I’m a voracious reader. I read books, tech articles, stories and many other things I can lay my hands on. However, unlike in the past, these days I read a lot more on my Palm than on what we bookworms call the ‘Dead Tree Format’ (for those of you who didn’t get it, this is the paper format). Not only can I carry a large number of books on my Palm, I can maintain bookmarks for each book I carry.
There are a lot of PalmDoc readers, and many of them free too. So why am I recommending this one? Well, because iSiloFree not only reads the standard PalmDoc format that you find many books for, but also has a proprietary format (called iSilo obviously), which stores the same data in a smaller space. The format can also store and format simple HTML, like bold, italic, underline and heading fonts leading to a more natural document.
The application lets you categorize the books you want using the familiar Palm categorization method. You can open, categorize, beam and delete books from the program. When a book is opened you can scroll through it using the hard-buttons or the scroll bar on the screen. You can even change to font-size and style on the display for your comfort. When reading multiple books, iSiloFree remembers the last position you were in and you don’t have to scroll about looking for it. Skipping pages or positions is also easy by using the find function in the program.
There is another free application on the developer’s site called iSiloWeb. This Windows-based application lets you capture Web pages, text files, PalmDoc PDBs and HTML files and convert them to the iSilo format. It can even queue up newly created documents for installation into your Palm.
iSiloFree is available at www.isilo.com. A shareware version of the application gives additional features like hyperlinking, more HTML support and even embedded images! So do try out this great application. For documents you can go to
www.memoware.com and even my company website has a few technical documentation at
www.isquaretech.com.
Vinod Unny at PCQ Labs