The TypeRacer Blog

Do you like typing?

typeracer — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:22:36 +0000

Then “Like” TypeRacer on Facebook and spread the word! We’ve added a new “Like” button under the main menu. When you use it, your Facebook friends will get a news feed saying that you like typeracer.com and hopefully you will have more friends to race against as a result!

In other news, we’ve added lots of new texts from songs, movies, and books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan and Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment by Ethan Watters. The latter describes living in one of the most unique cities in the word. Here’s a little excerpt:

“To drive out of the Central Valley of California on a hot day and into San Francisco is to feel like you’re landing on another planet. Over our two-hour drive, the temperature went from nearly a hundred to the middle sixties. The visual disparity was as dramatic. On one side of the bay was a day so bright you’d have to squint with the visor down and your sunglasses on. Halfway across the Bay Bridge the fog enveloped us, whipping in strands through the rusted girders. As we crossed into the fig, it didn’t seem possible that two such environments could exist side by side.”

Lastly, the Fastest Typists section now remembers each record-holder’s country of origin. So if you’re fast (or persistent) enough to have your name up there, get your country’s flag displayed by doing another race. Let’s see which country is home to the fastest typists in the world!

Increase your typing speed while racing Sean Wrona

typeracer — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:31:19 +0000

Look closely at the new header on the site and you’ll see this little red car typing out the heading.¹ It’s easy to miss it because that car is moving fast, but what if we told you that you can actually learn to type that fast yourself? Believe it or not, the animation is calibrated to type exactly 165 WPM (825 CPM) — which is the actual average typing speed achieved by Sean Wrona!

If you haven’t seen Sean’s name yet, look him up on the new and improved Fastest Typists section. Click on the avg. speed link at the top of the list to sort by all-time averages, which is the category totally dominated by Sean Wrona. The runner-up is almost 15 WPM behind — that’s the equivalent of being able to type up an extra 2 full essays in one hour!

As you can see, the Fastest Typists section now shows 100 results, which you can page through using the links at the bottom. And now you can also see the top people for 3 different categories: all-time speed, recent speed, and total number of races finished.

As usual, this release includes many other improvements, but the most requested new feature is probably the option to publish your typing speed on Facebook.

When you go to the TypeRacer App on Facebook, scroll down and click Publish your typing speed on your wall. After you accept the prompt to allow TypeRacer to publish posts on your behalf, you will see a preview of your scorecard before it gets posted on your wall and news feed. Or you can just keep racing until you achieve a new personal best, at which point the app will automatically prompt you to share that score. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to invite more friends to use the app (there is a link for that as well) — we appreciate it when you tell your friends about TypeRacer. Consider it a way of thanking us for this free app!

Wishing you a great summer! Keep typing and keep improving!

¹ — the animation will only come up when you’re not logged in (so it doesn’t annoy people who use the site a lot)

Accuracy Matters

typeracer — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:27:30 +0000

A frequent question raised on the TypeRacer Forum is how to best improve your typing speed. The typing masters all agree that improving your accuracy is the best way to improve your WPM. I’m happy to say that we’ve developed a training tool that might help – today we’re launching a new parallel TypeRacer Universe called Instant Death Mode. As you might remember from this post, different parallel universes let you try things that you wouldn’t normally find on the main site, all without impacting the scores on your primary account. We already have universes for typing in other languages but now there is a universe that will have you racing under a different set of rules!

Try the new Instant Death Mode by going to http://typeracer.com/universe/accuracy

As you might have guessed, this parallel TypeRacer Universe is all about accuracy, to the extent that it doesn’t allow you to make any mistakes. You will notice that a single typo will kick you out of the race. Give it a try for a few hours and then watch your typing speed improve when you go back to standard racing. I must warn you though, the Instant Death Mode will challenge even the most seasoned veterans – expect to be demoted to Beginner until you gain some practice (don’t worry, the skill level and scores on your primary account will not be affected by this).

