Nana's Focus: ADHD Reader

Nana's Focus is a reader for studying from your own texts. It does not promise you will read three times faster, because that would not be true. It looks after something plainer. Three pages in, you should still have the first one.

Three ways to read, because different things slip away from different people.

Spot: words arrive one at a time, in one place on the screen. Your eyes stop wandering, because there's nowhere to wander to.

Line: the whole sentence in front of you, with a pointer leading your eye underneath.

Traditional reading: a plain page at your own pace. This is where you drag your finger over what you need to know.

A breath before reading. In through the nose, a short sip more on top, then a long breath out through the mouth. The out-breath has to be longer than both in-breaths together, because the whole thing rests on that proportion. One minute, three or five, and you can turn it off.

Noise in the background, if it happens to help you. Steady pink noise, generated as it plays, so your ear never catches a loop. Here is the honest version of where this stands: in a 2024 pooling of thirteen studies, steady noise improved performance for people with ADHD and made it worse for people without. The gain was small, and it varied a lot between individuals. Turn it on for one session and see for yourself.

Highlights become cards. Drag your finger across a sentence and pick what it is: a definition, a date, a key point, or "I don't get it". The app writes questions from the first three. From the last one it writes nothing, because there's no point cramming what you don't understand.

Cards come back to fit the date. Give the app your exam date and it spreads the reviews so the last round lands before the exam, not after it. The closer the date, the more often the questions come back.

The Study tab works out how much you have to read each day to get through the material in time. It leaves the final days for reviews alone, because a chapter read once isn't enough.

Nine lessons called "How to study". Active recall, spaced repetition, desirable difficulty, prequestions and more. Each lesson says how much evidence stands behind it, and where the evidence is thin it says so.

Six ways to remember. For the things that have to come back word for word, or in order. None of them will help you understand a text, and the first screen says so before you start.

At the end of every sitting, one question: what stayed with you, in one sentence, out of your own head. That is how remembering works.

Read your own: PDF, EPUB, FB2, MOBI, DOCX, txt, or text you paste in. That is what this app is for. One short text is waiting on the shelf to start with, "Evening in the building", the same passage you read during the reading test, so the shelf isn't empty on the first day.

No account in the app, and no sign-in. Your texts, highlights, cards and progress stay on your phone, because there's no server for them to go to.

What this app doesn't do: it doesn't speed your reading up and it doesn't claim to switch off the voice in your head. The popular advice about silencing that voice isn't backed by the research, and the app says so plainly.

Trial and purchase

You turn on seven days of the full version whenever you like, with no card and no account. Until then, the free version works. After that it's one purchase, once and for good: 29.00 USD. No subscription. The purchase unlocks the whole app.

Terms of use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Privacy: https://nanas.pro/legal/privacy