I use the app Concepts on my iPad to draw mindmaps. Drawing mindmaps with pictures and such is way more powerful (better encoding into long-term memory) than typical mindmap apps where you just type words verbatim and draw arrows. It’s excellent since it has a (quasi-) infinite canvas. This is the same app that Justin Sung uses.
When I want to go in-depth into a paper, I will load it into OneNote on my iPad and draw in the margin to better encode my understanding of the paper.
I’ve been using the Voice Dream Reader app on my iPhone and iPad to get through posts and papers much faster (I usually have time to read most of an Alignment Forum post on my way to work and another on the way back). Importantly, I stop the text-to-speech when I’m trying to understand an important part. I use Pocket to load LW/AF posts into it and download PDFs on my device and into the app for reading papers. There’s a nice feature in the app that automatically skips citations in the text, so reading papers isn’t as annoying. The voices are robotic, but I just cycled through a bunch until I found one I didn’t mind (I didn’t buy any, but there are premium voices). I expect Speechify has better voices, but it’s more expensive, and I think people find that the app isn’t as good overall compared to Voice Dream Reader. Thanks to Quintin Pope for recommending the app to me.
A few more notes:
I use the app Concepts on my iPad to draw mindmaps. Drawing mindmaps with pictures and such is way more powerful (better encoding into long-term memory) than typical mindmap apps where you just type words verbatim and draw arrows. It’s excellent since it has a (quasi-) infinite canvas. This is the same app that Justin Sung uses.
When I want to go in-depth into a paper, I will load it into OneNote on my iPad and draw in the margin to better encode my understanding of the paper.
I’ve been using the Voice Dream Reader app on my iPhone and iPad to get through posts and papers much faster (I usually have time to read most of an Alignment Forum post on my way to work and another on the way back). Importantly, I stop the text-to-speech when I’m trying to understand an important part. I use Pocket to load LW/AF posts into it and download PDFs on my device and into the app for reading papers. There’s a nice feature in the app that automatically skips citations in the text, so reading papers isn’t as annoying. The voices are robotic, but I just cycled through a bunch until I found one I didn’t mind (I didn’t buy any, but there are premium voices). I expect Speechify has better voices, but it’s more expensive, and I think people find that the app isn’t as good overall compared to Voice Dream Reader. Thanks to Quintin Pope for recommending the app to me.