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TechRadar: All latest feedsRoundup: 10 best iOS writing apps for would-be authors everywhere
Many of us would like to write a book. But unless you're a genius (or you have low standards) you need to plan your story before you dive into its imaginary world.
That's why more than half of the apps we've mentioned here deal with the literary underpinnings of your book: defining your characters, planning pertinent plot points, describing locations, even picking out the motivating factors that drive your hero forward, like fixations, frustrations and phobias.
We'll also show you how you can make a significant saving on two leading reference works that ought to be found on every writer's virtual bookshelf.
Writing is something we all have to do at some point in our lives, and even if your scripting efforts centre more on notes for the milkman than chapters and verse for the masses, you'll find an app here to meet your needs.
Break down the writing process into manageable chunks and it isn't so daunting
Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
The most successful stories - from War and Peace to A Christmas Carol to those tales about that Harry Potter fella - use fairly similar plot and character arcs. Key developments happen in a recognised order, and they build to a resolution through a series of mini climaxes.
Plotting your book along similar lines with a tool like A Novel Idea should make for a stronger story and more fulfilling conclusion.
Here, you work through the screens in whichever order you choose, entering character names and backstory, location descriptions, scene developments, and even random ideas, and they'll all be corralled inside an overall novel container. You can store several novels inside the app at once, if you're fortunate enough to have more than idea on the go.
What's really clever, though, and makes it more than an untidy tub of ideas, is the way the various parts all link together. So, describe half a dozen locations in the Locations tab and they'll populate the menus in the Scene tab screens, ready for dropping straight in. This saves time and will keep everything uniform throughout your novel plan.
We'll admit that it's slightly clumsy about saving each step before you head back to the overview screen, but otherwise it's an effective way to break down a daunting task into manageable, less threatening chunks. A £1.99 In-App- Purchase enables Dropbox syncing, scene writing and export to iTunes.
A professional film-plotting tool that has much to offer to novelists, too
Price: £5.49 / $7.99
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
Contour has a dedicated following on the Mac where it's long been used to plot movie scripts, but that doesn't mean it isn't ripe for outlining novels, too.
It starts with four simple questions: who is your main character, what do they want to accomplish, who (or what) is trying to hamper their progress, and what would happen if they didn't succeed? Simple. Those four questions define your story from beginning to end.
What follows consists of a series of obstacles and triumphs that see your hero progress to the point where the strands of your book are resolved in the final chapter. Contour breaks down your story into three acts and shows you how to structure each one, guides you through the process of developing your character through the orphan, wanderer, warrior and martyr phases that characterise every successful story arc, and makes it easy to identify weak points in your plot.
If you still don't quite understand what you ought to be doing, it includes the underlying plots to 17 blockbusters, including Up, The Incredibles and Slumdog Millionaire, so you can learn from the pros. It's expensive compared to A Novel Idea, but well worth it if you're serious about writing.
With these reference tools on your home screen, you'll never be lost for words
Price: £4.99 / $6.99 (Dictionary) £2.99 / $4.99 (Thesaurus)
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
Don't underestimate the value of decent reference books when writing your magnus opus. You won't get much better than Chambers; the Dictionary app includes all 260,000 definitions of the mammoth 12th Edition, which runs to almost 2,000 pages in print.
The bonus here, of course, is that you don't need to leaf through each one to find the word you're after; you simply type it in, and up it pops. Likewise, the Thesaurus should help you avoid tired prose if used with care (and you avoid the temptation to slip in anything too flowery, florid, fussy, verbose, rococo… ahem).
This digital edition actually outguns the printed equivalent, for while the dead tree volume contains 420,000 synonyms - 20,000 more than you'll find here - they are organised under 18,000 key words, while the app edition gives you alternatives to 40,000.
The two apps are linked for cross-referencing from one to the other, which is why we've included them under a single heading here, and there are also fringe benefits for crossword lovers, too; it can assist you in figuring out words if you type in the letters you've got.
An editor geared towards writing a novel within time constraints
Price: £2.99 / $4.99
Works with: iPad
Novel in 30 could equally be called in Novel in 365, if you're a slow typist. Although it's geared up to achieving NaNoWriMo's target of 50,000 words in 30 days, you can extend your deadline to as long as a year, and your word count to 300,000. Whichever metrics you choose, it'll average your word count over each day so you know how much you still have to write.
