Syntactica

A Major iReader Improvement

by Henry Neils
President

Our team just had a huge breakthrough in the usability of the iReader!  The "Holy Grail" with this product, we're convinced, is that nobody would ever have to turn it off for any reason, and I think we now have that.

The problem, as we've heard you express, is that an iReader preview is great when you want it, and annoying when you don't. So, we've added a "gesture feature."  It allows you to simply move your cursor into a very unobtrusive, transparent icon next to a link you've scrolled over, which then tells iReader to deliver the goods!  If you don't need to preview a link, then don't gesture into that icon and just go on with your normal browsing activities.

Here's what the little transparent icon looks like, shown next to a link in the "Technology" section on today's NYTimes.com home page (look in the lower left of this image). That's what comes up when you move your cursor over that story link.

The next image shows what you see after you gesture into that little icon -- that is, the iReader Preview Window for that link pops up at that point.  Again, this only happens if you move your cursor into that little transparent icon.

Right now, we only have this update for the FireFox version (Mac or PC), because it is so much easier to prototype. Once we perfect it on FireFox, we will port it to IE. (And we'll let you know right away here on our blog.)

The credit for all the improvements we've been making to iReader goes to all of you -- the bloggers and their readers out there who've found us and taken the time to give us your reactions, comments, and suggestions. Your responses have been great!  You told us what to do, and we're listening! 

Those of you who have already downloaded the iReader plug-in for Firefox, please uninstall it now and go to this page again so you can download the latest. Then, click install and check out this improvement!

And do let us know what you think -- either by entering a comment right here on this blog, using the link below, or simply by emailing me at beta-support (at) syntactica (dot) com.

Thanks for being an iReader beta tester!

 

New iReader Download Available

by Henry Neils
President

The latest version of our iReader Web Previewer plug-in is now available. A key feature lets you easily enable or disable iReader. Just download and install the plug-in, or -- if you previously downloaded prior to February 22 -- uninstall first, then get the new version.

Now you can toggle iReader on or off by just right-clicking your mouse if you're on a PC, or control-clicking if you use Firefox on the Mac. That way, you can choose exactly when you want to activate the iReader preview window -- on just certain kinds of sites or web pages, for example.

But also note that we've had a feature where, if you go into Tools/iReader or Options/iReader, you can set the "sensitivity." This was designed to allow you to specify how many milliseconds of delay you want before the iReader window comes up. So,if you'd like that to be, say, as long as a second, or even several seconds, you could enter in the equivalent in milliseconds. Adjusting iReader sensitivity to suit your needs results in far fewer "accidental" popups of the iReader window.

But -- hold on -- a new feature in this latest download is a control panel that has slider controls instead of numeric input!  Cool, huh?

So, How Does iReader Work?

by Ward Johnson
VP Business Development

Glad you asked!  We've been adding lots of information to our web site to help answer that very question, and more, about our iReader Web Previewer plug-in. We've had lots of good reaction. Here are a few urls that I would encourage you to visit, including, of course:
• How It Works
And, to get more background on the technology behind iReader, try these:
• Developer Info
• Applications

We also have a white paper that goes into considerable detail on our technology, entitled "Introducing Syntactica: A Natural Language Processing API." It was written in September 2006, prior to the recent release of our iReader tool, but it's still informative about our technology. The author is James Mathewson, who's editor-in-chief at IBM.com.  Let me know if you like a copy by email. Just send your request to me: ward (at) syntactica (dot) com.

Welcome! Hey, Say Hello to Our New iReader™ Beta!

Hi, I’m Henry Neils, the president of Syntactica. And I'm really excited today, both to be debuting our new blog, and making our new “iReader” plug-in download available – all on the same day!  Our team has been working very hard to get this new tool out there for your evaluation.

iReader is a totally new way to browse! Where else can you get a text summary of a link without clicking on it?  We’re blazing a bit of a new trail here, friends, and we hope you’ll find it a helpful new technology. Most of all, we’re really looking forward to your honest reaction to it – so please send us your comments!  That can either be via the comments feature of this blog, for all to see – or if you’d prefer, by emailing us at beta-support (at) syntactica (dot) com.

We definitely want your opinions, comments, and suggestions -- so let us have it!  Where will this new technology be useful?  On what kinds of sites, or what kinds of links?  Note that you can even turn iReader on and off whenever you want -- just right-click. So, use it just whenever you wish, when you hit a site where it makes sense, or perhaps where you don’t particularly want to leave any clickstream tracks?  And when you don't need it, just right-click to shut it off.

In looking to get people to try our new tool, we decided to first approach several key bloggers whom we thought might like to review our new beta, and hopefully write about it. We did that a few days ago, under embargo. Richard MacManus, at one of our favorite blogs, Read/Write Web, has already posted.  And our local friend Graeme Thickins has also told a bit of our story at his infamous Tech-Surf-Blog.

In getting some of these key influencers out there to weigh in on it, we thought we might then get a fair number of people to download the iReader plug-in, fire it up, and give our newly beefed-up servers a bit of a workout!  Note: if we do get a little overwhelmed, and things do slow down, my apologies in advance.  Please bear with us, and we’ll deal with making the experience as smooth as possible.  We have certainly set up servers for the downloads that are separate from the  application.  (Okay, duh.)

Welcome to Syntactica!  And to our brand-new web site (still in flux!), and – especially – welcome to our new product, the iReader Web Previewer beta!

I hope to have discussions with many of you in the very near future!  Thanks for stopping by.  Now, please go download iReader -- then tell me if we’re onto something here, would ya?