Tether isn't ready for a public release yet. The main reading flow works, but internal use only tells so much. Closed testing is the point where other people get to find the bugs, confusing controls, and device-specific problems that have been missed.

The original idea is still there: hold the screen to read one word at a time, lift your finger to pause, and swipe up to see the complete article. Most of the recent work has been less novel and more necessary: importing files, saving progress, and making sure you can find an article again the next day.

Tether accepts links from the clipboard and Android share sheet, as well as pasted text, PDFs, and EPUBs. It follows RSS feeds too. The library supports collections, pins, highlights, notes, renamed titles, and a resume button for whatever you were reading last.

Recent builds also add presets for the reading settings. Each article remembers whether you last used RSVP or the full-page view. There's an optional daily goal, but it is off by default.

The closed test will stay fairly small because each tester is added manually. If access does not arrive immediately, that is probably why.

Tether doesn't have user accounts. Your library, notes, settings, and reading progress stay on your phone, and you can export a backup. Google Play does need the email address of each tester. Visit the post on Tendril Works to request access.

If you join, please use Tether for your normal reading. The odd PDF, the feed with broken formatting, and the article you abandon halfway through are much more useful than a clean demo.

Tether started with a small experiment: would keeping the current word in one place make an article easier to finish on a phone? The first build took a link, extracted the article text, and kept the same reading position while switching between RSVP and the full page.

RSVP isn't a speed-reading trick, and Tether does not present it as one. The research is mixed. Showing words rapidly in a fixed position can reduce eye movement, but it can also hurt comprehension when the interface makes it difficult to pause or reread. This paper on RSVP interfaces is a useful overview.

That's why Tether uses a hold gesture instead of a play/pause toggle. Hold the screen to keep reading and lift your finger to stop. When paused, the nearby words reappear and you can scrub backward. A swipe returns you to the full article.

The idea is worth pursuing because reading and attention really are related. In one study of struggling readers, attention measures helped explain differences in reading comprehension and predicted how comprehension changed over time. Tether isn't a treatment or a diagnostic tool. It's just a reader with fewer things competing for your eyes. Read the study.

The app should make a page easier to read. It should not tell you how your brain works.

Some of Tether's settings are experiments. It includes fonts such as Atkinson Hyperlegible, which was designed to make similar characters easier to tell apart. It also includes optional bionic-style prefix emphasis, though recent eye tracking research on Bionic Reading did not find a benefit for typical readers. The setting is included without a promise that it will make anyone read better.

The same goes for tint overlays. Some people prefer reading against a colored background, but the research on colored overlays and reading is unsettled. In Tether, the tints are simply optional colors.

This is still experimental software. If a setting helps, use it. If it doesn't, turn it off and read the article normally.

Tendril Works is a home for small, independent software projects. Not a consultancy, and not a plan to turn every idea into a platform. Just products with a job that can be explained in a sentence.

Not every product needs a feed, a streak, a recommendation engine, or a reason to send a notification. Those things can be useful. They can also become the product when all someone wanted was the tool.

notifications / streaks / recommendations / the article

The approach is straightforward: give the main action enough room, make the important settings easy to find, and don't ask for an account if the product works without one. That's a preference, not a grand theory of software.

Tether is the first project. It began with a familiar problem: opening a long article, reading the first few paragraphs, and losing the place. Its RSVP mode holds the current word in one spot. The full-page mode is always one swipe away when a paragraph needs another look.

Future Tendril Works projects may have nothing to do with reading. The common thread will be narrower than that: a real problem, existing software that does not solve it well, and a specific attempt to do better.

The boring details matter: whether a setting is named clearly, whether the app remembers where someone stopped, and whether it still works without a network connection. That's most of the work anyway.

That's the whole pitch for now.