As you start writing, Novel in 30 will tell you how many words you need to write each day, how many you've knocked out so far and whether or not you're going to hit your target. It's extremely motivating.
At the top of the screen there's a series of sheets, each of which shows how many words you wrote that day, while below it, a running word count tallies your overall input. You can only write a single novel at once and there's a built-in backup feature that uploads your novel to Dropbox. You can only change the font - a good thing; it means there's less to distract you.
Distraction-free writing with the added benefits of Markdown syntax
Price: £1.99 / $2.99
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
Byword is a simple, clean text editor that, crucially, shows count words in selections - not just in the complete document, as is currently the case for rival iA Writer.
Its virtues go beyond that, though. It's interface is relaxing; it's entirely black and grey on white, and you can choose from four typefaces. The regular keyboard is supplemented by a single-deck toolbar that you can swipe to switch between word count, punctuation and embedding tools, the latter of which let you add a web link, image or list.
The second and third toolbars also include a set of four cursor keys. The clever thing about the embedding tools is that they each invoke Markdown syntax. Markdown uses plain-text characters to denote formatting. In the working document they remain unobtrusive, but once you export it to HTML or email it as rich text, it's converted to complex formatting.
Plotting your novel and its intricate internal connections visually
Price: £6.99 / $9.99
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
MindNode is a piece of software geared around making mind-maps. It's often easier to work your way through a sticky plot point using mind maps than lists and bullets. Mind maps are organised brain dumps: a way for you to get all of your thoughts, concepts and possible outcomes onto the page in a logical, trickle-out manner.
So, if one branch concerns your hero uncovering a murder, the twigs that come off it might deal with the implications, how it affects the relatives, who was the culprit and how they might eventually reveal themselves.
Supplementary branches would deal with other important concepts, such as morality and discrimination, or could handle the development of supporting characters. Literally anything and everything that relates to your story can be plotted out.
The major benefit of doing this on screen rather than paper is that you can drag your various branches around the canvas, and switch from an overview to a more detailed aspect.
A miscellany of useful facts, names, places and tid-bits for any writer
Price: £1.49 / $1.99
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
Lists for Writers is more than a random bundle of lists. Organised into logical sections such as words, settings, plot points, personalities and characters, it's a quick-fix inspiration unblocker.
The shortest way to come up with a character name used to be a quick riffle through the phone book, but here you have extensive lists of male and female first and last names, occupations, and obsessions. You can pick out a phobia or character trait from the alphabetical lists, with each one defined so you know whether it fits your hero or villain's personality.
There's a rhyming dictionary for poets, and lists of US and world cities, landforms and weather traits. Lists for Writers is a simple way to quickly resolve a sticky plot point in the planning stages, and could be used to sketch out transient characters during the writing process too, allowing you to keep the words flowing without a potentially distracting internet venture.
Plan and write all in one app for anything from a short story to novel
Price: £1.99 / $2.99
Works with: iPad
On the one hand you have a plain text writing environment that lets you get on with laying down your story without getting tied up in formatting options and settings, on the other, you have an integrated planning tool like A Novel Idea and Contour.
Writing App doesn't give you as much guidance as Contour, but it does provide plenty of structured space for you to flesh out your characters and locations as you go along. The key to creating believable characters is knowing them as well as you do your family, so it encourages you to fill in as much as you can about their occupation, strengths, weaknesses, personality and even hobbies.
To get a clearer picture of each one you can specify their age, eye colour, hair style and height, and then start to think about the world they live in by moving on to adding locations, and the things they use in the items tab.
A modern take on an ages-old method for planning complex storylines
Price: £2.99 / $4.99
Works with: iPad
Sketch out scenes with Index Card and quickly re-order your story by rearranging them on your desk or pinboard; it's a time-tested method that's recreated here to great effect.
In much the same way you'd shuffle your cards in real life, here you can drag them to new locations on a cork board and their neighbours will shift about to accommodate them, which makes it easy to plan alternative story paths. Each card can be a character profile, location description or any other aspect you choose, but using them to write a synopsis of each scene means you can then drag them into chapter- or arc-based stacks.
Card projects can be exported as plain or rich text files, copied to Dropbox or printed, making Index Card a great app for planning your novel on a commute, or in downtime that you can't otherwise use for writing. There's also an iPhone version.
