Review: TomeRaider
Score:
86%
Version Reviewed: 1.0
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The date – some time in 1998. As the guy behind the 3-Lib shareware library, I start getting emails from a couple of people about a new, revolutionary application they’ve been developing, cheekily named TomeRaider and nothing to do with the similarly-named game with Lara Croft… From their descriptions, I couldn’t quite see the point in yet another document reader – it took the creation of real content for people to catch the vision and understand what TomeRaider’s all about.
I’m in a minority of one on this, I reckon, but I see TomeRaider as far more of a database program than an ebook reader. Of course, in reality it sits somewhere between the two, in its own unique niche. Think of it as a viewer for simple flat file databases of pure text. For example, a dictionary, with each record containing one word and its definition. Or a movie guide, with a record containing a film title and then a page or so of textual background on the movie. Or, indeed an ebook, with each record containing a chapter, or part of a chapter.
Even this is hardly unique, of course, there are database applications for just about every computer platform ever created. However, TomeRaider’s been built from the ground up for speed, even with huge, multi-megabyte files. Typical TomeRaider files include Internet Movie DataBase subsets, the Bible and a multitude of encyclopaedias and dictionaries (most of these are downloadable at http://www.memoware.com).
Already available for all other handheld platforms, the P800 port is now out and works superbly. Entries are presented in index or page views in any of four different font sizes, with an option to set the jog-dial to advance from entry to entry. Most importantly of all, the speed is very good – quick-matching something in the index is near instantaneous, even with a 10MB file. Searching within entries for specific text strings is a lot slower (around 100K per second) but still more than adequate.
Special mention should be made of the Find function. Whereas other document viewers present a simple one-string search, TomeRaider’s Find dialog lets you use up to three search strings, ANDed (or ORed or NOTed!) together, searching either from the current position or from the start of the file.
A TomeRaider for Windows utility makes it child’s play to import delimited or tagged text files and produce your own TomeRaider reference files (I made one in less than a minute), with MemoWare having hundreds more covering most subjects and interests.
Before this becomes a marketing exercise for TomeRaider’s developers, you should note a few small caveats. Firstly, the compression scheme used isn’t a patch on that used in, for example, standard DOC files, leaving reference documents perhaps 50% larger than they strictly need to be. For example, the Bible in DOC (.prc) format is around 2MB, with TomeRaider it’s over 3MB.
Proporta also need to make efforts to simplify the installation of TomeRaider files. Yes, they go into gory detail on how to do it (putting files into a \Documents\TomeRaider folder), but this may be beyond most beginners and there’s absolutely no reason why they couldn’t make TomeRaider search a few more default folders and also (shock, horror) actually refresh its file list when brought to the foreground.
Finally, and perhaps reflecting the ‘version 1.0’ tag, there are a few bugs and omissions. For example, a misleading error message when trying to open a TomeRaider file which has been set to ‘read-only’. And there’s no way to delete a file from within the application – you need to start up a file manager utility, etc.
These are relatively minor niggles though and I’m sure TomeRaider will be developed further on the Symbian/UIQ platform. It became a killer application for EPOC and for many people it will be just as useful on their P800.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at