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jimmejardine / qiqqa-open-source

The open-sourced version of the award-winning Qiqqa research management tool for Windows
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Feature request: Speed-reading should have controls to let the user reorient himself if he has lost focus #191

Open raindropsfromsky opened 4 years ago

raindropsfromsky commented 4 years ago

IMHO Qiqqa's speed-reading feature is a fantastic feature that is not given its due.

However, there is a scope for improvement: While reading rapidly, there will be a time where the reader loses focus, or is distracted by someone/something. By the time he refocuses, some words are lost. Now he has no idea what is going on.

While his brain is busy figuring out the lost meaning, he loses his grip on the new words that are presently flashing on the screen.

So, the moment he feels overwhelmed, he should be able to stop and backtrace.

But here lies the problem: There is no control to let him reorient himself quickly.

Although the playback is always in terms of individual words, he cannot remember the last word he understood well. (our brain reconstitutes a whole sentence, rather than remembering a collection of words. Therefore he would be able to tell which sentence he registered last.)

There are two options:

  1. Display the full page that is being read, with a highlight showing the current position. Let him figure out the spot from where to repeat. When he clicks somewhere on the page, start the speed-reading again from there.
  2. Give him controls that repeat the last sentence, and the last paragraph. If he clicks on the same control again, the app should skip backward by one more sentence or paragraph, depending on which control is clicked.
GerHobbelt commented 4 years ago

I believe speed-reading was added to Qiqqa as an experiment once and never got professional.

Good observations. Filed for later due to time constraints.

jimme-jamatto commented 4 years ago

Hehe, Ger, i pre-read most of my research papers using that speed-reading control! i found if i did that first (usually you could 'read' an entire paper in about 5 minutes) then when you really got down to reading it, i found that i already knew why the maths was working. an amazing time saving tool!

But as you can tell from the gui, I am not the master of UX :-P