A less fussy, more fun alternative to the ubiquitous iBooks
Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
After writing itself, the second best way to learn how to write is to read. There are plenty of reading apps, including iBooks, but Kobo does the most to make reading fun. We prefer its brighter, less fussy interface, and we love the Reading Life stats that present your progress through each book in the style of a newspaper infographic.
You even get awards for reading more, and it's not long before you're hooked, competing with yourself to get to the next milestone.
As with Kindle and the iBookstore there are plenty of free classics to download, free samples and most books are significantly cheaper than the paper-based versions. The only downside is that you can't buy books directly through the Kobo application.
It's easily worked around, though; buy from Kobo's store through your browser and refresh the app's shelves by pulling them down, and your new purchases appear.
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The printing primer | Macworld
http://www.macworld.com/article/2026114/the-printing-primer.html
Last week I showed you how to configure your printer. This week, we'll explore the ins and outs of Mountain Lion's print sheet.
As you've learned by now, one of the Mac OS's strengths is its consistency. You needn't worry that you'll find the Copy command under the Edit menu in one application and under the File menu in another application. Commands are consistent in this way, and the Print command is no exception. You can always find it near the bottom of the File menu. Let's run through it.
Launch TextEdit and open a saved document (if you have one); or create a new document, enter some text, and save the file. Choose File > Print and you'll see a very simple sheet that includes a pop-up menu for choosing a printer (the default printer will appear here by default), a field for choosing the number of copies to print, a pop-up menu for selecting the page range (by default, all pages will be printed; but you can elect to print a single page or a range of pages—pages 2 through 4, for example—if you wish), a preview area that displays a thumbnail of the document's first page, and navigation controls for viewing other pages in the preview area. To print your document, simply click the Print button.
The Show Details button at the bottom of this sheet hints that other options await. Click it, and the sheet will expand.
When you click Show Details, you'll gain far greater control over your printed pages. The options at the top of the sheet—Printer, Copies, and Pages—are the same as on the simple pop-up menu, so let's focus instead on the new items that this sheet contains.
More options become available when you click Show DetailsAlthough most of us use one paper size only—US Letter in the United States, for example—you can choose a different size from this pop-up menu. For instance, you might insert legal-size paper into your printer to print a wide spreadsheet, or you might shove in a stack of envelopes to print a slew of addresses for your next bacchanal.
You needn't always print in portrait orientation. If, returning to our previous example, you want to print a spreadsheet, you'll find that—unless the spreadsheet has many rows and only a few, fairly narrow columns—you can cram more data onto a single sheet of paper by printing in landscape orientation (the second icon in the Orientation area).
Below the orientation entry in most print sheets is a pop-up menu. In the case of TextEdit, the first item listed there is 'TextEdit'; in other applications, 'Layout' is the first entry. In TextEdit, that entry allows you to enable or disable the option to print a document's header and footer (which may include a document's name, date produced, and page numbers). You can also choose to rewrap text so that it better fits the printed page. But let's get to the meat of what you might find in this menu (not all printers support all of the following options).
Layout: No law says that you must print one virtual page to one printed page. If you like, you can choose to print multiple virtual pages to a single piece of paper. Just select a number other than 1 in the Pages Per Sheet pop-up menu. Do so and you can choose the way those pages are laid out in the layout direction area. You can also opt to add a border to your page, as well as to print the page two-sided (not all printers support two-sided printing). You can also reverse the page orientation and/or flip pages horizontally. Reversing a text document makes no sense, but it can be a useful option when you're printing photos.
Speaking of photos, you'll want to pay particular attention to the Layout option before printing them. Choosing two or more pages per sheet lets you print multiple pictures on a single piece of paper, thus getting better use out of your expensive photo paper.
Color matching: If you have a color printer, you can choose how the printer translates colors from your Mac. By default, the printer will use Apple's ColorSync color-matching technology, which tries to ensure that the colors you see on your Mac's screen don't vary wildly from what comes out of your printer. You also find an In Printer option. If your printer allows you to tweak its output settings (and you've chosen to use them), select this option instead.
If you click the Profile menu (which should read 'Automatic'), you can choose a different color profile. Color profiles are an advanced subject, however, and one we'll skip for the time being.
