It's called ReadIN now
The app finally says ReadIN everywhere now. I'd picked the name a little while back. Read plus IN, as in what you read actually gets into your head.
The product site went live. In the evening we made the company site too. I told Claude to go for an Apple kind of look and skip the features, just the vision. The home page has words flowing into a light, and a sphere that spins and reacts to your mouse. In the first version nothing moved on my screen and the sphere didn't even show up. After the fix I looked again and I was really happy with it.
The biggest job today was actually page turning on iPad. A user wanted to flip left and right, like a real book. I guessed scanned PDFs would be the hard part. Claude looked into it and said the opposite. PDF would take one version, EPUB three to five. I asked for the paper curl effect, and for the page to fill as much of the screen as it can. By the middle of the night both EPUB and PDF could turn pages.
Late that night I wrote down a thought. I think the most badass thing about AI is this. Zuckerberg back then had to really know computers to build anything. AI today blows past that Zuckerberg, 1,000 times, 10,000 times. I'd never coded before. I picked up Claude, with basically no education in this, told it what I wanted, and it built it. That's insane! As a tool, it really does empower all of humanity.
Here's another funny one. When I first read Paul Graham, I'd throw the English essay at ChatGPT to translate, then open the Chinese version in my reader. Then we added translation to the reader and I stopped doing all that.
In the evening I went back to his "Startup = Growth" in ReadIN and wrote more than twenty notes. He says to launch something small and use growth as the force that makes it evolve. To me that's the bible. My company will use that as its model and compass. Though 10% growth a week is really not a small goal.
What I figured out today: Anyone can now build things, any time they want.
Versions today: v0.53 missing English translations · v0.54 changelog opens at the top · v0.55 page turning step one, books laid out in pages · v0.56 page turning step two, the paper curl · v0.57 renamed to ReadIN · v0.58 ebooks turn like a real book on iPad · v0.59 app files renamed to ReadIN · v0.60 PDFs turn pages on iPad too · v0.61 copy your invite code over when opening from the home screen
My AI reader, ReadIN, is in private beta. Want to try it? → Try it