Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Palm Reader Gets A Facelift
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "SOFTWARE" @ 04:00 AM
http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com
Palm Digital Media has released a new version of their 2002 Pocket PC Magazine Award winning program. There are two versions of Palm Reader, the free version and the $14.95 Pro version. The Pro version gets you a basic dictionary, justified fonts, auto-scrolling and a few other goodies.
As you can see from the screen shot above, the new version includes several enhancements, some of which apply to the free version. As far as I know, none of these enhancements have been incorporated into the versions for HPCs and old Palm-sized PCs, but all Pocket PCs benefit.
• Inline images that scale well to the Pocket PC format. Previously, displaying images was optimized for 160X160 screens or multiples of 160. Now they look great on your 320X240 screen. You can tap on the image to zoom in as well.
• Theme support. If you dislike the drab white background, there are a number of textures you can use under the text. You can also choose the text color, link color (for footnotes), background color and highlight color if desired. I've not played with it yet, but I understand theme backgrounds, or the canvas, are just .png files so if you have a decent graphics program, you should be able to create your own canvas.
• Background pagination when you open a new ebook. This allows you to begin reading immediately. Even 4,000+ page ebooks paginate in under a minute on my iPAQ 2215.
• Better library screen allows you to see more information about an ebook before opening it.
• Finally, ebooks on the SD card are not closed when the device powers off! Woo hoo!
• Word look ups in the dictionary are much faster. The old version of Palm Reader Pro crawled when looking up a word. Now it takes just a second or two.
• Lots of other little tweaks and new preference settings.
Palm Reader has been my favorite ebook reader for several years now and the new features make it that much better.
Palm Digital Media has released a new version of their 2002 Pocket PC Magazine Award winning program. There are two versions of Palm Reader, the free version and the $14.95 Pro version. The Pro version gets you a basic dictionary, justified fonts, auto-scrolling and a few other goodies.
As you can see from the screen shot above, the new version includes several enhancements, some of which apply to the free version. As far as I know, none of these enhancements have been incorporated into the versions for HPCs and old Palm-sized PCs, but all Pocket PCs benefit.
• Inline images that scale well to the Pocket PC format. Previously, displaying images was optimized for 160X160 screens or multiples of 160. Now they look great on your 320X240 screen. You can tap on the image to zoom in as well.
• Theme support. If you dislike the drab white background, there are a number of textures you can use under the text. You can also choose the text color, link color (for footnotes), background color and highlight color if desired. I've not played with it yet, but I understand theme backgrounds, or the canvas, are just .png files so if you have a decent graphics program, you should be able to create your own canvas.
• Background pagination when you open a new ebook. This allows you to begin reading immediately. Even 4,000+ page ebooks paginate in under a minute on my iPAQ 2215.
• Better library screen allows you to see more information about an ebook before opening it.
• Finally, ebooks on the SD card are not closed when the device powers off! Woo hoo!
• Word look ups in the dictionary are much faster. The old version of Palm Reader Pro crawled when looking up a word. Now it takes just a second or two.
• Lots of other little tweaks and new preference settings.
Palm Reader has been my favorite ebook reader for several years now and the new features make it that much better.