Paper handling: Select 'Paper handling', and you can choose which pages to print (odd or even, which helps with double-sided printing, if your printer doesn't natively support printing on each side of a page), and specify the page order (automatic, normal, or reverse). You can also choose to scale the document to fit the size of the paper you're using—an option to keep in mind if a document that you'd like to compress onto a single page (a spreadsheet, for example) extends to two pages. Enable the Scale option, and you can then choose the paper size to use.
Paper feed: If your printer has more than one tray for delivering paper, you can choose which of the available trays to use.
The printing primer
Next PageCover page: People working in a formal business environment (or in a super-secret spy organization) are often required to produce a cover page for their printed documents. This option is where you can choose to do that. When doing so, you can select presets including Standard, Confidential, Unclassified, Classified, Secret, and Top Secret (again, helpful if you're a member of SMERSH). You can also add billing information in the appropriate field.
Color/Quality: If your printer allows it, you can change the output quality of particular prints. Why would you want to do that? To save ink and toner (and thus, money). If you're printing a fairly expendable document—your shopping list, say, or the first draft of your next acceptance speech—there's no reason to throw a lot of ink at it. If your printer offers an economy mode, which produces not-as-crisp prints because the printer is being parsimonious with the pigment, use that setting until you need the best-looking printout your printer can produce.
Finishing: Here you can choose the kind of material you're printing to—plain paper, labels, recycled paper, color paper, envelopes, and so on. Some printers can make adjustments to ink and toner output based on the kind of media they print to.
Supply levels: Some printers will report how much ink they have left in their cartridges. As I mentioned last week, this report isn't always accurate. However, it's a hint that you should lay in some new cartridges for the day when your pages don't print correctly because the printer really has exhausted its ink supply.
Paper Type/Quality: This option will appear far more often with a color inkjet printer than with a laser printer. The choices available include the type of paper to use (inkjet or photo paper, for example), the quality of the print you'd like (anything from fast draft to maximum dpi [dots per inch]), the tray source, and the option to print without borders. You'll also see a Color Options triangle. Click it and you can choose a different color profile, or adjust the image from within the print sheet—altering its saturation, brightness, and color tone, for example.
You can tweak images within the print sheetAs you can see, the print sheet provides many ways to tweak your printer settings. But you don't want to tweak those settings every time you use your printer, do you? Of course not, and that's why presets exist.
To save a preset, configure your settings as you like, click the Presets pop-up menu near the top of the sheet, and choose Save Current Settings as Preset. On the resulting sheet, you can name your preset and choose to save it for the currently selected printer or for all printers that are available to you. When you next print, your preset should appear as the default. If you'd like to return to a setting that you haven't configured, choose Default Settings from this pop-up menu.
Before we close up shop, I must direct your attention to the PDF button that appears in the print sheet. Click it and you'll see that you can create virtual printouts—PDF files created from your documents—within this sheet.
Convert your files to a universally readable form with the 'Print to PDF' feature.You'll find options here to create a PDF file and open it in Preview, to save the document as a PDF file, to save it as a PostScript file (an advanced option useful for designers and art directors), to add the PDF to iTunes (for syncing with an iOS device), to mail the PDF, and to save the PDF to the Web Receipts folder. Depending on the applications you've installed on your Mac, you may see some other options here (see the figure to the right).
This very useful feature allows you to send someone a readable copy of a document even when that person doesn't have a copy of the application that originally created it. So, for example, you could use this technique to create a PDF file of an iWorks Pages document and then send it to a coworker who has a Windows PC.
Next week: Class dismissed for Macworld/iWorld. See you the following week.
The printing primer
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There are lots of apps that let you add text to your photos. Over HD (US$1.99 but currently on sale for 50% off) does it with grace and style.
Pick or take a photo, open it in Over and add your text. The font choices are very artistic, not just the standard off-the-shelf variety. You can move the text around, change the size and reduce the brightness of the background image. Then you can share your photo through the usual social tools and email. There is also an option to have your photo delivered as a real postcard, at a small cost of course.
The rendered fonts are of very high quality, and the GUI is best in class. This app would be my first choice to add text to my photos. You get 25 fonts with the app, and for another dollar you can add more. I think the default fonts are varied enough to not make me want to purchase additional ones.
It's not, however, as full featured as I would like. You can't add multiple labels, and you can't rotate the text or create a drop shadow. I'd like to see those functions added.
