I'm pleased to announce the first alpha of Sunrise XP.
Sunrise XP is a reworking of Sunrise. I'm no longer pursuing a commercial venture for this product and am releasing it as freeware.
Highlights- Completely rewritten. Smaller, faster and no Java required!
- Streamlined interface.
- HotSync conduit
Requirements- Windows XP / 2000 / 2003.
- Pentium II or better
- 128Mb RAM for common websites. 256Mb for larger documents.
- HotSync Manager 4 or 6. (Should also work without HotSync installed, but does not work with older HotSync versions.)
This is a bare-bones release, with a small, but useful feature set. The purpose is to gather user feedback. It is not suitable as a replacement for Sunrise 0.42 yet, primarily because it has no support for RSS/Atom feeds, but it should be good enough for converting your favourite web sites.
Of particular note is the reduced memory usage compared to the Java version. You should be able to convert large documents without running into the dreaded "out of memory" error.
That all said, it's still alpha quality, so expect some issues, possibly major, show-stopping ones.
Features not yet available in this alpha:
- RSS/Atom feed conversion.
- URL rewriting.
- Automatic updates through Windows Task Scheduler.
- Plain text conversion.
- Wizards for setting up SXLs and documents.
- Basic CSS support. (Fonts, colors, visibility.)
- Firefox extension.
- SDL import for migrating settings from Sunrise to Sunrise XP. (See post below for an intermediate solution.)
- Help documentation.
These features will be made available throughout the next few months with a stream of monthly alpha and beta releases. (The next alpha is due in the first week of January.) The final 2.0 release will be in late Spring at the earliest. I'm following a strict roadmap for this product and have to make the best of the little time I can spend on it, so don't be disappointed if your feature requests are rejected. I might even get round to finishing work on the PPC version of my viewer (which uses its own format) and release a cut-down version of that as freeware eventually, but this is not a real goal at present since I'm preoccupied with other work.
Update:
Alexander was gracious enough to let me host the file on MobileRead. I also fixed a bug in the generation of URL info for large documents. This release is marked "alpha 1a".
Download:
sunrisexp-2.0-alpha-1a-setup.exe (780Kb)
No longer available. Download alpha 2 instead.