Mobile Ministry Magazine

Despite the fact that PalmOS PDAs have been top sellers for years, one of the most missing features has been the ability to read files without having to send them thru some kind of conversion process. It became even more of an issue with the Treo series of PDAs being able to receive attachements with emails, but not able to read them.

Fortunately, developers have stepped up to the plate and introduced products such as Documents to Go and Piscel Viewer, to enable viewing (and sometimes) editing of common documents. However, the PDF reader was missing for all but a select set of devices (using the Piscel Browser, Sony Clie models were able to read PDF files without needing to convert them).

Thankfully, in the past months there have been two announcements about bringing native PDF viewing to the complete range of PalmOS devices (at least those using PalmOS version 5/Garnet). The first announcement came from Dataviz, the creators of Documents to Go (news via PalmInfocenter). And the second one is a lot more recent (yesterday) and comes from Alexander Gratz at Tam Hanna's PalmOS blog.

Now, while most would think that it should be a no-brainer for this to have already been in the palm computing world, the fact is that in many cases, what we use for desktops is not at all suitable for use on a handheld. Hopefully, with mobile standards and devices improving, there will be less of a line between content and enable all us to view any information from any device.

EDIT: Sorry about that Alexander; I tend to look at the website title a bit too quickly.