You will find other improvements in this release as well. As a first step toward letting you personalize your TypeRacer experience, I’m happy to say that you can finally you edit your account info. You can change everything including your first name, last name, email address, and password by clicking on the edit icon () next to the Sign Out link. Your username, however, is your permanent identity on the site, and, as such, cannot be changed.

As always, this release includes numerous bug fixes, quirk fixes (the Opera browser is now officially supported!) and new texts. Check it out then leave a comment and let us know what you’d like to see in the next release!

Update: If you’re looking for something fun to do, create a private racetrack in Instant Death Mode, invite your friends, and then watch them (and yourself!) dropping like flies from each race That’s how some of us have spent a good chunk of today!

Looking back on 2009, Kicking off 2010

typeracer — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:35:35 +0000

Thanks for making 2009 another great year on TypeRacer! Last year we launched some groundbreaking features such as typing in 50 other languages and many more great things are coming in 2010.

To kick off the new year, I’d like to first unveil the I TYPERACER T-shirt designed by Alex Foygel (you can see more of his designs on his blog). It’s available for purchase from the new TypeRacer T-shirt shop. Order yours today!

Now let’s take a look back at 2009. Last year, you’ve helped us reach the milestone of 10 million races, hopefully improving your typing speed as a result! We’ve carefully analyzed the data for 2009 and can help you predict how much you can expect to improve in 2010. Here is a chart that plots the average change in typing speed of a user by number of races finished last year.*

The above chart plots just the averages, so your “mileage may vary,” but we can tell you that 1913 people increased their speed by more than 10 wpm after only 100 races. There were also a few individuals who showed outstanding achievement, improving by more that 30 wpm throughout the year! Let’s meet the top 10 most improved typists of the year:

Congratulations are in order to Luís for topping the list with a 50 wpm improvement! (We’ll send him a free T-shirt).

Now we want to hear your thoughts. What new features are you hoping to see on TypeRacer in the coming year?

* we measured “improvement” as the difference between the average of one’s races numbered 10 through 20 and their last 10 races.

TypeRacer Goes International

typeracer — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:22:04 +0000

Typing in other languages has been the #1 most requested feature since way back when TypeRacer was born. Today we’re launching the first international release of TypeRacer with support for 51 languages!

Click on the change your language link at the bottom of the homepage to see the full selection. The name and flag of the language you’ve selected will appear under the logo in the upper left corner. Your race results and typing speed will be saved separately for each, so it’s easy to track your progress in any language.

The scorecard now displays the country where each racer is located.

TypeRacer has always appealed to an international audience, and I’m happy to give you all the ability to race in your language. Even if English is your primary language, it’s fun to learn how to type in other languages. So far, I’ve mastered Spanish and French, and struggling with Russian, as you can see in the screenshot above.

Typing speed, by default, is measured in words per minute for English and in characters per minute for other languages, but you can always chose the format that's best for you. Just click on the CPM (or WPM) link at the top of the homepage to save your preference.

This release represents a giant leap into the future for TypeRacer, but it isn’t perferct. For one thing, the text translations need more work. We used Google Translate on the English texts and the results, at best, are easy to type but don’t make much sense. In the worst case, some of the translations might contain left-over English characters and punctuation, requiring a brief switch of keyboard layouts to type them. We’ve tried to correct all the texts to the best of our ability, but with all these languages, we now have 23000 texts to keep track of! Let us know if you see any errors in your language and we’ll try to fix them right away.

TypeRacer International is still a work in progress. Over the coming months, we’ll work on improving the text quality and also translating the menus and captions. But the main thing right now is to get more people typing in other languages, so that you’re not just racing against bots. We need your help to spread the word. Send out the URL for the homepage in your language to all your friends or go head-to-head with them in a private racetrack for your language of choice. We have empty high scores to fill in every language, so start racing!

Typing in other languages has been the #1 most requested feature since TypeRacer was born back in March, 2008. Today we’re launching the first international release of TypeRacer with support for 51 languages!

