More info

Feel like reading? Here's some more info on Readable. The information here isn't something you need to know to use Readable. It's just some info I thought I'd share with you.

Compatibilitty

Readable should work in all decent, modern web browsers. It has been explicitly tested in Firefox 3.0, Safari 4.0, Chrome 1.0, Internet Explorer 7.0, and Opera 9.6.

(The fact that I have not gone mad making a very complicated JavaScript/CSS app that works in all the main browsers is mainly dues to the fantastic jQuery library. Some of the cross browsers stuff in the app is indeed my own, but I never could have pulled it off without jQuery.)

Readable works just fine with sites written in foreign languages — even if those languages have a right-to-left layout.

Philosophy

Readable is not about removing ads (although it does do that quite effectively). Readable is about making reading on the web comfortable.

Personally, I don't read web pages with lots of ads on them (I'm not a fan of the news), but I do read (quite a lot) of web pages that are set in a font, size, or color that I'm not comfortable with. That's where Readable comes in.

Readable is about ease of reading. Its purpose is to help you read more of the web.

The Long Tail of Readable Text

Readable offers so many options simply because I believe that preferences for readable text are — like may other things — a long tail phenomenon.

Most people think that a few combinations of typography and color would make text readable for everyone. I disagree. I think you should have the option to customize everything. Moreover, I think that, when given the option to customize everything, more users will choose to customize more options.

Insipration

Readable was inspired by Paul Graham's website. You see, I love reading the man's essays, but at the same time I hate how his website displays said essays. (It's not you Paul, it's me. I really have a problem with the left set text, and the Verdana font.)

That kind of particular preferrence to how text is displayed is not unusual. That's Readable's target audience: people who like their text displayed a certain way.

Fonts, Colors, and Layouts

The fonts, layouts, and colors used by Readable are completely customizable. If you have some other ideas, please get in touch — you'll find our email address at the bottom of this page.

Readable vs. Readability

There's another application out there that aims to do almost the same thing as Readable. It's called Readability and it was launched a couple of weeks before Readable.

No only do the two share no source code, but the inspiration for Readable did not come from Readability — as I've said before, Readable was inspired by Paul Graham's website (or, actually, by me being annoyed with Paul's website).

(At the time Readability launched, Readable allready existed in a preliminary form — albeit not on the internet.)

Also, as far as process goes, Readable and Readability are very different beasts, that go about achieving their purpose in very different ways.

(Readability is destructive — it destroys the things it does not like on the current page. Readable, on the other hand, is constructive — it leaves the current page alone, but ads an overlay with the extracted, or manually selected, content.)

Also, Readable is quite a bit "smarter" than Readability — that is, it performs quite a few more operations on content, before displaying. It may even be to "smart" for its own good.

Honestly, I would like nothing more than to make Readable dumber (simpler is always better), but, bunfortunately, I haven't managed to make it any simpler than it allready is — not without loosing functionality which I deem to be essential.

Google App Engine

Readable pretty much runs on Google's infrastructure: Google App Engine is used for application hosting, and Google APIs is used to load jQuery — as well as SWFObject on this site.

(Gratitude towards Google App Engine is the main reason Readable chose to keep it's appspot.com URL. Thanks Google.)

Powered By

Readable is completely written in JavaScript, and it uses the fantastic jQuery JavaScript library.

As for actual source code, at the moment, Readable measures roughly 3200 lines of code (that's nicely formatted source code — with comments and jQuery style chaining). Minified, that comes out to only 37 thousand characters — which, if you ask me, is not a lot at all.

Also, with regard to code, you might be asking yourself right now, "Why isn't Readable a Firefox extension?". Well, I did not make Readable a Firefox extension mostly because I wanted it to work in all browsers, and because making Readable a Firefox extension would not have given me many more advantages over it being a bookmarklet.

(As a side note — and a disclosure — a big reason of why I went for the bookmarklet approach was Mac users: a huge number of Mac users use Safari, and not Firefox, because Safari is more Mac-like. I respect that — plus, I love the Mac)

Author

If you're interested, Readable was made by me; my name is Gabriel Coarna.

I like to think of myself as a writer. Some of the things I write turn out to be computer programs, while others turn out to be essays.

I don't have a website, otherwise I would now be pointing you to it.

Get In Touch

If you would like to get in touch with me regarding Readable, this is the way to do it:

You can also get in touch with me via Twitter. If you'd like, you can even follow Readable App (@readable_app).

Possible reasons to get in touch: