The iSilo application, whose earlier incarnations were much beloved of doctors, lawyers, and others who sought a way to carry HTML reference material on their PDA since time immemorial, was released for the iPhone platform back in August.
As I mentioned when I covered it then, I had been a heavy user of iSilo for PalmOS back in the day, since I cordially disliked the MobiPocket PalmOS application and iSilo was the only other convenient way to get Baen Webscription books onto my Palm, Visor, or Clié.
However, I hadn’t used it since my last Clie bit the dust. There had been other ways to read those books, such as FBReader on my Nokia 770 and Bookshelf on my iPod Touch. When I downloaded the first version available from the store, I was fairly unimpressed, so I decided to put off reviewing it until it got a little better.
That time has come now. With the release of version 1.30-1.31, iSilo has moved considerably closer to ready for prime-time. It has added support for viewing a number of non-iSilo document formats (most notably PDF), and also supports loading documents with WebDAV rather than needing a sync conduit application—an innovation I would like to see in other readers, such as Stanza or Bookshelf.
The iSilo document format
In order to convert documents from HTML into iSilo format, you will need to download the free iSiloX converter program. This program will allow you to convert any single page or collection of linked pages into an iSilo-compatible e-book.
Some websites, such as Munseys, also offer preconverted iSilo-format books for download. (It should be noted, however, that Munseys uses an older version of the iSilo format, which shows up double-spaced on newer iSilo apps, so you will get better results if you convert them yourself.)
iSilo is a format that has been evolving since shortly after the introduction of the original Palm Pilots. At its root, it is intended as a way to take text formatted in HTML and translate it to a form that can be read on a PDA, with as little human intervention as possible along the way.
In this respect, it has a couple of notable advantages over the other HTML conversion document format, MobiPocket. With iSilo, if you have a table of contents for a book in HTML format with links to all the chapters, all you need to do is point iSiloX at the table of contents and tell it to fetch that to a link-depth of 1. It creates the book for you, with the table of contents at the beginning”and links from the table of contents to other parts of the book work just as they would if you were viewing through a web browser.
On the other hand, I have never yet been able to make a MobiPocket-converted file with a built-in table of contents, even when I had that same table of contents HTML file.
This also makes iSilo a natural for mirroring websites. Just feed iSiloX the URL and link depth, and it will produce an archive file that can be browsed just as if it was the actual website. Of course, this was much more useful back in the PalmOS days when the presentation of the web on a portable device was much more limited.
The iSilo iPhone App: User Interface
Both having names that start with a lower-case “i,” it would seem that iSilo and the iPhone were made for each other. At $9.99 on the App Store, it is half the price of the iSilo client for other platforms (though this price may be raised at any time).
Like other platforms’ iSilo clients, the iPhone version is capable of reading iSilo-format documents. However, unlike the other versions, the lack of hardware buttons on the iPhone leads to some hard choices in the user interface.
Scrolling up and down can be done by dragging and “flicking” just as with other iPhone apps. But there are other functions that can be performed by single, double, or triple-tapping the screen at various points. (They can be edited from within the Options menus.)
Tapping in the very middle of the screen brings up a display of the single-tap commands, then tapping again in the same place switches to the display of double-tap commands (as seen at left), then triple-tap.
Thus, tapping twice in the lower left corner of the screen would move to the previous page in the document, or tapping twice in the middle top would page up. The interface is a bit clunky, with so many different locations and taps to remember—and if you are in the habit from using other applications of just tapping anywhere in the lower part of the screen, iSilo could be a little hard to get used to.
Configuration Menu
Another place where the interface is a little clunky is in the configuration menu (accessed by tapping the “More” icon at the lower right corner of the screen). This will bring up a list of all possible functions—File, Edit, Find, Mark, Go To, and Tools—in one single panel.
Some of the options are a bit unclear. For instance, if you want to change the font, you need to go to the “Edit” section and choose “Options”. (However, changing the font is frequently ineffective; see below.) The options for autoscroll, rotation lock (to prevent the screen from changing orientation if you flip the device on its side), and full screen display are under “Tools,” at the very bottom.
Thus, to engage full-screen mode (getting rid of the title bar at the top and the menu bar at the bottom), you must go into the configuration menu and scroll to the very bottom. (Also, if you attempt to page down with a tap, you will come right back out of it again, since it is turned off by tapping at the bottom of the screen where the menu bar would be.) There is room for improvement here.
