dBelement - Blog : Reading is fun again with the amazing power of WebApps

Reading is fun again with the amazing power of WebApps

2010-02-09 19:22:45

In these last few months we've released a huge upgrade to our Reader app. Reader was re-coded from the ground up to function completely offline.

What's new for you

In addition to being 60% faster, we've added hundreds of new features in the Reader upgrade. Here are just a couple of examples.

Reader now helps you read faster with Auto-scroll. Auto-scroll is a unique feature which makes your books act like movie credits. So you will never have to turn another page again. Just relax in a cozy spot, open up Reader, then choose a perfect auto-scroll speed (maybe something challenging) and enjoy your books. You will notice yourself finishing more of your books in less time.
Another recent addition to Reader is a built in Dictionary. The next time you run into a word you don't know, you won't need to write it down or be forced to open up your computer. Having a dictionary always within reach will improve your vocabulary and help you understand more of what you read.

Rebuilding Reader

Rebuilding Reader has been a very rewarding experience. Our hope with Reader was that once you started using it you would completely forget that you are using a WebApp. There are many benefits to WebApps, most importantly they free you from having to download and install all those updates. We can publish updates every night, and you get the updates instantly without having to install anything. Bugs are taken care of faster and features are added in a matter of hours rather than weeks.

A quick shout-out to all of our Reader users, thanks for all the feedback, we really appreciate it. There are many more updates to come to Reader and we hope you will join us as we evolve Reader and the idea of mobile WebApps.

If you haven't tried Reader we're really excited to hear what you think. Grab your iPhone (or iPod Touch), open Safari, and navigate to http://reader.dbelement.com You can start adding books by opening the Reader BookManager on your computer.

Visit the Reader description page to learn more about Reader.

PS: As many of you discovered, Reader works on almost any modern smart phone. Go ahead launch it on your Droid, Nexus One (any 2.0+ Android phone) and Palm Pre.