Hi ! 
I don't have the time (or knowledge, yet) to comment adequately on all your reviews and great site, folks. I'm a PDA newbie. I d/l'ed CSpotRun per your reviews and am quite happy so far. I really appreciate the time and effort you have all invested in this site. Kudos !!!! I wish I hadn't wasted 2 precious hours of "study time" trying to find out info on DOC readers so I could open a microbiology document. 

K. Hoffman 
Med Student/ Mom of 3 

I strongly disagree with your recommendation to use SmartDoc for editing DOC 
files. pedit (see http://home.columbus.rr.com/nevai/palm/) is a far, far 
better editor, and it handles memos, DOCs, and (using pedit32 or peditPro) 
can work with memos up to 32K.

It isn't designed as a reader, but it can import/export DOC files.

I believe you are better using different programs for reading and editing; 
combining them almost always means you get mediocre versions of each. This 
"Swiss Army Knife" approach to program design leads to a great deal of bloat, 
and the Palm doesn't have room for it.

The best reader I've found is iSilo. I also keep PeanutReader on my Palm 
because it is the only thing that will read PeanutPress books, and it's not a 
bad reader either.

Thanks for listening!

Michael D. Hensley

Dear Julie,
Thank you for the comprehensive work on comparing DOC readers. I am
relatively new to computers, and brand new to PDA's, so while generally
delighted with my new Handspring Visor, I was disconcerted when it
apparently was not accepting downloads into the free AportisDoc program I
was playing about with. I wondered if something was wrong, as I searched
everywhere in every way I could think of to find items the HotSynch monitor
said I had indeed transferred. I was very annoyed,while reading your review,
to discover that AportisDoc didn't list more than seven items. After
deleting a number of items, I was pleasantly surprised to discover those
poems I had thought vanished into the aether! The total failure of adequate
communication,and the grating consistency of that program's appeals to buy
the full featured version did not give me a positive impression of
AportisDoc, and I think I shall give my business to another company. SJS 

I haven't had any trouble with Z-DOC. Perhaps this is a newer version
5.0.1.b3.

You should mention some BAD behavior too. Aportis and QED remove ALL
your DOCs if you remove the program. Z-DOC, iSilo and Teal do not.

BTW, Landware has full featured word processor with intgreated
thesaurus. Take Note! (a poor name to be sure for a powerfull program).
$39

Don

I have been using CSpotRun for abut a month now, and find it to be very convenient. I have used the windows file conversion program mentioned in the CSpotRun readme file to convert several documents and hot synch to my palm llle. They include a C.S. Lewis poetry book from Gutenburg.com, some technical information files from memoware, and twenty six different material specifications from work. The last are the most useful, as I now have a convenient place to keep them and get access quickly. Since I am not modifying them, CSpotRun is fine to view them. The program has worked exactly as the documentation claims and has not crashed once! I may also look at Tealdoc, as the specifications sometimes contain diagrams but only the titles show, It would be nice to have the completer picture, but can't beat the CSpotRun price!

Mike Spring

Great reviews; thank you.  I wanted to add one thing: you mention that
the AportisDoc feature "tapping only scrolls down" doesn't seem
useful.  Sometimes it really is: depending on how you hold your Palm
device, and if you use your finger to do the tapping, it definitely is
convenient.  Not, to be sure, essential, but certainly nice on crowded
subways.

Again, thanks for the reviews.  I've been using AportisDoc, iSilo
free, and CSpotRun, and I think after reading your review I'm going to
try TealDoc.

Marc Carter

Comments? What comments? The review is excellent! Thank you!

"There is an option to right justify the text on the display. Why
you'd want to this is beyond me though."

I'd guess the answer is simple: Hebrew support.
--
Best regards, -- Boris.

    I downloaded QED v2.01and TealDoc v2.75 because they were both 5 star on
pilotzone (I've just recently heard about SmartDoc, which is also 5 star on
pilotzone, but is hidden in another category)
     I loved TealDoc, and would buy it, but I wish it would let you edit/
create DOCs
     QED was nice, esp because I could edit/ create on the palmpilot, but the
onscreen controls were difficult to use.  Tapping the upper half of a control
was easy, but I often couldn't get the lower half a control to work.  I even
tried recalibrating the palmpilots screen with Digitizer.  Forget using the
controls on Mass Transit (TealDoc gives you lots of options for configuring
the hardware buttons and works great on a bouncing bus or subway car).
     I liked TealDoc's "scroll panel" because it showed were you were in the
document with a big black block.  With QED I often I would have trouble
telling if I was at the beginning or end of a large document because the
single vertical line indicating my place in the document would "vanish" into
the beginning and end buttons of QED's "position bar".
     I did like the ability to Toggle the control bar on/ off in QED for
maximum reading area.

