Tofu 2.0a2 review

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by rbytes.net on

Tofu is.

License: Freeware
OS: Mac OS X
File size: 494K
Developer: Amar Sagoo
Price: $0.00
Updated: 05 Sep 2006
0 stars award from rbytes.net


Tofu is... different. It is a novel application to 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 system-wide 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.

What's New:
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.

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