Click on the change your language link at the bottom of the homepage to see the full selection. The name of the language you’ve selected will appear under the logo in the upper left corner. Your race results and typing speed will be saved separately for each, so it’s easy to track your progress in any language.

The scorecard now displays the country where each racer is located.

TypeRacer has always appealed to an international audience, and I’m happy to give you all a chance to race in your language. Even if English is your primary language, it’s fun to learn how to type in other languages. So far, I’ve mastered Spanish and French, and struggling with Russian, as you can see in the screenshot above.

This release isn’t perfect. For one thing, the text translations need more work. We used Google Translate on the English texts and the results at best are easy to type but don’t make much sense. In the worst case, some of the translations might contain left-over English characters and punctuation, requiring a brief switch of keyboard layouts to type them (let us know if you see any such places in your language). This is all still a work in progress. Over the coming months, we’ll work on improving the translations and also translating the menus and captions into every language. For now, everything but the typing texts is still in English.

The main thing right now, though, is to get more people typing in other languages, so you’re not just racing against bots. We need your help to spread the word. Send out the URL for the homepages in your language to all your friends. Go head-to-head with them in a private racetrack for your language. We have empty high scores to fill in every language, so start racing!

Typing speed is usually measured in words per minute (WPM) for English and in characters per minute (CPM) for other languages, but you can always chose the format that's best for you. Just click on the CPM (or WPM) link at the top of the homepage.

Pinning, dragging, flagging, laughing

typeracer — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:55:27 +0000

I’m happy to say we have just completed the second TypeRacer release of the summer! The first thing you’ll notice is that scorecards can now be pinned and dragged around on the screen so you can compare people’s stats. Just click (or right-click) on any username to bring up the options menu and select “Pin scorecard.” Once pinned, you’ll be able to move this user’s scorecard around by dragging its upper left corner. You can “un-pin” the scorecard by clicking on the pin or just closing it. For now, the scorecard shows you the user’s stats and links to their Facebook or Myspace profiles (pinning will come in handy if you want to click on those links). When we introduce extended user profiles and pictures, you’ll be able to see them here as well.

The most significant new feature, though, is the ability to report a user. If you see someone with an offensive username or someone you suspect is cheating, please report them using the same menu (click on the username then select “Report user” next to the red flag). Your participation in this will greatly speed up the process of removing Terms of Service violators from the site.

We’ve also added a lot of new texts to type and made a bunch of minor improvements to the site. Many of the new text were submitted by you guys – thanks! The others were contributed by our friends at Bookfail.com (hope you can handle racing and laughing at the same time!)

TypeRacer – The 1st Anniversary Edition

typeracer — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:00:43 +0000

This spring marked one year since TypeRacer went live, and what a great year it has been – almost from day one, TypeRacer has been serving more than a million races every month! It’s been so much fun building this first-of-its-kind online experience and talking to many of you about how to make it even better.

There have been lots of challenges as well: making the site work in all kinds of browsers, across social networks, overcoming database outages, dealing with cheaters, and many, many, more. This stuff took up so much time, that I’m actually surprised we were able to get anything else done at all. In spite of all that, the past 12 months saw the release of some major features like private racetracks, permanent accounts with race histories, and recently, the Facebook App. There is so much more still to come, and today, we’re kicking off TypeRacer’s 2^nd summer season with a brand new release!

New Features

Improved player matching: From now on players are matched up based on WPM proximity instead of skill level. This means that a 40-WPM Average player and a 42-WPM Pro can finally go up against each other in a public race. This change makes races so much more balanced and competitive, especially if you type in the 55-75 WPM range like I do and were constantly being smoked by 90-WPM people like I was!

More skill levels: The Megaracer skill level has been split into the 55-79 WPM Typemaster level and Megaracer for 80+ WPM.

Many of you, especially those who type very fast, have been asking for these two changes, and we’re happy to finally deliver on our promise!

