Reviews

TealDoc and TealPaint

April 3, 2002

TealDoc is a DOC reader, but it goes far beyond that simple description very quickly. For starters, it includes some features that you won’t find in all reader programs. It has autoscroll, which is great for reading ebooks without having to constantly push a button to advance the pages. You can change the orientation of the page, so if holding your device horizontally is better for you while you’re reading, TealDoc works the way that you want to. It includes a bonus mini font that allows you to squish an amazing amount of text on one screen. It has a handy little button bar at the bottom to ease navigation, and of course it supports bookmarks. Unfortunately the buttons aren’t completely intuitive, so you’ll need to refer to the manual to learn what each of the buttons does. ANd it’s VFS aware, which is a must for modern Palm OS applications that might be called upon to access large data files.

But do you want a bit more out of your handheld reading experience? How about color text? Embedded pictures? Links to other applications? You can have all of that with TealDoc. I was really impressed with how those extra features make the DOC reading experience that much richer. Ebooks are nice, but having pictures and charts as well really does liven up a text. That does mean that creating your own ebooks and distributing business documents and presentations may require some extra work in the beginning, but depending on your use for the documents, it may be worth it in the end. You’ll need a converter program such as MakeDocW, and several of them are readily available as freeware.

What kind of pictures can you put into TealDOC files? Anything at all that you can create in or import into TealPaint, a surprisingly robust graphics program for the Palm OS platform. I’ve been using this program for a very long time in order to capture screen shots for my reviews and articles for this and other web sites. That’s been the extent of my use, because I am NOT artistic by any stretch of the imagination.

But I’ve been playing around with TealPaint more in order to write this review, and I’ve had a lot of fun. I haven’t gotten any more artistic, but I have gotten more familiar with TealPaint’s inner workings. In many ways it works just like Paint, which comes with Microsoft Windows— select the various drawing tools and colors with a tap of the stylus and then use your stylus to “paint” on the screen. I was impressed with the variety of tools available, and especially with the textures— it was so much fun to pick one of several textures, choose my foreground and background colors, and paint away. If you want to include drawings with your TealDoc files, don’t despair if your creative talents are just as poor as mine— TealPaint also comes with a couple of conversion programs that allow you to import *.gif files (and anything else that you can convert to a BMP.

Both of these programs are very well-designed and are a lot of fun. TealDoc and TealPaint work very well together, so if you have a need to create Palm DOCs with advanced formatting and embedded pictures, this is the package to get. TealDoc costs $16.95 and requires 128K of memory on your Palm OS device. TealPaint is $17.95 and only needs a measly 76K of room, though of course any images you create or import will require some more space. Generous free trials of both programs are available at the TealPoint web site.

PocketGoddess rating for TealDoc: