New Beta Hires+ Plucker Viewer fixes OS5

[kstuart]

20030222-am (prc)
Numerous improvments in handling OS5 devices.
Added hires (aka double-density) application and toolbar icons
Amalgamated the preferences into one form.
Added new preference option to enable dynamic scrollbar screen updates
Added the ability to hold the pen down on a library document to bring up the icon popup.
Now takes advantage of the Palm's built in image blitter. Before the maximum image bpp that could be displayed was limited to the device's maximum screen depth. Now it's based upon what the OS supports itself.
Added the ability for the viewer to automatically optimize an image based upon the users' specific device limitations. (Ie, uses less dynamic-heap memory, faster load times, especially for lower-end devices)
Fixed a bug causing compressed images to appear corrupted on OS5 devices
Fixed a crash that happens when viewing fullscreen images on OS5 devices.
Fixed a bug preventing concurrent loads of the viewer from going to the same page the user left off at.
Fixed a bug where re-categorizing documents under classic mode would fail.

HiRes+ Plucker Viewer Web Site (http://hires.plkr.org)

[rhart00]

how does this app compare to iSilo?

[turcic.com]

Try both yourself. While I am a passionate iSilo fan, I also keep running the latest version of Plucker on my Palm. But so far no chance for the latter to replace my iSilo.

[kstuart]

Originally posted by rhart00
how does this app compare to iSilo?

iSilo costs money, Plucker is free.

[rhart00]

I too am a huge iSilo fan. I am always on the lookout for great new apps for my clie though. Plucker seems pretty nice but I have to agree with turcic- it doesn't come close to replacing iSilo

[kstuart]

...because... ?

[turcic.com]

For various reasons. Free does not always mean better. One example: This forum runs VBulletin for which an owned licenses costs $160/year. At the same time, there is very decent free forum software available, such as InvisionBoard. Many IB users swear that there is no functional difference to VB anymore. Yet most professional forums run VB.

Back to the topic, out of my mind, I find the following disadvantages with Plucker compared to iSilo:

- Plucker doesn't support cut&paste (something I also miss in Avantgo)
- Plucker is slower (especially for pages with image content!)
- Plucker's autoscroll is choppy making it almost unbearable to read text
- Plucker's output is not as nice (no - or since recently just rudimentary - table/multi-column support, frames are screwed up)
- Plucker is buggier; I haven't managed to crash iSilo yet, which I cannot say for Plucker
- Plucker doesn't support smaller fonts in OS5
- Plucker needs a long time to load large documents (I really mean *long*)
- Plucker chunks single documents into 32Kbyte files (let's say that you have an HTML document that's 200Kb. When you parse it it splits it up into 6 pages in the viewer (~32k each, etc etc). To view just one of those pages there is a load time of 10 seconds until you can actually begin to read and scrolldown on that one page).

Yes at the end there is the money issue. But, at least for myself who uses iSilo as a document reader and web clipper, spending $17.50 is nothing compared to the benefit I receive from it. I also want to stress here that I am in no way related to the company or person who writes iSilo. I am merely a fan.