Review: iSilo
Score:
80%
Version Reviewed: 4.27
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Originating in the Palm OS world, iSilo was such a good idea and has been such a success that it's now available for both Pocket PC and Symbian UIQ/Series 60. Unashamedly working with just HTML, it's the perfect tool for packaging up web pages for viewing on a mobile device. It will work as an ebook reader as well, and there are plenty of documents in iSilo format on Memoware, converting most standard texts into iSilo format involves getting them into HTML and then passing them through the free iSiloX converter, which is a bit of a pain.
Far better to think of iSilo in terms of its star turn, which is taking sets of static web pages and turning them into compressed iSilo databases. On the smartphone, you can then browse each database just as if you were online, browsing the real site. Note the word 'static' - iSilo isn't trying to be a bandwidth-saving web browser - it's for taking copies of reference information that you find on the web and keeping them handy for posterity on your phone.
The iSilo system is good for keeping a reference copy of informational or fan sites. A 'clip' icon is placed in Internet Explorer's toolbar, for easy conversion, and all you have to do is tell the tool how 'deep' you want to go in terms of following the hyperlinks. The other main option is whether you want images included or not. These work well, resampled down to (by default) 144 pixels wide, but of course the final size of the iSilo database is increased significantly.
There are a mountain of other options, all tucked away in the multi-tabbed 'Properties' dialog, including scheduled download and conversion (perhaps for an online magazine site), along with full control of what iSilo's converter does with tables, text formatting, cookies, and so on. The downside of such a hugely configurable tool is that it's very easy to think you've grabbed a site, start reading through it all on the train and then realise that you didn't go deep enough or handle tables in the most sensible way. Still, you can't fault the conversion power on offer here.
If you've got local HTML pages on your PC (perhaps your own web site, or reference information that you've previously saved), it's easy to use the standalone iSiloX utility, with similar interface to the clipping version in Internet Explorer, specifying the top level page and letting iSiloX do the rest. As examples of the sort of thing iSiloX can produce, I tried running it on the main AllAboutSymbian reviews page (i.e. all reviews for all platforms, albeit with images turned off), producing a single 1MB .pdb file. I'd put it for download here, except that a page with so many links seems to be impossible for iSilo to handle at the moment, with wait times of thirty seconds every time the main index page is loaded. With just the Series 60 reviews, the file (All About Symbian_ S60 Reviews_.pdb) size was 600K or so and the wait was around 5 seconds, just about bearable. Thankfully, choosing something a little more modest produced much more useable files, e.g. legoland.pdb (300K).
iSilo also proved perfect for repackaging my own (free) Trivopaedia (trivia encyclopaedia), whose 'master' was already in HTML format.
The viewer interface is a little unusual in terms of key shortcuts ('C' is used to go 'back'), and (on the key-driven Series 60 implementation) you have to get used to scroll and selection modes, but after using it for a while you'll start to appreciate the functionality on offer. Besides a 'full screen' mode, there's a full bookmark system (in addition to which, when opening a document you're inserted at the last place you got to in your previous session), various clipboard copying options and a really quick 'Find' function. There's even a handy readout of IMEI and free RAM, which I'd never complain about...
It's worth noting that for many 'table-centred' pages, it's necessary to use 'Edit | Options | Disable table layout' - a little more intelligence within the application to handle this automatically would be helpful.
iSilo may be new to Symbian OS, but (aside from needing a little optimisation when dealing with large archives) this is a mature product and I'd seriously suggest that you give it a try.
Steve Litchfield, 3-Lib
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at