sprits-it! is an open source web application which allows speed-reading of arbitrary web pages in a browser.
The speed reading technique is currently based on the ideas of Spritz described in their blog. At the time of this writing Spritz had virtually nothing to offer to iOs device users to play with. This project is targeted specifically on usability in Safari and Chrome mobile browsers but should ultimately work well on other platforms.
- Speed-read any web page in your browser (well, almost any) — also on mobile;
- Configurable reading speed, play/pause/rewind, nite mode, reading progress bar;
- Settings, text and reading position can be saved in browser local storage and restored next time you visit;
- Uses Readability™ technology for text extraction and cleanup (HTML boilerplate removal);
- Hyphenation for long words with language auto-detection;
- Punctuation aware;
- Easy-to-install bookmarklet;
- Right-to-left language support (עברית and العربية);
- Coming soon: e-book reading (in ePub format);
- Coming soon: PDF text extraction;
- Coming soon: word and context highlighting and navigation.
Live demo is hosted on Heroku here:
To read a web page at page_url use the following GET query:
http://sprits-it.herokuapp.com/read?url=page_url
For example:
http://sprits-it.herokuapp.com/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spritzinc.com%2Fthe-science
Alternatively, you migh just grab a bookmarklet in the settings section of the demo.
Official project homepage is hosted by GitHub Pages here.
Currently development betas only — simply because the project lacks sufficient user base to be tested extensively. Sorry… and you can help fixing that!
- v0.3-beta
- Right-to-left language support (Hebrew and Arabic);
- Improved language auto-detection;
- “Modern” browser detection, reject old browsers such as IE8;
- v0.2-beta
- Hyphenation and punctuation handling;
- Improved text extraction;
- v0.1-beta — Initial release.
The bootstrap code was imported from a CodePen snippet at http://codepen.io/the-happy-hippo/pen/aDHrl which in turn had been forked from a great Pen by Charlotte Dann at http://codepen.io/pouretrebelle/pen/reGKw with javascript cherrypicking for Readability text extraction from OpenSpritz project by Rich Jones(@miserlou).
Up-to-date Gist from codepen can be found at https://gist.github.com/the-happy-hippo/9474002.
Here is the description from Charlotte Dann for her original Pen:
Use Spritz right now! Options for speed, localStorage saving, jog forward/backward, text size and dark/light theme, also with keyboard controls and progress bar. You'll never need to read conventionally again. localStorage implementation by Keith Wyland, thanks Keith!
- OpenSpritz - OpenSpritz project by @miserlou
- Spritz Speed Reading V2 - Codepen Spritz project by @Charlotte Dann
- Spray - Bootstrap extension of OpenSpritz by @chaimpeck
I have started this project purely for educational purposes while having virtually no prior background in web design (apart from plain old HTML tables of 90's).
If you find something stupid that I did — please don't blame me and never hesitate to point those things out so I can learn from them.
sprits-it! is not affilated with Spritz Inc in any way. This is an open source, community created project based on publicly available information. We love you!