TomeRadier Users Take Note: NewsRaider Now Available!

[Jon Westfall]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.newsraider.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.newsraider.com/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"The mobile device specialist, proporta.com, has announced the release of NewsRaider, a FREE application which keeps you up to date with all the latest news stories and reviews from a growing number of sites including BBCNews.com, CNN.com and the authoritative and slightly left of centre Guardian.com"</i><br /><br />For those of you who use Tomeraider, this new application from Proporta looks like it may be a pretty cool addition to your setup. Downloading articles and seemlessly putting them into your Tomeraider seems like a pretty handy idea for up-to-date reading material. Since I'm not a tomeraider user, I can't vouch for how this program works - but if you do use tomeraider, try it out, after all - it's free!

[bjornkeizers]

There's a BUT though - you need to run a client on your PC as well that will fetch the articles. The PPC program can't sync the articles wirelessly like Avantgo can. No wireless, independent sync = bye bye Newsraider.

[rob_ocelot]

There's a BUT though - you need to run a client on your PC as well that will fetch the articles. The PPC program can't sync the articles wirelessly like Avantgo can. No wireless, independent sync = bye bye Newsraider.

Further to that, it requires an activesync connection. It would be possible to set up a remote VPN connection to Async over the net (BUT I've personally never been able to get this sort of thing working).

It should be pointed out that the program originally sounded to me like an adjucnt of Tomeraider. It most definitely is not, though you can manually force the PC side of the program to export the news data as a .tr3 file. It's very inconvenient to do (and doesn't sort or display correctly).

NOWHERE in the site documentation nor the nonexistent program documentation does it say how the program works (needs PCand has it's own file format, for example). It would be so much easier for end users if this functionality was embedded into Tomeraider itself -- and more importantly that the news was actually formatted in .tr3 format.

A huge bug I discovered is that if you check for the news data to be stored on an external storage card -- IT ONLY WRITES TO THE FIRST ONE, which is usually the file store flashram. As a result, my puny 2MB filestore was quickly overrun with this mysterious 'NRDATA' folder. If I had not been poking around and found this it would have lukred there for weeks. Some people have their regularly timed backups written into the flash ram, and would be quite upset if the last 3 weeks of backups never went through becasue some other program data was taking up that space without their knowledge..

I understand the program is a beta, but when you advertise your program as a 'free' download you'd better also TELL people that it is a beta and to expect bugs.

I see no forum to report bugs, request new features, etc. They've gone to all ths trouble to create a program that lets you browse news articles with a Tomeraider interface (sorta, it has about 1/2 the fucntionality of TR) yet if there had been a forum or some way to give feedback it would have been quickly pointed out that their time would have been better spent tweaking Tomeraider to do the exact same thing.