Summary:
The beta of eNews Creator is great, but it also faces a strong competition (iSilo, Plucker). We must understand that the whole idea of this program is to simplify and automate eNews creation, and not act as something as "high-tech" as iSiloX or JPluck. And indeed, eNews Creator is very easy to use!
eNews Creator basically runs a script, which converts the website within options selected, the output is actually an HTML page (see the directory output mentioned earlier), which then gets converted into .prc MobiPocket format. So before people start to complain about MobiPocket's proprietary format - you have the converted HTML output which you can access, manipulate, and use with another conversion tool such as iSiloX!
In conclusion, we think that MobiPocket's eNews Creator can become a powerful alternative to other offline browsers.
Reviewers:
Saud &
Alex
Positive- doesn't require a doctor in computer science
- stable (for a beta)
- extracting pages appears to be multithreaded and very fast
- Emulator allows for instand previews
- e-mail feature for extracted eNews
- you can instantly publish eNews on the web
- good support for non-mobile websites
- good support for rss feeds
- great reader - mobipocket reader has a huge repertoire of commercial ebooks, references and ebooks, includes text justification, drawing, seemless dictionary integration
Negative- MobiPocket WebCompanion is resource-hungry (it happened that the CPU usage reached 100%)
- URL filtering: eNews Creator only has 'restrict to' option only used with direct mobile links which is not as good as filtering based on regular expressions and wildcards
- Scheduling: limited; only allows to globally schedule syncronization and only if 'send eNews to email' is enabled. Otherwise, it updates by itself when changes to a website occur.
- no table support
- does not appear to support RSS 2.0
- lack of advanced control over settings (however, you can directly edit .enews files to have some more control over the extraction process)