When Resco first released Neeews, many in the Palm OS world did not understand the motivation behind giving away such an excellent program completely free. After the Resco site-visit, I knew that a commercial version was coming…and here it is. The product hasn’t been released yet, but the TamsPalm review is right here!
Resco Neeews starts up by showing a few introductory pages. These contain basic information for novices - well done.
Resco Neeews’s user interface is similar to the Palm OS launcher:
Adding a new feed(Resco term: newspaper) works via a wizard that is easy to understand, but confusing. I outlined all the steps for you below, as you might see, one passes the same form twice(once to choose, once to edit and save). However, the Wizard appears well thought-out and did its job perfectly.
Static feeds like our TamsPalm feed work very well. You can choose if images should be downloaded or not, how many articles you want to have, the font size can be selected and links can be passed to your handheld’s web browser or sent to the clipboard. To cut a long story short - Neeews’s rendering is excellent!
Resco’s so-called dynamic feed feature allows you to get a feed from sites like Google or Flickr that is parametrized by the search terms you enter into the wizard. This page shows the settings for a Flickr feed that downloads the latest lava lamp photographs from Flickr:
Resco Neeews did a great job with the dynamic feed - the pictures look great on my Palm Tungsten E2(the ripple is due to the GIF compression in Wordpress - the gradients are soft on the TE2):
Neeews’s dynamic rendering allows you to look at a feed while it’s data is still being downloaded. This is especially handy for feeds with many images… . Here is a video that shows the creation of a dynamic feed, its downloading and rendering on a Palm Tungsten E2.
This review looked at Resco Neeews 2.01 on a Palm Tungsten E2 with a HP SD card. Neeews didn’t crash in my tests, neither did it show any excessively weird behavior.
Overall, the Palm OS world just got richer by one excellent program. If you enjoy looking at RSS feeds, you will love Resco Neeews! Excellent HTML rendering makes looking at feeds comfortable, dynamic rendering makes the whole experience fast. I can’t really find out anything negative about Neeews! - congratulations!