     Yesterday, I just downloaded SmartDoc v1.2 from CD-Rom (_PalmPilot:
Ultimate Guide_ by David Pogue) because it can beam documents to another
palmpilot.
     So far I really like the list document screen w/ the action button pop
up menu and other icons.  I also like the scroll bar on the side that shows
you were you are in a document or list of documents and approximately how
many screens the document or list of documents is by the size of the slide.
     It is annoying that you can hide the right side scroll bar for more
viewing area but you can not hide the onscreen controls for more viewing area.

I enjoyed reading your review of DOC format readers for the Pilot,
and found it very informative and helpful.

Based on your review I obtained TealDoc and Cspot, to compare them
for myself.

I will probably keep TealDoc because of its string search and bookmark
features, and because of the alleged feature of being able to copy
text from a Doc file into a memo page.  (This feature appears to be
disabled in the download copy -- I can't figure out how to select
any text, and the Copy menu option only beeps sullenly -- do you
suppose it will become active when the registry key is provided?). 
Someday I may want to read a reference manual or other doc where
searching and bookmarking is very important, and it might be worth
$17 to be prepared for that eventuality :-)

However, for "just reading" I find Cspot to be superior on several
important counts.

1) ability to adjust leading (line spacing) so that more text fits on
   the dinky Pilot screen

2) ability to suppress control bar entirely, thus freeing up more
   screen for text

3) ability to rotate text thus taking advantage of better aspect
   ratio in "landscape" mode

4) menu of available docs is very, very slow to come up in TealDoc
   where it is a whole new screen, but is a simple menu and almost
   instantaneous in Cspot, much more convenient!

Now, on the other hand, TealDoc gives me the option to Delete
and Rename docs from the doc list screen.  This is handy because
I've not yet discovered how to delete individual docs from any of
the Pilot system menus.  However, the Delete option is poorly
implemented -- I can only delete one doc file at a time.
Having just read an e-text book divided into 21 chapters, I found
it very tedious to delete each chapter, one by one.  Kept wanting
to click-drag to select 'em all and delete them in one blow.

TealDoc also provides the "timed scroll" or "prompter" option, but
this (if I may wax even more opinionated for a moment) strikes me as
useless.  If I crank it up to a speed which even approximates my
natural reading speed, then the "blink effect" as the screen redraws
becomes intolerable.  Whole-page scroll on demand is the only
comfortable way to read large bodies of text.  I don't know what
the "prompter" feature would be useful for, but I personally find it
a waste of code space :-)

So, in summary, I might use TealDoc if I had a reference manual,
movie guide, or other database-like doc where searching and marking
were primary activities.  I doubt I will ever use it to read
straight etexts -- tried that and didn't like it.  The only
bookmarking I need for normal use is "where did I leave off",
which Cspot does perfectly.

My intention in writing this note is to thank and congratulate
all of you -- the reviewer, and the authors of both products --
for your fine work.  It's terrific for a newbie Pilot owner like
me to have such a choice of quality products, and such a good
review to learn from!  It's also to provide another blip of user
feedback (what *do* those customers want???).  This customer would
throw away TealDoc and use Cspot for the lifetime of my Pilot,
if Cspot only could do searching and tagging and allow me
to export selected text into memo or other forms...

I suggest to Mr. Clagett that his already "way cool" Cspot would
reach "meaga cool" proportions if he could provide these features,
and to the Teal team that they could improve the real-world
usability of their product by taking a look at Cspot's excellent
management of screen real-estate ...  hopefully we all end up with
better software in the end...  maybe one day I can have just one doc
reader and recover some RAM for more etext? :-)  oh, yes, speaking
of which, Cspot is 17K and TealDoc is 44K (ahem)...  another factor
to consider...

best wishes to all -- as a novice Pilot owner I really am impressed
by the energy of the Pilot hacker community and the quality of
both the shareware and freeware.  keep up the good work!