If you are looking for something free, check out Phonto. It's not as pretty, the fonts aren't as cool, but you can freely rotate and add additional text labels. The app is add supported, but for an additional $0.99 you can have an ad-free version.
Still, Over HD is my favorite way to add text to photos on the fly. It is easy to use, has a beautiful GUI, and the text looks just great.
Over HD is a universal app, and is optimized for the iPhone 5. It requires iOS 5.1 or greater.
Over HD for iOS puts beautiful typography over your photos originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Mac troubleshooting: What to do when the Trash won’t empty | Macworld
Terminal Goodness:
...open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities). Type cd ~/.Trash and press Return. Then, type sudo rm -R followed by a space (don’t leave out the space character—it’s essential). Don’t press Return yet.
Next, click the Trash icon in your Dock to open a window displaying the contents of the Trash. Select everything in that window and drag it into the Terminal window; this action adds the paths of all those files and folders to the rm (remove) command. Now, press Return and enter your administrator password when prompted. In a moment or two (depending on how much was in your Trash), the Trash icon should return to its empty state.
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Exchange 2010 is similar to Exchange 2007 in that it will only accept email for your internal domain name. However, there are instances that may require your Exchange servers to receive emails that are in not your internal domain name. When this happens you will need to configure your Exchange servers to accept email for those other domains. To find further explanation on what an accepted domain is and the types of accepted domains, visit our previous Petri IT Knowledgebase article, Configure Exchange 2007 to
Configuring Exchange 2010 to accept email for other domains is similar to configuring in Exchange 2007 to accept other domains, in that it natively does not accept email from the external world; instead, you must tell it that it is allowed to do so.
For example, say your company decides to change its Internet domain name from mycompany.com to mycompanyemail.com. To do so, you will need to add the new domain name as an accepted domain name in Exchange.
Accepted domain names can be used in various situations such as each company division having its own Internet domain name, company mergers and acquisitions, or when your internal domain name is different than your Internet domain name.
Prior to configuring, ensure that you have the correct permissions to apply the changes. You must have the Exchange organizational administrator's role permissions delegated to you in order to configure changes. Accepted domains are configured at the organizational level on Exchange 2010 servers with the HUB transport role. You can configure accepted domains in two ways: by using the Exchange Management Console (EMC) or through Exchange Management Shell (PowerShell prompt).
First, open the Exchange Management Console. Expand the Organizational Configuration. There are two ways to add an accepted domain using the EMC:
Edge Transport role server (only use if you are using this role): Select Edge Transport, then click on the accepted domains tab.
Hub Transport role server: Select Hub Transport, Click the Accepted domains tab. From there you can do either of the following:
Next, the New Accepted Domain wizard will appear, as seen below.
In the Name field, type in a name to identify the new accepted domain. You can use any name you wish, but I would recommend using the same name as your new accepted domain. This will make things simple and easier to identify in the event that you have multiple domains that may be similar.
In the Accepted Domain field: Type in the accepted domain name. This is the field that identifies the SMTP domain name that will be accepted by your Exchange servers.
Select one of the following options to set the domain type. For a more detailed explanation, see Configure Exchange 2007 to Receive Email from Other Domains.
Select New; the wizard will begin configuring.
After the wizard has finished configuration, select Finish, as shown below.
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You can also configure a new accepted domain through Exchange Management Shell. To do so, follow these procedures.
First, open the Exchange Management Shell.
For the following domain types, type the respective commands:
New-AcceptedDomain –Name "YourEmailDomain.com" –DomainName YourEmailDomain.com –DomainType Authoritative
New-AcceptedDomain –Name "YourEmailDomain.com" –DomainName YourEmailDomain.com –DomainType InternalRelay
New-AcceptedDomain –Name "YourEmailDomain.com" –DomainName YourEmailDomain.com –DomainType ExternalRelay
There may be times when you will need to delete an accepted domain. We can do this either by using the Exchange Management Console (EMC) or by Using Exchange Management Shell (PowerShell prompt).
Open the EMC. Expand the Organizational Configuration. There are two ways to add an accepted domain using the EMC:
Select the Accepted domain you wish to remove. You can either right-click or and choose Remove or select Remove from the action pane.
Click Yesto remove when the prompt appears.
