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DESCRIPTION
Tofu helps address the common problem that people don't like reading text on the screen. Why is that, anyway? I believe there are two main reasons: line width and visual instability. 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.

In Tofu, text is arranged in columns, and each column is only as high as your window. So lines are nice and narrow, they don't move about vertically, plus your text is now in easy-to-digest chunks. You just scroll from column to column horizontally, and feel more in control.

Tofu also includes some other useful features to make reading easier for you. You can jump to any point in your text by simply typing some letters near it (without choosing any command first). There's a "View In Columns" service so you can, for example, grab some text from a web page. And it lets you use your voice to navigate text, so you can literally sit back and read.

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WHAT'S NEW
Version 2.0a2:
  • Tofu is now a Universal Binary. If you have an Intel Mac, please let me know if it works for you.
  • Rewrote full-screen mode to show the menu bar and Dock (if you move your mouse over the edge) and to allow switching to other documents and applications. This means more than one document can be in full-screen mode at the same time. This hopefully also fixes crashes some people were experiencing.
  • Window resizing now snaps to quarters of a column width, to make fitting to columns easier.
  • Command-Equals can now be used to make text bigger.
REQUIREMENTS
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.


SCREENSHOT

Developer:Amar Sagoo
Downloads:21,596
  - Version d/l:5,518
Business:Word Processing
License:Free
Date:28 Mar 2006
Platform:PPC/Intel
RATING
****½
Tofu User Reviews (82 posts)Write A Review
Mar 30 2006
*****

CRUCIAL  Absolute genius.

Tofu does not get nearly the attention it deserves. Tofu makes reading long documents on screen totally painless, and in some ways is better than reading a paper based document as you can see both the page before and after so you can easily scan for things and adjust column width for reading comfort.

If it has bugs, like sometimes spotty connection to services they are of so little consequence, compared to the simplicity and elegance of this app. My biggest gripe is that this is not built into the OS so that I can chose to read web pages without having to switch to it, or compose notes in TextEdit using the same concept.

I just wish there was more software out there that re-though problems and came up with such elegantly simple solutions. Solutions that remove barriers and have interfaces so simple that they need no toolbars, or other extraneous icons. Interfaces that just get out of the way. A lot can be learned from the elegance of this application, when it comes to software, less is often more.  (Version 2.0a2)

[ 1 Reply - Reply ]
Mar 29 2006

SOMEONE  Under version 2.0 alpha, the system wide service no longer works and remembering text position doesn't work at all for PDf files.  (Version 2.0a2)

[ Reply ]
Mar 29 2006

IMACBIE  This is a very neat app.

Hopefully PDF support will be complete with ease o.O  (Version 2.0a2)

[ Reply ]
Mar 28 2006
*****

HUEVOX  This is a simple and effective app. Thank you so much for such a great tool! I would gladly pay a fee to use this.  (Version 2.0a2)

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