dmg.

It works very simply: select text in any application, then hit CMD+SHIFT+V and ZAPMac automatically starts and zapreads the selected text for you. Once the text is done, it quits automatically. Use Z and X to rewind/fast forward 16 words at a time, and use A and Q to speed up or slow down. space starts and stops, and there are preferences to change a number of things, though the defaults worked the best for me. It intentionally goes fullscreen - to make sure there is no distraction for your eyes.

Apparently it works so well because of two things:

• It saves you from having to ‘track’ - you no longer expend effort to keep your eyes in the right place. Your eyes no longer need to move at all, just keep staring at the same place.
• It makes use of ‘brain replay’. Ever said ‘What did you say?” to someone, only to realize that you DID hear them after all? Your brain has a limited ‘pipeline’ of sorts, but you usually incorrectly think you misheard or misread forcing you to take action. When reading, this means you often reread sentences that you don’t need to reread. With ZAP Reader you force yourself into going forward.

This is my first foray into Mac Os X Cocoa development, incidentally. I spent maybe 12 hours on getting this thing together, including learning a new programming language from scratch (well, enough to write this, anyhow), and including learning how to distribute it, set it up with a nice preference pane that stores its settings in the right places, and all that jazz. Basically cocoa development is really nice and very simple, which may explain why Mac software looks so good.

If you’re interesting in the source, here you go: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMacSource.zip.