The text reader which has been used for all the Palm® based topics in these pages is iSilo™. It is available as well for the Pocket PC® format. Like the Palm Pilot®, iSilo™ has been popular as a platform for medical applications for many years. Collections of applications for this platform can be found on the web at the elegant Meistermed site link Medical iSilo Depot and the Healthy Palm Pilot site, among others. This is a program capable of capturing web pages from a computer or from the internet and putting them into PDA format without loss of hyperlinks and bookmarks. It is capable of reading hyperlinks to several layers on web pages. It can handle tables and graphics, but you need to be mindful of the limitations of size of screen on the PDA. Tables and graphics which are too large will require a lot of scrolling for adequate navigation. Some detailed graphics do not resolve well on a small screen. Documents formatted for iSilo carry the .pdb extension. The program is also capable of reading .txt and .doc (palm .doc, not Microsoft .doc) files, but only displays them as plain text without hyperlinks, making information retrieval almost impossible. Double clicking on a file with a .pdb, .txt, or .doc(Palm) extension queues these files to be installed on the PDA at the next Hotsync.
iSilo™ is available for 30 days as freeware, however if you wish to continue to use the hyperlink, bookmark, table and graphics capabilities, you then have to register for the sum of $19.99 US. There is a companion Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Windows® and Macintosh® which can be downloaded free of charge. The latest version of the program for the PDA and the GUI for the host computer can be downloaded from http://www.isilo.com/. It is now in version 4.32. This program is highly recommended.
Other text readers are available for PDA’s. Files are not interchangeable, as formats are proprietary, thus you will have to use the zipped web page files as a source if you wish to use another platform.