New All-in-One Mobile Document Viewer

Yea, I've got to agree with H. If this thing had on device conversion it would at least be more compelling and potentially justify the price tag.

50 clams for a VIEWER? NOT!

the VisorMiser
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Where will ya be when ya get where you're goin'?

Well, I was excited when I saw this so I tried it with several types of documents. It is faster than Adobe Acrobat for Palm for reading PDFs on my Clie 615 but the docs are not nearly as sharp and are a little fuzzy--of course they are a lot smaller, so there are good things as well as bad. The powerpoints are okay--not great but readable. But for docs or especially HTML this doesn't compare to ISilo(ISilo is still one of the best programs I have; if someone has other suggestions, please post).

FYI: Quickpoint (part of Quickoffice Pro) allows you to choose what resolution view you would like on the device: from small (160x120) all the way to 800x600 for on device viewing AND up to 1024x768 (for presenting directly to a VGA projector using Pitch Solo or Pitch for Palm). You can manage your device memory while having FULL fidelity of your presentation viewable, so you don't have text 'moving around' to new places different than on the original slides.

You also can have up to 3 zoom levels available for each slide at the max resolution.

Additionally, Quickpoint provides a thumbnail view option to see the 'flow' of your presentation with four slides at a time.

Mike (with a blatant plug)

Several reputable programs perform their jobs admirably, as some people have noted, and I don't think RepliGo will replace any of them, particularly for their happy customers.

I think where RepliGo brings something new to the Palm community is in document fidelity. With RepliGo, you have a full, high-resolution version of the original document right there on your Palm. I think there is a class of Palm user for whom that's important, to be able to zoom in and see precisely what that document would have looked like if it were printed.

As for PDFs, the Acrobat -Viewer- is free, but Acrobat is not, and I think you'll find for its capability and ease of use on Palm devices, RepliGo fares pretty well for the money.

Jim Moy - Software Engineer, Cerience
(The views expressed by the author may not represent the views of Cerience Corporation, etc., etc.)

Which files would you like to edit? Don't you realize the concept behind this? This is a killer app as a viewer. You'll be able to take with you virtually any document you can process in a desktop computer. Imagine the complexity of building an editor for every format on a Palm. Handhelds are about portability and mobility. Actually, the amount of information you edit on a Palm device is very little. And you have pretty good editors for the main formats (DocsToGo).

Guys, you can view *ANYTHING* that you can print from. Project files, Visio, CAD, Quicken, Money, your news reader, HTML emails, WinZip comments, help files, Illustrator images, your ERP reports, Access reports, etc. No more copying text to a memo or word document to sync over. Just file|Print|Repligo Printer, OK!

You might be surprised at how readable PDF files are when converted by RepliGo. There are thousands (dare I say millions?) of PDF files that are untagged and are difficult to read without RepliGo's ability to rewrap paragraphs appropriately.

One example of a person who might be interested in RepliGo is a lawyer who has a bunch of faxes with signatures that he wants to be able to look at in great detail. Or scanned, archived documents with notes in the margins that don't translate very well to anything other than a highly graphical format. You can probably think of other people who would have use for a high-resolution document saved to a portable device.

RepliGo's definitely not a web browser. It doesn't follow links, submit forms, etc., and the documents are typically viewed on-screen and not authored for high-resolution printing. But what you see in RepliGo is very precisely what IE or your favorite desktop browser showed you, down to that last little filler GIF that the graphic designer so carefully aligned. RepliGo doesn't do any reformatting or substituting with Palm fonts, what you see is what the app printed.

As I described above, I think where RepliGo will shine is where high fidelity to the original is expected, and desired.

Jim Moy - Software Engineer, Cerience
(The views expressed by the author may not represent the views of Cerience Corporation, etc., etc.)

Good question.

Intelligence about the document, for one. The RepliGo format knows where logical chunks of text are found. When you tap on a paragraph, it highlights briefly before going into flowed mode. The text, in its original desktop font and appearance are wrapped for viewing convenience, which is not possible with an image viewer. Images embedded in the document are recognized, and are convenient to tap and zoom into. Just a couple of examples of how the built-in intelligence give meaningful features to the viewer. Give it a try!

Compression, secondly. JPEG, and other graphics file formats are not optimized for typical business documents. The example you gave might produce 100 KB or larger images per _page_ at the resolution levels RepliGo provides. (Of course, depending on the resolution and compression level chosen) and associated with it the problems of manipulating and decompressing them on these limited memory devices. And once you do get it compressed down, you've got all artifacts to read through.

Third, document management. Lots of documents are multi-page. I don't know about you, but I would sure get tired of dealing with all those individual JPEG files, getting them named reasonably, and dealing with them in my image viewer. RepliGo stores multi-page documents logically, like your original document. A related (not so distant) fourth item is integration. You get all this with just a few clicks: hit the convert button; prompt for the name and location of the document; hit your HotSync button; done.

These are roughly in the order that I value the benefits of RepliGo, and I use it personally for pretty average documents and web pages, I think.

Jim Moy - Software Engineer, Cerience
(The views expressed by the author may not represent the views of Cerience Corporation, etc., etc.)

Jim, in my zeal to create a paperless life, I have scanned about 10 thousand documents and pictures in the ScanSoft Paperport format. http://www.scansoft.com/paperport/

Would you consider adding Paperport .max viewability?

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David

Folks,

Just downloaded the trial version, tried a 10 pages PDF file, but when the document came up, I get to see the front page for about 1-2 seconds, then the whole thing went blank-dark. Nothing else happend thereafter, has any encounter this yet? What could I have done wrong?

Thanks,
John