De Clarke

Hi,

Read you report on the Docu-readers, as it was sent to me by a friend.
Personally, I do not fully understand why you want so many features you
want in a document-reader. A 'find' function is nice, and so is
font-selection, but that's about it.
I'm using ToGo myself, for two reasons:
One is that it has enough features that support book-reading: I like the
one-line scroll functionality when you tap the screen whilst having the
page-jump available with the hardware buttons. Most other readers have
only one scroll-mode.
Two, and this is the most important one: It gets document files
significantly smaller than DOC-files. If you have over 1MB of documents
on your Palm, as I do, the space savings of about 20% can get quite
significant.

DOC is so ineficient, spacewise, that I'm quite willing to give up
bookmarks and line-space settings (which I do not need when I'm reading
a book) for the convenience of being able to take two more books with
me.

Gerben

I read the doc reader review you wrote. very nice but i dont think
you grasp why j-doc lets you rotate the screen. j-doc is a japanese
doc reader... japanese is not an english "left to right, top to bottom"
language... its "top to bottom, right to left" but you can't ofcourse
edit doc files in that fashio but rotating the screen allows it to be
read correctly ^_^

Dark Fiber

Just a quick comment on compression... I believe that the DOC format
allows DOC files to be stored compressed, and that they are usually
distributed this way.  The clue is when you get a zip file with DOCs in
it, and compressed they aren't any smaller than when they are
uncompressed.  That said, a major reader difference is how they handle
compression and decompression.  Most DOC readers decompress the entire
document at once when you read it... this means that (a) they can be
slow to deal with large files, and (b) they tend to be mean to
small-memory Pilots.  QED does on-the-fly compression of the region
being read, and thus is better on the Personal.  It also has (I think)
the fastest compression/decompression of any DOC reader out there.

One question: why do you say that you don't see much use for
autoscrolling, but then say that QED needs it if they're going to
compete?  I also don't see much use for autoscroll for much the same
reasons as you, and while I agree that these are only two data points,
the statements don't quite follow.

Just wanted to put by $0.02 for QED: small and fast!

Ian Soboroff

Hi,
Thanks for your review. It is quite interesting and useful.


CSpotRun v0.5.2
===============
"Navigating through a file can be done with screen taps or the hardware
scroll buttons. Both options will only allow you to scroll a page at a time."

In Preferences, you can choose "Tap action": Page, 1/2 Page, Line.


TealDOC v2.75
=============
"There is an option to right justify the text on the display.
Why you'd want to this is beyond me though."

This is explained in documentation:
Release 2.50
* Added right-justify preference option for future Hebrew support

Ivan

In my opinion the screen rotating feature should be implemented in EVERY doc-reader (uh, surely a killer for a software-developer). Especially on the Palm III this gives a real good electronic-book like feeling - competition is coming up (although I think PalmComputing is, after the leaving of Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins and the anouncement of the geeky Palm VII a sinking ship anyway).

Regards,
Alfons

Allow me to throw in my twenty cents worth... (inflation drives the
price of thoughts up... :-) )

There's one thing about SmartDoc's autoscrolling implementation that
you forgot to mention that I think makes it a real winner over any
other autoscrolling DOC readers. By requiring you to tap the 'play'
button first, they've created an implementation that allows you to
switch to your basic Palm apps with the hardware buttons, even if you
want to use Autoscrolling. This is impossible with any other DOC reader
that uses the hardware buttons for autoscrolling.
I would think that a combination of SmartDoc, QEX, and a GoType!
keyboard would make for a great remote word processing system. (I've
been unable to test it because I don't have that keyboard... yet...)

Aportis's readers are an insult to the original Doc. I think someday,
somewhere out there, you might find Rick Bram screaming out "Why did I
give Aportis my DOC program?"

TealDoc is very nice, feature-wise, but I don't like their
autoscrolling (there's an audible 'screen refresh' - it's not smooth
enough), and it's S-L-O-W.

QEd was nifty when it first came out, but with Smartdoc's arrival, the
only thing it's good for is if you want to edit documents without
taking up that much space on your Palm. That's it. The program is a
usabilty mess - I tried it for weeks and I still couldn't figure out
exactly how to use it. For a Palm program, it isn't intuitive at all.
Their 'split buttons' approach (along the bottom of the screen) is
impossible to figure out and understand unless you keep a copy of the
manual next to you at all times. I'd get SmartDoc instead.

