News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

June 27, 2008

software

This kind of Tofu doesn’t taste like paper, but it acts like it (ooh!)

Posted Jun. 27, ’08, 3:45 PM PT by Dan Pourhadi
Category | Software

Tofu1.jpgReading lots of text on your computer screen is hard—not only are you constantly distracted by Twitterific Growl notifications, annoying IMs, the constant beeping of your email client, and YouTube, but it’s also just plain difficult for your eyes. There are so many words, and you’re always losing your spot and constantly needing to scroll up and down and readjusting your view after a scroll, and then dealing with the inconsistency of text—format, size, distribution, etc.—from different sources. Totally unnatural. Makes me yearn for the days of printed text and paper books.

But those days are long gone, so we must embrace methods of improving our ability to read on-screen text without gauging our eyes from their sockets. So today I point you to Tofu—not the disgusting wannabe “food” poser yuckiness, but the app that makes reading on the computer screen not such a miserable task.

Amar Sagoo, Tofu’s dev, tries to understand and explain why this is such a problem:

Text is usually very wide on the screen, which makes going from the end of one line to the beginning of the next difficult. That’s why newspapers have narrow columns: It makes them faster to read.

So why not just take a normal window and make it narrower, scrolling down as you need? Well, there are usually a lot of lines in a text, and all look more or less the same, so if they move past your eyes vertically, they are difficult to keep track of. The text doesn’t feel stable, and you get lost easily.

Tofu attempts to solve that: text you copy into it is formatted into columns, only as high as the Tofu window, and you scroll through it horizontally instead of vertically. And there are a slew of neat features: voice control of scrolling, full-screen mode, an OS X Service that lets your grab text from other apps, letter-jumping through text, and easy scrolling with the keyboard. It gets a little slow and choppy when there’s a massive amount of text, but other than that it works pretty darn well.

It’s free (yay!) and can be downloaded at Amar’s website. And check out this Macworld piece for more Tofu info.


1 Comments

Dave-O said:

gouging?

June 30, 2008 1:00 PM

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