As someone who's watched the development of the various HTML tools for the Psion 3a at a somewhat closer than distance than most, it's interesting to 'freeze' a particular release version and review it as a finished product. In practice, of course, and much like their bigger brothers in the PC world, HTML (i.e. web) browsers are in a constant state of change, with more upgrades than you could shake a stick at. Nevertheless, here's a glimpse of Micro Cheng's browser, HTML Viewer, currently V1.44.
Like its cousins on desk-top machines, HTML Viewer's job is to render HTML pages and GIF graphics onto the Psion's screen, allowing navigation through the 'web' of hypertext links between documents. It's actually very fast. Mainly because it's coded lovingly by Micro in the 'C' language, but also because it uses a 'cache' to store previously decoded and viewed images. The downside of the cache, of course, is that more RAM disk space is needed. There is the obligatory animation which sits in the corner of the screen while the document is loading, though there's thankfully an option to turn this off. The main screen and controls work very well, with links being followed by manipulating the graphical cursor with the arrow keys and then pressing Enter. The cursor even changes shape when over a hyperlink, a very neat touch.
HTML Viewer now supports the usual web page tools, such as tables, lists, rules and so on, with the only exceptions being frames (usually not essential) and .JPG images (the Psion is not commonly thought to have the processing power to decode these). It displays .GIF files at a reasonable, if not blinding, speed, decoding them cleverly in the background and then displaying when ready. HTMLVIEW also supports Psion's .PIC format images, but this isn't a lot of use in practice unless you're prepared to keep two copies of all your pictures, one in .GIF format for the web and one in .PIC for testing on your Psion, although for completely off-line browsing it's nice to have the option to use the much quicker native format.
The image caching is very well done, and once a .GIF has been decoded to a native Psion .PIC it can be re-displayed in a second or two the next time it's needed, which is a great improvement! If you do try this program, please make sure you have as much free system memory and RAM disk space as possible, as HTML Viewer needs enormous amounts of memory to work and cache properly. There is a setting to alter the amount of memory HTML Viewer allocates to itself and I found that in practice it helped to have this set quite high.
There's a useful (if not particularly wordy) set of help screens and various widgets to play with. You can fiddle with the graphics settings, view the HTML source in a text screen, find text within a document, launch other applications from linked files and play with several screens worth of font, application and cache settings.
As a web author myself, I get a big kick out of seeing a web-site come up, more or less complete, on a humble Psion 3a. A bit sad, maybe, but if this is the sort of thing that appeals to you, get yourself the latest version of HTML Viewer and try your site for size!
The big question, of course, is when will HTML Viewer be properly 'online'. Micro asks in his documentation for people to contact him and preregister for such a beast. Please, if you are interested in seeing HTML Viewer become a fully online application, mail him, or even better register this program!
See also the review of Websurf.
Tthe article is capture at 1999 from 3-Lib web site, and now this article haven't post on that web site.