J-Doc is, as you said, pretty next to worthless - unless you're in
Japan. If you have J-OS and the Elisa font, then J-Doc will display
Japanese characters - correctly, I'm told. Since I can't exactly test
this, I'm not sure about it's reliablity... but it's the only DOC
reader that can do this, AFAIK.

As far as I'm concerned, there's really only three worthy DOC readers
out there right now - the three you reccomended. (CSpotRun - best
freebie, TealDoc - the images, SmartDoc - everything else) If TealPoint
could just speed up TealDoc and add editing features, then it'll be
really good. Until then, I'll stick with SmartDoc.

All in all, a great review!
 -- Jonathan Valentine-Cooper

Dear Julie,
I'd like to add my comments to your review of DOC readers.

CSpotRun does appear to be perfectly suitable as a low RAM-footprint
reader. However, aside from the lack of a bookmark feature, it also does
not have categories, unlike some of the other readers. This is quite
important for me, and might be for others as well.

Although TealDoc's HTML-like support for links and embedded images hasn't
resulted in many documents that take advantage of this feature, I've found
them useful for some of my longer e-books. I have used the hyperlinks to
create a table of contents, which in some cases just looks a little
prettier than bookmarks. Using the hard-coded formatting commands also
makes chapter headings easier to read (ie bold or large font, with various
alignment options) rather than typing them in ALL CAPS.

So for now, I'm using TealDoc. A new version is in beta (v2.75beta) which
might solve some of the complaints people have. But if and when CSpotRun
comes with bookmarking and categories, it just might replace TealDoc on my
Pilot.

--Andrew Ang

Thanks, Julie, for the review of Doc readers (and editors.) My recent
research to find "the right one" parallels your review almost perfectly. I
tried QED as my document reader, but found that it wasn't up to par as a
reader, so went back to Tealdoc for reading, and held onto QED for the
occasional editing job. However, when the recent upgrade to SmartDoc came
out, I found that it was great in both categories. I don't mind the extra
RAM it uses, and dumping both Tealdoc and QED made the increase in RAM
usage not seem so great.
I might have to reload Tealdoc, though, if more Docs start to appear with
images in them. This seems like a great feature; like you, I hope it
catches on.
One feature that none of the doc readers seem to have is a highlight in
the popup bookmark menu which would tell you where you are in the document.
Example: you are between Chapter 11 bookmark and Chapter 12 bookmark, so
Chapter 11 bookmark would be highlighted. When reading long novels, I
sometimes forget just which chapter I'm in, and if I jump somewhere else,
it can be difficult to get back. Perhaps a temporary "Quickmark" (that's
what WordPerfect calls it) would do the trick, instead.
Again, thanks for your service to the Palm community. Keep up the good work.

Michael F. Wiens   

Julie,

Thank you thank you thank you. A million times thank you. I'm a new Palm
III user and your Doc reader review was terrific! A big help to me in
determining what's best, what the choices are, and what to get. Although
you have an overall summary, I'd have loved to see your "editor's pick" or
"What I use on my pilot". I'm very happy with C Spot Run. I was also happy
to read on its web site that the author is planning to add bookmarking in a
future version.

Tim Powell

Thanks for the nice review of Doc readers. I do have one more CON for
TealDoc (and I use many of their products, I'm a big fan of TealPoint). It
is the most buggy of the readers I have used. As long as I have used it,
I've had trouble with slow loading of the documents, when you have a LOT
loaded (I have the TRG 8 meg board) and even worse, fatal exceptions when I
chnage categories. Both have improved, but are still problems.

Mary Jo Sminkey

I've tried several of the DOC readers (DOC, DOC+, AportisDOC, TEALDOC and
QED).  I may now check out Smartdoc.  One of the things I've wanted was the
ability to edit DOC files.  Thank God I was able to find my copy of DOC+.  I
finally gave up on Aportis and have written them off as a bad investment and
a flaky company.  AportisPro it appears will never see the light of day.  It
makes me wonder if they have only one programmer and he's a part timer who
only works a couple of hours a week.  Could they have hired Rick Bram the
creater of DOC to finish up the work.  He'd get a pay check and they'd
finally get a product they could sell.  I wonder if it's possible for Rick
Bram to reclaim DOC+ or perhaps recreate a new DOC editor and market it.

Sorry about the Aportis trashing but once I got started I had to finish it.
They deserve it in MHO.

