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Tuesday, November 16, 2004
TomeRaider 3
I have been a fan of Tomeraider for a long time, but since making the switch to Mac my usage has been hindered by the need to convert .tr files to .pdb on a Windows machine. With the launch of Tomeraider3 that will no longer be a problem. According to the manual: TR3 Palm Users: Don't forget you don't need to convert TR3 files to use them on the Palm, just rename the extension from *.tr3 to *.pdb or use TR3 Windows, then HotSync. Unfortunately you still need Windows to convert TR2 to TR3, but it is a huge leap forward for Palm users: more native file formats! Hopefully the next release will not even need the extension changed when the file is stored in external memory. There are not many TR3 files available yet, but I did download the 8.7mb CIA World Factbook, which I currently have in iSilo format (same version only 6.2mb), to give it a spin. On a very quick late night comparison the score was 1-1: Tomeraider was about 10x faster to load, but only iSilo displayed usable maps and flags. (To be fair, this might be to do with the conversion. iSilo offers a great many choices of image quality when converting the webpages, but nt having Windows I cannot comment on Tomeraider conversion.) I will do some more testing, but this bears out my hunch that Tomeraider is king for text-centric data but iSilo will do better with rich graphics.
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