12:54 PM by Laurens in Archive | Sunrise

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.

08:41 AM by ballshooter in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Ballshooter has submitted this news about a new Pocket PC game. We're pretty selective about what product announcements get put on the front page, but this one really caught my eye. Sounds like a lot of fun, and I'd be interested to hear if anyone has given it a try. -- BobR

BallShooter.com is happy to present our new game for Pocket PC named "BrickGenius", where you need to build the mosaics by sliding bricks.

This game offers a REALLY innovative gameplay and we guarantee that you have never seen anything like this before!

How it works:

1) The game board is a mosaic of 15x15 cells.
2) Your aim is to cover all the black cells with a sliding bricks.
3) Sometimes, you will be awarded bonus bricks that possess
special qualities: the Lock, the Ligthning, the Vortex, etc...

Demo version of "BrickGenius" is available to download:
http://ballshooter.com/genius/

ps. Moreover, the Holiday Season is here, so now you can save 33% on most our games and even get three games for the price of two.

08:44 AM by pruss in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

My FontSmoother for displaying smooth (antialiased) fonts on hi-res Palm OS 5 PDAs has been significantly updated. Most of the updates are under the hood, but they should make a much better product.

(To update, uncheck old version in YAHM, hotsync, check new version.)

http://www.palmgear.com/index.cfm?xyz=90288
http://www.zlthemes.com/Programs.php

Updates:

• Added Larabie Goodfish font.
• Speed optimization: up to about 60% faster with common text operations.
• Overhauled font remapping method, to make it more reliable for NVFS devices like the TX.
• Added special Fonts4OS5 mode. This is a neat feature for NVFS devices to compensate for instabilities in Fonts4OS5: you can use Fonts4OS5 to set the fonts for different apps, then deactivate Fonts4OS5, and FontSmoother will still use the options Fonts4OS5 has set, but without the instabilities introduced by Fonts4OS5.
• Removed safe mode option. Made Blazer tweak always on and removed option. Removed -std- fonts (except for fixed width)--they were really a leftover from earlier versions.
• Improved quality in Versamail.
• Fixed control panel app list bug (also in Force16).
• Fresh trial period for users who tried a previous
  version.

05:47 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

Arstechnica reviewed the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet: After spending a few days using the 770 intensely, I feel conflicted about it. I want to love it, and some aspects of it exceeded my expectations. At the same time, the 770 has some serious shortcomings that need to be addressed in v2.0 of the 770 (or in the 771) if it is going to have wide success.

Pros: Beautiful high-resolution display; Web browser; Button placement and navigation; Stable Linux OS; Audio and video players; 802.11b/g and Bluetooth support; Size and form factor

Cons: Speed of UI and application/window slipping; Meager amount of RAM; Poorly executed e-mail application; Choice of RS-MMC; Poor handwriting recognition; Lack of client software for PC, Mac, Linux; No support for importing bookmarks or RSS feeds

05:20 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Rumors are flying that Palm may have hit a big contract with DirecTV, a subsidiary of News Corporation's Fox Entertainment Group. A guy on Yahoo Finance boards claims that he has heard from a friend (well, we all know how rumors get started) that Rupert Murdoch himself ordered all DirecTV installation technicians to be equipped with juicy new Palm Treos in an effort to get rid of all paperwork and to communicate directly with the DirecTV HQs.

05:03 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Holidays are upon us and nothing delivers joy and happiness more than promising words about your favorite company. Last week it was the NYT who pointed out the strong fundamentals of Palm company in an interview with Ed Colligan; today it's the WSJ who argues that Palm is poised for a comeback. Pablo Perez-Fernandez, an analyst at research firm ThinkEquity Partners, who rates Palm "buy" with a $50 price target (current: $27.89) and RIM a "sell" with a $60 target (current: $64.13), says that 2006 will be a huge year for Palm. WSJ:

A key source of hope stems from Palm's introduction of a Treo smart phone that operates on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system [...] The device, which will be pushed by Verizon Wireless, is seen appealing to a wider swath of business and government customers. "This operating system brings a new set of functionality that the Palm system doesn't have," said Palm Chief Executive Ed Colligan during the unveiling of the smart phone in September. "The fact of the matter is things have changed." For Palm, the change was necessary [...] Much like chatter over a low-priced device, there is talk that Palm will release a smart phone that will run on the next-generation wireless network in Europe. Any such product could provide another unexpected spark to the stock.

Reminder: Palm will report fiscal second-quarter earnings report on Dec. 20.

04:37 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

On the off-chance that you haven't heard about Project Gutenberg before, it's a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute full texts of public domain books in open formats. WSJ interviewed Project Gutenberg's founder Michael Hart and reveals that he was approached by Google one year prior the official announcement of Google Book Search.

I talked to Google a year before Google's big announcement [in December 2004]. … They approached us. They sent us an email saying, "Hey, we'd like to talk to you." They let us tell them about all that we were doing. It took place at the big Google headquarters in Silicon Valley. They gave us a free lunch and everything. They were very polite, but very business-plan oriented. At a certain point, they sort of talked us out the door. So I heard about [Google Book Search] along with everybody else. Same with Yahoo.

So Google didn't want to work together with Mr. Hart. According to the latter, the search engine company decided for a different approach:

Google is working from the top down. It's very centralized. Project Gutenberg is the opposite: It's decentralized, it's grassroots. From the consumer's point of view, if you're trying to get a quotation from a book, you could get the book from Project Gutenberg and cut and paste, say, the whole "Hamlet" soliloquy. On Google, you can't. Also, ours is totally non-commercial. You won't find advertising on any of our pages.

08:48 AM by TadW in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

It's World War II and you are B.J. Blazkowicz, the Allies' most valuable agent. So begins the story of one of the most debated games in history. Some dude completed a Pocket PC port of Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny. This port includes support for accelerated graphics, sounds and music. To play the full version of the game, you need to own the PC version and copy the data files into the game folder on your Pocket PC.