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!

03:27 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Stephan Schreiber wrote Ext2 IFS 1.10a, a free Ext2 IFS driver for MS Windows which supports Linux Ext2 and Ext3 volumes with read/write operations and almost everything else available under Linux except access rights, defraging and some other minor things. This may be useful if you have installed both Windows and Linux as a dual boot environment on your computer.

Take a look at the release notes before installing this driver!

[via Bink]

03:00 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Remember Orb Streaming Media which had first sounded like a marvelous idea, but then failed - at least in our opinion - due to the use of some proprietary software? Although you are still required to run the Orb Windows application, at least there's now an add-on API (updated: released under a Mozilla Public License) allowing developers to write their own DLL libraries to extend (PDF) Orb's media streaming capabilities.

Well gee, this certainly seems like a good idea. For next, why don't you simply release the tool as open-source?

[via Downloadsquad]

08:03 AM by Laurens in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Pretty sharp editorial at The Register: the "secret" product line that Jeff Hawkins has been talking about is... the LifeDrive!

Let's look at the evidence. For a start, Hawkins refers to his company as PalmOne, which suggests the interview was conducted some time ago, before the firm became Palm again. Newspaper feature deadlines being what they are, it couldn't be entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that the PBJ talked to Hawkins before the LifeDrive was announced, when quite clearly he wouldn't be able to say too much about it.

05:53 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Knowing that mobile search engines have the potential to become the killer application of next year, it comes as no surprise that search engine companies continue to expand their offerings in the mobile search space. Barb of Engadget has gathered a list of current mobile search resources.

Among my favorites is MSN Mobile, which does a great job for local searches, map displays and driving directions.

[via PalmAddicts]

07:19 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

Seeing Korea as a "what's to come" indicator, we have finally good reason to believe that e-books are gaining acceptance. Sales have doubled and are expected to almost triple over the coming year. One of the main reasons of those growth numbers is a lower sales price compared to the dead-tree variety:

Readers feeling the recession can buy books that would cost over W10,000 in hard copy for 40-50 percent of the money. In the case of "49 Things You Should Do in Your Life" (Wisdom House), which sold 800,000 copies this year, the print edition costs W8,800 and the e-book just W3,600. The book was downloaded 50,000 times in the first half of the year.

Bottom line, are we seeing a postive trend towards increase in e-book sales here? Bet your pants we are.

[via if:book]

08:59 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

There's a nice post at Palm Addicts today with lots of info about why you need to do backups even though you have a hotsync, and it even includes many freeware options. Personally I use BackupBuddyVFS with a daily automatic scheduled backup to move everything in memory to my SD card, and then I move the SD card backup to my PC every week. (More often if something significant changes on the device. I also keep a full backup when I install new programs just in case they cause conflicts, or don't get removed properly when I delete the app. So far, this approach has made my device quite a bit more stable and reliable, so it's been worth the extra effort.)