James Grimm

re ToGo:  I asked the author and he does *not* plan to publish the
ToGo file format.  Given that the success of Doc is somewhat tied to
the fact that *anyone* can produce content for it, and integrate Doc
support into their programs, ToGo just doesn't look like it is going
to go anywhere...

Mark Eichin

Wish I had read this a month ago.  In my quest for a DOC reader I think
I've downloaded every reader you reviewed and came to the same
conclusion.  I could have saved lots of time...

By the way I chose TealDoc.

Bob Brinias

SmartDoc is an excellent DOC reader but for one thing: it doesn't allow you to turn Carriage-Return+Line-feeds on and off. That ability, which AportisDOCMobile Edition has, is important because DOC files are very inconsistent in the way they use line breaks. Aportis DOC let's you find the best way to view any document on the fly. SmartDOC does not.

Trotter Hardy

Good review. I've tried most of the readers and have stayed with CSpotRun for its ease of use.

John Balevic

Hi,

I am a registered user of both TealDoc and AportisDoc.  If there is a
"con" for TealDoc, it is that you are limited to the amount of text you
can select for copying and pasting.  Unless the program has changed, you
can only select one screens worth of text, while in AportisDoc, as you
select text with the stylus, the screen scrolls upwards and allows you
to select pages of text (I have ClipHack installed which greately
increases the clipboard).  Anyway, that one lacking is what sent be back
to AportisDoc.  Initially I contacted TealPoint and they said they would
implement that feature when they figured out how to do it.  Maybe they
have by now.  Haven't tried the latest version.  Anyway, aside from
that, TealDoc is great.

Ken Wright

Just a comment on your reviews of the doc readers julie. First off, thanks for taking the time to do the reviews ... they are a valuable service to the whole palm community.

I wanted to add a point that may be overlooked with the Tealdoc vs. AportisDoc readers (haven't tried the others yet, so don't know if this applies to others).

I agree that Tealdoc has some great features. I found one problem however that forced me to register AportisDoc Mobile edition rather than Tealdoc. I have a Palm III and often have several dozen doc files on my palm at any given time. With Tealdoc, the time to load the program was a couple of minutes for some reason ... it must have to do with the way it reads in the doc file names ..... extremely slow.

Despite it's great features, i couldn't live with that problem and AportisDoc does not have that particular problem.

Thanks again for the great reviews.

In regards to your questioning the use of the wide virtual screen, there
are times I convert a wide chart, the virtual width allows the colums to
remain aligned.

The new version of CSpotRun, 0.4, now supports page rotation.  It's
suprisingly usable; it makes it easier to read while holding the Pilot in
one hand.

In addition to all of its other convenience features (line spacing, fonts,
screen tapping to page up and down, control hiding to give more room, small
size, per-document preference and position saving) it's hard to see why to
ever use another docreader for anything other than images.

Oh, CSpotRun could use a bookmark function; some books are arranged to make
any other way of reading difficult.

-Billy

Regarding Jot:

You can still use the graffiti shortcut stroke, and then use all your
defined shortcuts, including shortcut names with numbers.

It's also much faster than using the jot shortcuts !!

After reading your text browser review, I'd like to make a couple of
comments on QED.  I think the text editing and conversion features both
deserve a spot on your feature chart.  The free QEX utility works really
well for bi-directional text conversion, is fully functional shareware
that can be downloaded free and is included with the $23 QED
registration.  The latest version of QED (v1.43) adds bookmarks and
fixes the "strange rectangle symbols" you mentioned in your review. 
These were apparently caused by stray carriage-return characters.  QED
is still a tiny 15k.  If they can still keep it compact, in the future I
would love to see text scrolling, more font options, tabs and replace
(it has search already).  Overall, QED is a compact, powerful little
editor that works quite well.  I'm very happy with it. 

Julie,

A co-worker mailed me a link to your review page.  Nice piece of work!

For what its worth, I had a few comments to add.

AportisDoc disappointed me with its lack of editing ability.  Though they
advertise that Docs can be "created" (with the Professional Edition, of
course) from what I could tell, you can only create Doc files on a PC.  The
ability to create and edit files is a handy feature (to get around
Notepad's limitations).

QED works okay for me.  It gives the ability to not only edit existing
Docs, you can create them from scratch, right on your Pilot.  I didn't see
that feature on any other (working) Doc program.  ZDOC promised it, but
crashed every time I tried it.  The biggest annoyance in QED, to me, was
the interface for loading Doc files.  It lacks the ability to place Docs in
categories, so if you have a large list, you have to wade through them ALL,
every time you want to load one.  Oh, and it does nag a bit too often for
my liking.  :-)

ZDOC looks and feels like a Unix program.  It's full of bugs, and lacks a
usable UI, typical of the average (or even the above-average) Unix program.
It crashed every time I tried to create or edit a Doc file.

However, based on you reviews, I think I may just try out CSpotRun, and
register QED.

Thanks again for the fine work.

P.S.  Do you think you could include an "Edit/Create Docs" column in you
summary?  That would be real helpful.

Ron Goers

Dear Julie,

Thank you very much for your most informative review of the various Doc
readers for the PalmPilot.

I am pleased to announce that based upon your feedback and requests from
users, we have lowered the price of the PanaRead Info Viewer from $39.95 to
$24.95.  We will provide "price protection" for those who have purchased
the product at the higher price.

The scrolling PanaRead viewport (as shown at http://www.panamedia.com) is
our solution to making reading longer documents more comfortable and easier
on the eyes.  It is the patent-pending result of several years of research,
development, and user-testing to find a better way to display text on the
small screens of hand-held devices (hence the larger K size).  We encourage
your readers to download our free 30-day trial (available for PalmPilots
only, not Palm III yet) and see how it turns their PalmPilot into an
effective mobile reading device, even in poor lighting or at arm's length,
controllable with a single thumb.  As you mentioned, PanaRead can also read
E-mails and memos, which makes it a convenient viewing tool for all
electronic text.

PanaRead does not turn the PalmPilot into a leather-bound book with
acid-free gilded-edge pages, but after testing it, I believe your readers
will find it a well worth its RAM!

Best regards,

Jim Novack
President
Panamedia Electronic Publishing

Hi.  Just a quick comment or two.  Overall, though, you've done a great
job here, just like you always do, Julie.

You left out any mention of Doc/Doc+.  I realize they're not available
still, but with as many "doc" readers as are out there and the thousands
of available "doc" files, a review that covered all the readers would
benefit from a brief history, IMHO.

I don't think you trashed Aportis enough.  Again, all my HO here, but I
think they royally screwed up Doc, just like they've (apparently) done
with Outliner (now called Brainforest).  And, to release the shareware
crap that they've done and have the nerve to call it shareware and not
crippleware?  Hmm, why didn't you mention the stupid shareware hints and
reminders and timers in your cons section?  ;)

TealPoint can't be praised enough.  They saw the dropped ball that
Aportis caused and picked it up and ran with it.  The imbedded images
idea was complete genius, and all they need now is to add edit
capabilities to make this a tough to beat package.

All the others I think you hit right on the head.

Thanks for listening.

Julie -

First of all, the review you did on the Doc readers was very good, and
comprehensive.  A nice summary of all the different Doc readers out
there for the Palm.

In your review of TealDoc, in the Display Options section, you wrote:

"There is an option to right justify the text on the display. Why you'd
want to this is beyond me though."

There is actually a good reason for this - in order to provide better
support for users of "Hebrew Support for PalmOS".  "Hebrew Support for
PalmOS" was developed by Penticon Technologies Ltd.
(http://www.penticon.com), and is very popular for the Palm, especially
in Israel.  Hebrew is written from "Right to Left", so the ability to
have Hebrew documents "right justified" makes them much easier to read
on the Palm.  Penticon has an online archive of Hebrew documents
available for the Palm at: http://www.penticon.com/moadon.

I had approached both TealPoint and Aportis about adding a "right
justify" option, and TealPoint was very receptive, and in a short period
of time had implemented this option.  Aportis on the other hand, said
that they wouldn't be able to support this before November (this was in
March or April).

For now, TealDoc, being the only document reader with a right justify
option is the Doc Reader of choice for anyone wishing the read Hebrew
Docs on their Palm.

I'd be happy if you would mention this in your excellent review of the
Doc readers.

Thanks,
Howie Hirsch

Dear Julie,

While I agree that PanaRead software is way over-priced, I feel you may
have allowed your own lack of enthusiasm for an auto-scroll facility to
unduly influence your critical remarks.

Speaking as someone who likes the auto-scroll feature (when set to
Fast), I find the program worthy of more attention. The configurable
speed and option to display both the original text and the PanaRead
window mean that you stop and jump forward manually at any point, then
resume the auto-scroll when ready.

If they could just halve the price, they might be on to something.

Many thanks for your past, present and future reviews, by the way. I
have found them very helpful.

Best wishes,

Nigel

PS. I've been using AportisDoc and the PanaRead demo in tandem with the
daily Entertainment News feed from www.i2iuk.com, which is e-mailed to
me each morning.

Hi
I have tried a number of Doc readers and was happy to see your
comprehensive review.
I am sticking with CSpotRun, as it has all the features I need at this
time.  In addition it is "certified" by BackUp Buddy which is an
additional comfort.
I think your review, as usual, hits the nail on the head!

Alan Bornstein

Nice work!  You didn't mention the huge flaw that all of them don't
have a PC-side companion yet.  (STILL waiting for the promised Aportis
app...)

Jim Thompson

Nice review. My personal favorite, however, is Doc+.  Bookmarks,
searching, and, most important for those pilokey fans of us, editing.
Too bad it isn't offered anymore. (Supposed to be in AportisDoc
Professional, if it ever comes out!)

Ken

Dear Julie:

Thanks for a very fair minded overview of all the Doc viewer's features.

I'd like to make a few addtional points:

- We offer *free* telephone support to users. In addition to the speedy email support, we have knowledgeable people answering our phones who can troubleshoot a problem. There's nothing better than getting a friendly voice on the other end of the phone.  The other publishers are only available via email, and do not even offer a telephone number. Though you may not think that our products (or our users) require intensive hand-holding, we can tell you many stories otherwise.

- We provide comprehensive, detailed documentation to both AportisDoc Mobile Edition and AportisDoc Reader. As a commercial software vendor, we provide a professionally written manual for all of our products (more than a simple document describing the highlights). Documentation for both products may be downloaded at no charge.

The infrastructure needed to accomplish the above is another reason our pricing is a bit higher. Though you can argue that it is "high for shareware," we do not treat our products as shareware, and devote the resources to it that we would to a 'commercial" product. It is shareware only because of the nature of marketing to the PalmPilot community. When we release the Professional edition, it will be packaged and placed for sale at many resellers world-wide, as well as being sold electronically.

- We also offer one feature no one else does, which is the Wide "Virtual" screen capability.

One last point - AportisDoc Mobiel Edition is the only Doc product that has passed & received Platinum Certification by 3Com.

Regards,

Frank Colin
Aportis Technologies Corp.

Thanks for the review of the doc readers.  I had Aportis for a while,
jumping in when I first got me Palm.  After a while I found that I
really don't need all the features - they tended to get in my way. I
purpose is to create some specific documents for my business as
reference works and once I have them I can just jump from page to page
to find what I want.  If I decide to get back to using a doc reader then
i will probably go with TealDoc - it seems to be a good company and I
like their other products.

I am using brain forest to good advantage, tho.  - primarily as a
outliner.  I don't need it to incorporate all the other to do's etc.  so
that is working for me. 

Thanks for all your input.  I read all your stuff.

bill stavers

Hi Julie,

Thanks for your overview of the different doc readers - it's great to
have an overview of these apps!

At the moment I'm using AportisDoc Mobile Edition and I find that the
feature to scroll down when you tap anywhere on the screen is actually
quite useful - I do most of my reading on the train standing up, hence
one hand is used to hold onto the handrails. 
That only leaves one hand free to use my PalmPilot and to scroll down.

If I use my thumb to press the up and down hardware buttons this is very
awkward and uncomfortable, plus I agree with you on your reasons for not
wanting to use the automatic scroller.
So the solution is to turn the option on and just tap the screen
anywhere with my  thumb.  It's not as nice as having a dedicated 'down'
button but it works!

Now I just wish that the pilot would have a 'rocker' switch for
scrolling up and down just like the Palm-Sized PCs... :)

Well, just thought I'd share my five cents with you. :)

As always, thanks for the great info on your site.  Kepp up the good
work!

Terence Wong

P.S. I 'm still evaluating the Mobile edition too, and am annoyed about
the long waiting time at the start.  I have found that if you press the
"Order Now" button and then the "Not Yet" button you can get into the
reader quite quickly.  Not sure if it's faster than waiting for the ad
screen to disappear but at least I feel like I'm in control. :)