Work / Products and games
Redub Reader
A save-it-and-read-it-later app from 2009, before Instapaper, Pocket, or web fonts, built to make long reading on screens bearable.
The Redub Reader came years before Instapaper, Pocket, Readwise, web fonts, or flexbox. It tried to fix one thing: reading long articles on a screen was miserable.
It failed for a pile of reasons. It was built in Flash. Copyright was a mess. The iPad showed up. But the problem it went after still isn’t fully solved, and it’s the same one I’m working on now with Virgil.
The problem
- Web pages were built for ads and interruptions.
- Layouts didn’t adapt to the screen and weren’t made for legibility.
- HTML wasn’t reliably semantic.
- Copyright.
What we built
An HTML parser that pulled the key parts out of a page (title, headings, body, images) and flowed them into a Flash/Flex app. CSS couldn’t do multi-column layout yet.
A tutorial video shows the browser version.
GOOD Magazine gave us one issue on spec to see how it would look:
The annotation interface:
