I am a big speed reading fan, especially the idea of being able to use rapid serial visualization presentation (RSVP) on a phone.
The idea behind RSVP is that it takes a considerable amount of effort and time to move your eyes' focus from word to word when you are reading, especially on a phone where the font might be tiny. Because of this you can increase immensely your reading speed if instead of having to move your focus from word to word, you focus on a point and the word changes at a certain cadence. Typically, with some practice you can increase that cadence to numbers such as 500 words per minute comfortably, which is a lot more than what the average person can read and works brilliantly if you read light stuff (I wouldn't use it for hard technical stuff, because you need more time to process the information for it to make sense).
I looked for speed reading apps for WP8 and found a few, but they required you to either copy&paste the text you want to speed read, required the text to be in OneDrive or that you'd copy the url of the page you wanted to speed read.
So I did Lectito (it means reading in Latin): http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/lectito/c4f00daf-d815-4868-8e65-a55ae40708e2
Lectito can be "launched" from Internet Explorer using the sharing option and it also supports pictures (it will display them and their "alt" text), which was another feature lacking in all the apps I've tried.
I'm still adding features and making stuff better in general. I'd really appreciate feedback in terms of features/problems that the app might still have.
All of the code that is not UI related is PCL, so it isn't too hard to port it to other platforms. I've chosen Windows Phone because that's the phone I have now (Lumia 920 and I really like it, especially the camera), and because I thought it would be the mobile platform where the market is less saturated.
The idea behind RSVP is that it takes a considerable amount of effort and time to move your eyes' focus from word to word when you are reading, especially on a phone where the font might be tiny. Because of this you can increase immensely your reading speed if instead of having to move your focus from word to word, you focus on a point and the word changes at a certain cadence. Typically, with some practice you can increase that cadence to numbers such as 500 words per minute comfortably, which is a lot more than what the average person can read and works brilliantly if you read light stuff (I wouldn't use it for hard technical stuff, because you need more time to process the information for it to make sense).
I looked for speed reading apps for WP8 and found a few, but they required you to either copy&paste the text you want to speed read, required the text to be in OneDrive or that you'd copy the url of the page you wanted to speed read.
So I did Lectito (it means reading in Latin): http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/lectito/c4f00daf-d815-4868-8e65-a55ae40708e2
Lectito can be "launched" from Internet Explorer using the sharing option and it also supports pictures (it will display them and their "alt" text), which was another feature lacking in all the apps I've tried.
I'm still adding features and making stuff better in general. I'd really appreciate feedback in terms of features/problems that the app might still have.
All of the code that is not UI related is PCL, so it isn't too hard to port it to other platforms. I've chosen Windows Phone because that's the phone I have now (Lumia 920 and I really like it, especially the camera), and because I thought it would be the mobile platform where the market is less saturated.
Thanks! Rui