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View Full Version : iSilo at last


Tycho Morgan
05-14-2002, 11:25 PM
<a href="http://www.isilo.com/info/beta/iSiloPPC.htm">http://www.isilo.com/info/beta/iSiloPPC.htm</a><br /><br />In my time with Pocket PC Thoughts, I've made no secret of he fact that I've been a Palm user. Once upon a time I had a Visor Solo, and at the time I was quite happy with it. I could read ebooks, I could write, I could keep track of my to-do list, and like most people who haven't yet seen the light of Pocket PCs, I could want nothing more. (That isn't entirely true, because I had seen Pocket PCs, and I did want one, my budget was such that I didn't think I could afford one.) One of the things that allowed me to get along so well with my Visor Solo was this nifty little program iSilo. It let you read documents (with a lot of HTML formatting, which at the time was otherwise unavailable) in the most compressed form. When using a Palm you were able to get more formatting options and have files that were half the size of competing DOC files (which the program read too). As if that weren't enough, iSilo has this nifty little desktop counterpart that allows users to easily convert text files, html, and even pull a number of channels off the web for your later reading. This last part may not seem to be very big, but I think this is what will make iSilo HUGE for Pocket PCs. <br /><br />When I was able to make the switch over to Pocket PC, I wasn't too concerned with loosing iSilo: Microsoft Reader and Palm Digital Media Reader for Pocket PC combined to do everything I needed, and my supply of Compact Flash and RAM, compression wasn't that big of a deal anymore. However, I really missed the desktop conversion utility that iSilo had. Mazingo with its custom channels and other premium services come close, but the conduit isn't nearly as efficient (or as nice) as iSilo was. You could convert a file into an eBook in a matter of seconds, and pull 5-7 web channels (assuming they aren't graphics intensive or anything) in 90 seconds tops; or at least that's what I remember. This is what mobile favorites should have been, and I'm really looking forward to seeing a final version of this. <br /><br />What are your thoughts?

jwf
05-15-2002, 09:19 AM
I was a keen iSilo user on the Palm. It's the one program I keep referring back to whenever I try and read an offline web page that requires horizontal scrolling to read every line of text with Pocket IE. iSilo was doing decent offline web reading years before PocketPC came out, and still MS missed the point completely and botched Mobile Favourites and 'Fit To Screen'. These days Starbuck comes pretty close, as you can switch it into plain text mode to read 'wide' pages and it will open .zip files with local web content. It'll be interesting to see what iSilo does for the Pocket PC.

jwf
05-15-2002, 09:54 AM
Looking good. The beta seems to install and I've managed to download the top Pocket PC Thoughts page and read it on the Pocket PC with iSilo. The conversion program doesn't have a device conversion preference for Pocket PC yet, so I suspect I'll have to have a look at the list for the highest resolution colour Palm model and use that as my preferred format conversion target.

Tycho Morgan
05-17-2002, 05:32 AM
There are a couple of issues that I'm talking with the developer about, but from what I've seen, I don't think it will be a problem for them to clear up. And it is still in beta after all...

The Big thing is that the iSilo format, at least the graphical stuff is formated for Much Smaller devices, so for instance, this site doesn't look real good. There might not be anything we can do about that.

I'm also keeping my eyes open for increased speed and clear type support (which will be hard because it doesn't use the HTML rendering powers (weaknesses?) of the OS, so it might be hard to get clear type to click in. If anyone knows how to do that, then email the developer or me and I'll forward it along.

Because it doesn't use HTML from the OS, iSilo plays nice with CSS!! Its very cool I think... Here's an even better reason to use this over the alternative...

Cheers,
Sam

jwf
05-17-2002, 02:19 PM
I've emailed them about speed, ClearType and Full Screen support. I guess theoretically if iSiloX is mashing the original source data to format it to the smaller screen size, it should be possible to output 'narrower' HTML for PIE to read with ClearType/MultiIE type features.