You might be wondering why we picked 80 WPM as the cut-off for Megaracer? That’s because it happens to be just above the top 10% line if we were to graph everyone’s scores. So if you’re still a Megaracer — congratulations — you type faster than 90% of our community! Which brings us to the next point:

Global ranking: So you didn’t make it to the top 20 but still want to know where you stand? Now you can, with the new percentile-based rank on your scorecard! In this screenshot, for example, Alejandro types faster than 69.3% of the people. (We also made it easier to see who’s a bot).

Support for New Browsers

Internet Explorer 8
Safari 4 Beta

Tweaks and Bug Fixes

the race again link in single player game no longer takes you to a multiplayer game

commas and semicolons are no longer underlined to differentiate them from periods and colons (see the screenshot)
scorecards no longer pop up when a car enters an idle mouse pointer, so you won’t have any undesired interruptions while typing (see the screenshot)
+ many more bugs that you hopefully never noticed

Hope you enjoy these new changes! There’s more on the way!

P.S. We’re now on Twitter: follow @typeracer for news and my latest thoughts.

Beam me up, Facebook

typeracer — Sat, 09 May 2009 22:00:14 +0000

If you enjoy TypeRacer and have a Facebook account, help us spread the word by installing the TypeRacer Application on Facebook!

It’s easy to link your existing typeracer.com account to the Facebook app. When you do, your completed races on typeracer.com will appear on Facebook and vice-vera. To link your accounts, click on “My Account” under your name (as seen on the above screenshot) after you’ve installed the application. Just enter your typeracer.com username and password into the box that pops up, and you’re done! From this point on, you’ll be able to race from either typeracer.com or Facebook as you choose (but be sure to still race from inside Facebook every once in a while so that your typing speed gets updated on the Info tab of your Facebook profile).

Naturally, you’ll also want to invite your friends to race you, because the Facebook app shows a score chart just for you and your friends. Where is Liutenant Sulu on this chart? Invite him, please!

Let everyone know you’re serious about typing (and racing) by installing this small Facebook profile badge to show off your skills! You’ll see a grey button for installing this widget above the racing screen on the app’s main page:

You might also want to boldly go where no tab has gone before and put your Facebook account into warp speed with the TypeRacer profile tab:

The profile tab can be installed in a similar way as the profile badge

I really encourage you to try the Facebook app if you haven’t already. TypeRacer is one the very few apps that doesn’t force you to install it just to try it. It also doesn’t force you to invite 20 of your friends to advance to the next level or get a hundred bucks in fake money. If you’ve used other Facebook apps, you’ll know how annoying that is. Unfortunately, not having those dirty tricks makes it harder for a new app to become popular on Facebook. That’s why we need your help to spread the word. Let’s show them that apps can be successful without being annoying!

Encouraging honest competition

typeracer — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 02:38:14 +0000

A walking race (Helsinki, Finland)

We’ve taken measures in the past that make it harder to cheat, but if you saw the top 20 (Fastest Typists) last month, you know that quite a few individuals are still very much determined.

Starting this week, you will need a (non-guest) account to get onto the Latest High Scores, and at least 100 races to get into the Fastest Typists leaderboard. The first restriction is actually intended more to discourage spam rather than cheating, but the second was introduced specifically to give us enough time to review all contestants and delete those accounts suspected of cheating. That’s right – from now on, all accounts suspected of cheating will be promptly deleted, as stated in our Terms of Service.

Happy Holidays from TypeRacer

typeracer — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:05:48 +0000

Hope you’re well-rested and ready for the new year! We certainly are – the long awaited new release of TypeRacer is up, ready to kick off 2009!

More details to follow, but for now, let’s just say that the best news is for our Facebook users – TypeRacer is finally available as a Facebook application. You can link your typeracer.com account with your Facebook account by clicking on My Account inside the app (top right corner, just under your name), to get a head start on your friends. All of your scores will carry over. Enjoy!