11:49 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

TomeRaider 3 has been in development for over 2 years and you can finally download a first beta.

This is new: Categories/Filters for database queries, image support, accelerated full text searches, better and faster compression, full html support, DRM and encryption.

07:30 PM by hacker in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

http://www.plkr.org/news/47

Can you belive Plucker is 6 years old today? Its come a long way from that little hobbyist project from Mark Lillywhite in Australia to a project adopted by thousands of users, dozens of companies, and hundreds of other projects around the world!

Plucker 0.01 was pretty rough, but it worked! It only handled text, and it required sed and awk to work properly. There was no GUI or "desktop" components. It only worked on Linux and Unix. The early versions of Plucker didn't have a lot of fancy bells and whistles, but what it did, it did well. There were probably less than 5 users of Plucker 0.01 total back in late 1998/early 1999, worldwide, and I was one of them (as was Mike Nordström and Alexander Wagner). This is what it looked like back in 1998:

A LOT of work has been put into Plucker over the last 6 years, by dozens upon dozens of contributors. Plucker now works on EVERY platform including Windows, OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, Amiga and others, through the use of various tools provided and contributed by other community people.

For those who are on a platform that cannot run the native Plucker tools, or who are behind a restrictive corporate firewall, or other reaons... Plucker even works over email!

There are graphical desktop applications that can create Plucker content for you, quite a few commercial applications that produce Plucker content.

The Palm-side application has gone from English-only in the beginning, to German, French, and onward through the years to a total of 16 current translations in 2004!

Plucker has even been ported to the Windows PocketPC platform, so even Windows users can continue to use it on their Microsoft Windows-based handheld PDA. Dozens of interesting projects use Plucker as their base handheld distribution format, including hospitals, educational institutions, and publishing companies. Many ebooks are beginning to be released exclusively in Plucker format, and many more are coming.

We know of at least 2-dozen commercial companies utilizing Plucker in their products or internal company. Many doctors, students, and other professionals use Plucker to keep read-made information on-hand (pun intended) when they need it.

Here is what Plucker looks like today. What a long way we've come... and we're not done yet! Lots of new features are planned for Plucker 2.0. Come join us!

Happy Anniversary Plucker!

(You can read more about the history of Plucker on our website)

03:36 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

John Cox, librarian at the National University of Ireland, wrote a wonderful essay on the challenges and opportunities of e-books. He depicts findings from library and user perspectives, seeking to relate them to other studies and services and to future e-book development.

Edit: I forgot to mention the link. Sorry! Click here for the full article.

Abstract:

E-books are commonly perceived as offering great potential for learner support but also as struggling to compete with print due to poor on-screen presentation, restrictive licencing and limited range of titles offered. The experience of a group of Irish university libraries shows that, with the right combination of product and subjects, e-books can thrive among students and faculty, while librarians can create more dynamic, relevant and flexible collections than for print. Subscription management is demanding for libraries, however, and licencing issues remain highly problematic, representing a formidable obstacle to full exploitation.

08:11 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Sharp announced that it will ship its latest Linux-based Zaurus SL-C3000 PDA into the Japanese market next month. What is hot about this device, beside the fact that it is running Linux OS, is the fact that it will be the first PDA to integrate a hard drive (4GB). Beside that the hardware specs look pretty much standard; the Zaurus is powered by a 416MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor, comes with 64MB of SDRAM and 16MB of Flash ROM, and features a 3.7in 640x480 LCD display.

06:04 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

This is the second round of 20.04% discount items at PalmGear. Visit this thread if you have missed the first.

The Best Audio or Video Applications:
AeroPlayer
MMPlayer
NoviiRemote
Pocket Tunes Deluxe
Pocket-DVD Studio

The Best Enhancements:
CIC Jot
FindHack
PowerRUN
TealScript
TextPlus

The Best Utilities:
FlyZip
NeatFreak Pack
PDBcruncher
PowerOn
SyncWizard

The Best Board or Card Games:
400 Solitaire Games
Aces Texas Hold'em - No Limit
Backgammon Pro
Chess Genius
Scrabble

The Best Office Applications:
Documents To Go Premium
MiniOffice Deluxe
MobiSystems OfficeSuite Pro
Quickoffice Premier
RepliGo

The Best Image or Photo Viewers:
AcidImage
Firepad Picture Viewer
PicturePlus
Resco Photo Viewer
SplashPhoto

The Best Personal Finance Applications:
Budget Master
PMT xl
Pocket Quicken
SplashMoney
Ultrasoft Money

The Best Hobbies Applications:
My Roots
PDACookbook Plus
Planetarium
TealMeal
Wine Enthusiast Guide 2004

The Best Apps to be Stranded with on a Deserted Island:
GPS Compass
Little Palm Pet
MyDiary
Palm Aid
PathAway GPS

05:37 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Here's a very cool development in Japan: Japense mobile users will soon move to new frontiers in their passion for mobile telephones and pop music as customers will be able to download full-length, CD-quality songs to their cellphones.

The Inquirer reports that KDDI, Japan's second biggest phone outfits, would offer a service of 10,000 songs with sound quality so good the music can be listened to on stereo speakers. Users can also use the tunes as ring tones.

The service, which begins next month, is called "Chaku Uta Full," or "Full Ringer Songs."

05:23 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Larry Garfield from Infosyncworld looks at the different design strategies of palmOne and PPC-based vendors, and muses on what it says about the way they think. This is an excellent read and mirrors exactly what a lot of our members have been discussing lately:

Where HP and Dell both think in terms of feature count, palmOne, rather out of necessity, tends to tailor its markets more. That's why, according to palmOne anyway, the T5 doesn't have Wi-Fi[...]That's not to say that palmOne doesn't need a bigger push. Next to the equally-priced non-novel but very flashy X50 Advanced, the T5 just doesn't seem impressive, even if it is one of the most feature-rich Palm OS handhelds to date.

So what does the editor of the article suggest? -- That palmOne is better hurrying up to release a Cobalt handheld that could hopefully compete with the latest HP and Dell PPC devices.

05:08 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Bottom Line: The Rio Carbon is a worthy competitor to the iPod mini, with a gigabyte more storage, great style, excellent sound, and extras such as voice recording and a built-in stopwatch. It charges via USB and doesn't need a driver or dedicated software.

Click here for the full review.