ReadPal and Selfsell.ie - examples of great design

Before I got my new laptop PC last year I used to suffer fairly regular eye strain working with a CRT monitor. The LCD is much less straining but I still go through periods where its literally painful trying to focus on the screen.

So I was delighted to come across ReadPal yesterday when Michael FitzGerald of Galway based Cucoco Ltd. introduced us to it during the Web 2.0 Ireland Skypecast. According to the website -

"ReadPal makes your everyday on-screen reading a better experience. No longer is there a need to print off documents just to read them, use ReadPal instead."

Well I never print off documents to read them but I know I'd have less problems with my eyes if I did.

Disappointingly ReadPal doesn't currently support Firefox or Thunderbird so I can't use it for the vast majority of my reading and I was reduced to testing it with NotePad (I don't have MS Word either!). That was enough to see how great it is though and confirm that the software is as polished as the website. The GUI is really nice and the reading options are great with various views, speed reading and the intriguing Autoskim -

"Many words are useless. They just slow us down without contributing to meaning. For instance, in Chinese they do not even have a word for 'the' or 'a'. In English these are only necessary for emphasis when they are usually italicized. In Spanish 'he', 'she' and 'it' are often not used.

With this patented technology you can choose to remove 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% or even 50% of the words in the document. With one click they are removed, with another replaced."

I've tried a few different spead readers before (even on my mobile) and I was skeptical of this feature but it actually works very well. And they've got a patent on it - nice one! Michael's partner in ReadPal is a Medical Doctor so you know that there's some real science behind it.

You can tell that Michael has an eye for design (he's a Design Engineer) and it carries through to his other project SelfSell.ie. Its a clean attractive site even if the houses have a distinctly Balamory look about them ;-)