To remove an accepted domain from the Exchange Management Shell, use the following procedures: Open the Exchange Management Shell prompt, then type:
Remove-AcceptedDomain –Identity youremaildomain.com
Accepted domains allow the exchange organizational to know for which SMTP domains the Exchange servers should accept emails. They are replacements to the recipient policies that were used in Exchange 2003/2000 versions. You will need to create additional accepted domains for every domain that you wish to accept incoming emails for in addition to the default accepted domains. If you wish to relay emails for other domains you will also need to configure the accepted domains and add the appropriate external relay settings.
Brief message sent from a mobile device
Cyber attacks of all kinds are on the rise. It is a trend you ignore at your own peril. National Security Agency and U.S. cyber-command chief Keith Alexander said in July that Internet attacks of all sorts surged 44 percent in 2011 and are responsible for what he terms the "greatest transfer of wealth in history."
In a world where you can rent an already-hacked botnet for about $20to start your attack, and in a world where a criminal enterprise industry has developed to support amplifying attacks in progress, it is important to understand that these types of attacks are simply not going away. Are you ready for them? Are you considering the right points? Here are four strategies to help your organization prepare for and defend against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) events in the future.
Most of us develop systems on strict budgets. There is a general resistance among financial types as well as information executives to not pay for unused capacity. This makes good sense in and of itself—why waste your dollars on capacity, either bandwidth or compute, that you are not using? Many companies scale their systems to match a predictable but legitimate peak, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday or another annual peak load.
In a DDoS attack, however, your site or resource can experience loads many times greater than even your highest peak activity—on the order of 10 or 20 times, if not more. Mind you, I'm not suggesting you budget capacity to pay hackers to blast your network with packets. While you are specing bandwidth and compute resources, though, it makes sense to give yourself a healthy margin of error, even on top of your peak.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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PickTheBrain How and Why You Should Learn Speed Reading
Do you wish you could get more reading done everyday? Of course you do!
Whether it's reading more novels or keeping up with industry blogs, just imagine what it would be like if you could read 2, 3, or even 4 times faster than you do now.
The reality is you can do it… and it's much easier than you think!
My name is Ryan Whiteside and I'm a personal development junkie. I've read (literally) hundreds of personal development books over the past five years. One of those books that I gained incredible value from was called Breakthrough Rapid Reading by Peter Kump.
Before that book I had never taken the subject of speed reading seriously. Like most people I was a bit skeptical it was even possible to learn speed reading, and if it was I thought it would be too difficult for me to learn.
As it turns out, speed reading was much easier than I expected. In only a matter of a few hours of practice with the drills in the book, I went from reading 180 WPM (slightly below average) to 450 WPM (top 1% fastest in the world). I couldn't believe it!
I've been a slow reader my entire life, but now all of a sudden I was able to read over twice as fast as I did previously. A book that would normally take me 20 hours to read would now take me less than 10. I could now read 4-5 books a month instead of just 1-2.
In addition, what I found was that my comprehension was remaining exactly the same and even improving a little bit! Many people report that when you speed read, you maintain focus easier which helps with comprehension. I was certainly no exception to this.
The reality is, you can achieve the same kind of results that I did. Speed reading is a skill and like any skill, it just takes practice. The more you practice, the better the results you can expect.
After reading Peter's book, I picked up every other speed reading book and training course I could get my hands on. I was addicted and wanted to know every trick there was so I could take my reading level further.
What I found was calculating my WPM in the books I was reading became very tedious. And the various software I used just didn't cut it.
That's why I decided to take everything I learned about speed reading and build an iPad/iPhone app called RapidReading. I'd highly encourage you to check it out if you want to learn speed reading. There are three drills, each taking less than 10 minutes to complete. With continued practice, you can join me in the top 1%.
If you don't have an iPhone/iPad, try picking up a copy of Kump's book. It teaches you the science behind speed reading, as well as several drills you can do. It's not as fast or easy having to calculate your WPM manually, but it gets the job done.
If you haven't learned speed reading before, it's my hope that this post is the encouragement you need to give it a shot. I consider it one of the greatest skills I've ever learned how to do.
Post in the comments any thoughts or questions you have about speed reading or the RapidReading app. I'd love to discuss! 
Ryan Whiteside is the developer of RapidReading available in the iTunes store. You can learn more about speed reading at his website, RapidReadingApp.com .
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