11:13 AM by zrski in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Hi all, we've just launched PHONifier which is yet another IYHY/Skweezer alternative. It's a mobile surfing proxy that strips webpages of unnecessary code. Best of all, we've released it as an open source project under a creative commons licence.

I'd love to hear what you think.

10:35 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti shares her opinion on print books versus e-books in the first Teleread podcast. Coming herself from the print publishing industry, she argues that while e-books don't have the physical touch and smell of paper books and thus should not replace them, smaller independent publishing houses still need to become aware of what e-books can do, what profits can be made, and how to enter the market:

Most authors don't know who to go to for e-books, and perhaps what we need is some better reference ... and maybe that exists and I just don't know about it yet because I am pretty new to the e-book scene.

Of course Teleread and Mobileread are the perfect two places for book authors, to flutter their eyelashes, to have a chat with us and to be enlightened about the benefits of e-books!

10:04 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Sunrise

Laurens released Sunrise 0.42d which adds support for the Launchable flag to make documents show up in the Palm OS "Applications" launcher. You can read more about it in the discussion here.

Download from Palmgear.

If you are new to Sunrise, click here to find out more about its top-notch features for website offline conversion.

08:27 AM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

"Home to one of the largest "collections of collections" on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill."

It's part of UNC's efforts to develop an online library and archives. The library doesn't appear to have much in the way of etexts, focusing on audio/video archives instead. Oddly, the search engine doesn't seem to be very effective. I even did a search on words from a title I found, and the search engine couldn't find it. I did see all kinds of technical videos and MovieTone and NASA clips (e.g. from the Apollo missions.) Looks like a very interesting complement to sites like Project Gutenberg and Archive.org.

"The average municipal public library receives a few hundred visitors a week. ibiblio.org averages 3 million information requests per day, and the contributor-maintained collections are expanding daily. A free and vibrant exchange of ideas among a large community of contributors who share their knowledge across disciplines, ibiblio.org uses the open source model to encourage users to help shape the way information is managed and accessed in the 21st century." More at http://www.ibiblio.org/about.html

A couple of the fun items I've found with a quick look (but haven't tried yet) are:
Classic Television Commercials (Part II)
A Date With Your Family

06:31 AM by Laurens in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

HTC 'to manufacture' Palm's Windows-based Treo (The Register)

HTC is believed to have won the contract to manufacture the upcoming Windows Mobile-based version of Palm's Treo smart phone, but the device's release is some way off. [...] If that's the case - neither firm will confirm it - then HTC is the logical choice for the Windows Mobile-based Treo, believed to be dubbed the Treo 670, apparently seen in a series of videos here. HTC may even have lent some Windows Mobile development expertise to Palm's design team.

06:01 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Talk about a double standard. While PalmSource leaders tout the benefits of investors owning their stocks, current and former executives seem to be running for the doors themselves. Latest Form 144 filers:

• 07/05/2005 David Nagel, former CEO: 116,388 stocks
• 07/15/2005 Schindler, Gabriele, (now) former VP: 55,220 stocks
• 07/25/2005 David Nagel, former CEO: 130,000 stocks
• 07/28/2005 Slotnick, Lawrence, former CTO: 16,000 stocks

It is not uncommon for executives to liquidate options and sell shares to buy houses or diversify their investment portfolios. But the fact that three of PalmSource's recently laid off executives are selling at the same time, all the while PalmSource stock is osculating around a new all-time low, causes us to speculate there may be more to these stock sales.

Ohh, and really, it's not helping either to boost our confidence that two major insitutional investors, Fred Alger Management and Fidelity, disclosed yesterday that they had dumped all (Alger) or a large part (Fidelity) of their PalmSource shares.

05:22 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | iSilo/X

Darren released the second beta of iSilo and iSiloX 4.28. It contains minor bugfixes for new features introduced in beta 1.

If you are new to iSilo make sure to visit this thread for more information.

03:55 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book Formats | PDF

I think it's time to summarize what we've learned about reading pdf files on a mobile device, and pool our resources to try to determine what are the best approaches on either Palm or Pocket PC.

Over the months and years, we've seen a lot of proposed methods for reading pdf (Acrobat Reader) documents. I'm not sure, though, if any of these are clean, reliable and relatively successful.

I think many of us would be very interested to hear if anyone has found a good solution at a reasonable price. Maybe there are even a few great solutions buried in our forums here that I've missed, and which deserve to be trumpeted again.

Some of the ideas I vaguely recall hearing about are:

• Adobe Reader for Palm or PPC
  This seems to be universally disliked, both due to the required document conversion step, and because the reader is slow and bulky. Here's one description with some of the negatives.
• Conversion to "better" formats
  I haven't yet seen a good, reasonably priced solution that handles the pdf files I've tried on it. Maybe I'm not trying the right ones? We recently heard about a free online converter, but it has a size limit that makes tech manuals, for example, out of reach.
• Documents To Go (Palm only)
  I think Docs To Go has a premium version that reads pdf files, but I don't know how well, and that's a lot to buy and install if you don't need the rest of the package.
• Picsel File Viewer
  Wasn't there something called Picsel File Viewer that could read pdf after a conversion step?
• Repligo
  Or how good/expensive are Repligo products?
• Other solutions?
  I wonder what they are...

My idea of a basic set of requirements (wishlist) for such a program would be:
1) If necessary, the conversion process can be done on a PC, but should not require Palm Desktop or hotsync. You should be able to just transfer to a storage card.
2) Reads just about any (non-DRM'd) pdf file adequately
3) Can turn pages and search reasonably fast
4) Works on smaller screens like a Treo or 240x320 standard resolution PPC
5) Can handle large documents.
6) Can read documents from storage cards
7) Bonus points if it costs less than $30
8) More bonus points for reasonable RAM memory requirements

Or.... maybe this is beyond our capabilities in the mobile world right now? Surely not!