A New TomeRaider PPC Is Imminent

We started this blog a few weeks ago because there were imminent changes afoot that we thought might be cool to put down in a public blog. As always in software development things take about 3.8 times longer than expected, but, those imminent changes are getting their shoes and socks on and will soon be afoot.

The first thing we are going to do is release TomeRaider Pocket PC 3.5 at some point this week.

What’s going to be new in TR PPC 3.5?

The last version of TR on the PPC had a new kind of handheld interface that prized screen real estate over the aesthetic. It didn’t look very in interesting because it was just a “smart” scrollbar. I really liked it, some of us didn’t and the general consensus from the users was a thumbs down. In fact it was so badly received that the editor of Pocket PC Mag refused to publish a review that a PPCM journalist had written essentially on the grounds that the screen grabs would look bland in the mag.

So we went back to basic and came up with what we now feel is a close to perfect compromise. The new UI is very simple, focussing the use on browsing rather than the sundry features like bookmarks, categories and the like.

It makes good use of “drop up” menus, which on the small screen size of a PDA or Smartphone are very useful features. You can have the core feature, say Index find, on the tool bar prime and then the features that are related but less used in the drop up, such as Full text search.

Stay tuned….