08-13-2003, 12:00 PM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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Palm Reader Gets A Facelift
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.
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08-13-2003, 02:05 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 20
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Nice update. All issues with Pocket PC 2003 fixed. Only needed to do a soft reset to get the scroll wheel and the D-pad to control pagination.
Much faster at formatting books than before.
Not sure if I'll ever use the "themes", but it's a nice addition.
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08-13-2003, 02:05 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 93
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This is definately my favorite PPC program. If it was not for Peanut Press, now reluctantly Palm Digital Media, and their reader I would not be reading as much as I do today.
I just downloaded the newest FREE reader (1.3.0) and it is a really great improvement. I had 3 books in main memory and opened them all with the new program. I then moved them to my SD card and went back to the reader where it opened them up as if they never moved! Really nice. Now I can leave them all on the SD card.
If you do not have this program get it!
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08-13-2003, 02:21 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 17
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Bookmarks will be GONE
Becareful, if you UPGRADE, ALL your bookmarks will be GONE, and you need to enter the credit card verification again. Keep your card handy before you install the new program.
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08-13-2003, 02:30 PM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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Re: Bookmarks will be GONE
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Originally Posted by jsjxyz
Becareful, if you UPGRADE, ALL your bookmarks will be GONE, and you need to enter the credit card verification again. Keep your card handy before you install the new program.
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Good advice, but it doesn't always hold true. Apparently of there are some corrupted annotations, your book will be rebuilt. I had a few that this happened with but others were just fine.
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08-13-2003, 03:10 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 138
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I lost all my bookmarks, but only had to enter my credit card number for one book. BTW I don't use annotations so I don't know if thats the problem. Other than that it is a nice upgrade. I am also glad they included the enhancements in the free version
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08-13-2003, 04:18 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 147
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It may be a good idea before installing the upgrade to go into each book and note the page number you last read. It might not be exactly the same with the new version, but it'll save you a lot of time trying to find where you were if the annotations file needs to be rebuilt.
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08-13-2003, 04:38 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 7
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For me, the free uBook from www.gowerpoint.com beats all other PPC readers. It reads HTML, TXT, RTF, PDB and PRC (not secure) ebook files. It can read directly from inside ZIP files, and supports BMP, GIF and JPG images.
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08-13-2003, 04:46 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 251
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Re: Palm Reader Gets A Facelift
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Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry
http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com
• Finally, ebooks on the SD card are not closed when the device powers off! Woo hoo!
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Praise the lord! This was always a huge issue for me! It was such a pain that the books would close and you'd get that NO BOOKS OPEN screen!
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08-13-2003, 04:47 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jan 2003
Posts: 37
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I like the look of that reader too, but you are SERIOUSLY restrricted in what you can read with it - if you want to read anything recent or not already in the public domain, forget it.
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Linear Mode