Viewing Other File Types
Unlike other iSilo clients, the iPhone version of iSilo has been blessed with the ability to display several document formats in addition to iSilo—most notably PDF, Word, RTF, unaltered HTML, as well as JPEG and other image formats. No conversion is necessary to load these documents into iSilo. Perhaps the iSilo people figured that these document viewing abilities might make the iPod iSilo more attractive to people who had never used it before.
Most of the PDFs I loaded as a test displayed adequately—at least as well as they would appear in Air Sharing’s viewer. The only failures were a Wowio PDF (which only displayed the first couple of pages and everything else was blank—perhaps this was due to whatever copy protection method Wowio uses) and my 153-megabyte Spycraft 2.0 PDF (iSilo churned gamely away for a couple of minutes trying to load it, then the iPod crashed to the silver-apple screen—but then, I didn’t really expect it to work).
Loading iSilo: “I can do that, WebDAV.”
Once you have files in a format iSilo can read, it is necessary to load them. As with eReader, iSilo can pull down compatible files from any web server, including one on your own desktop computer. But unlike eReader (or BookShelf, or Stanza), iSilo offers the ability to load files into its memory without needing a webserver or any specialized PC-side conduit at all.
Like Air Sharing, iSilo has its own WebDAV server built in. This means that you can tell iSilo to set itself up as a file server on your wireless network which you can access with a URL. You can then add it to “My Network Places” on your Windows computer, explore to it, and move files into and out of it just as you would any network drive. In short, the app itself is also its own conduit.
This also means that you can use iSilo just as you would Air Sharing—as a network hard drive utility to transfer files from one computer to another without ever wanting or needing to view them on the iPhone.
Loading files in this way is easy and fast, at least for me. It means no having to mess around with a conduit that may not actually work properly. I wish other e-reading apps would offer this function!
Text Display
iSilo books are displayed by default in a Verdana sans serif font. They can be viewed in either portrait or landscape; iSilo has a very smooth accelerometer screen-flip function. The documents look very much as they did in their original HTML format (making allowances for screen size), including italics, bold, links, and even tables.
The font is reminiscent of the fonts available on the old PalmOS devices where iSilo was born. Someone used to reading on those devices might see very little difference in how the document is displayed.
However, these days I tend to prefer reading in a serif font, such as Georgia, for the way it guides the eyes along. iSilo does have a font-setting dialogue under its Options menu, where the font can be changed to any that is available on the iPhone—but for some inexplicable reason, of all the documents I tried to change the font with, the only one where it stuck was the converted HTML Tor e-book of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire (as seen in the screenshot near the top of this review).
I am not sure whether something in the document’s HTML (or in my iSiloX conversion of it) is overriding my font choice, or if it’s something wrong with the iSilo client—but whatever it is, it certainly is annoying.
[Edit: I have since been informed that this has to do with the way that iSilo documents have a specific font family (serif or sans serif) set, and you must choose which font is displayed for each family. You can choose to set a serif font to be displayed for sans serif families, by turning "Set Defaults" on, changing "Family" to "Sans Serif," and then choosing the serif font, such as "Georgia". I tried this, and it worked. Still, it only serves as more evidence of the overall clunkiness of the application and its configuration options.]
One thing I have found while reading documents in iSilo is that sometimes the scrolling can be decidedly sluggish. Sometimes it will not even scroll at all, no matter how much I flick it—and then it comes unstuck and immediately jumps several pages down.
Another mild annoyance has to do with the “soft” scrolling selection from iSiloX—a format conversion option which is supposed to allow scrolling across boundaries between different webpages in the same iSilo file.
I used soft scrolling with Baen Webscription books (which are set up in a one-webpage-per-chapter format) when I was using iSilo on my PalmOS machines so I would not have to click a link to jump to the next chapter, just hit the down button again to scroll across the boundary. However, the iPhone iSilo client does not seem to recognize soft scrolling. (I wonder if it is because of the same API issue that makes BookShelf have to load books in 35K chunks?)
Conclusion
Back in the PalmOS era, iSilo offered an unparalleled ability to convert HTML documents to a form that could be conveniently carried on a Palm. Since it was the only game in town at the time (other options such as Plucker had not yet come along), it was immediately adopted by professions that relied on rapid access to significant amounts of reference material—most notably the legal and medical professions.
To this day, a number of medical and legal reference sites continue to support iSilo, and the lack of an iSilo reader had been cited by doctors or lawyers as an overwhelming reason why they could not switch from their old PDA to an iPhone. Happily for those doctors and lawyers, this has now changed. I would have no compunction at all recommending the iPhone iSilo to people who need to use iSilo professionally (or others who have a bunch of files already in iSilo formats).
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