Reading on a Series 7

In today’s world of overt marketing, algorithmic timelines, generated content, and retail-centric apps, I find myself seeking refuge in simpler devices—anyone who visits here occasionally will know that I’m fond of using Psion devices for this purpose, and I’m constantly exploring ways integrate them into my daily life. A few months ago, I kicked around a new idea…

Over the past few years, I’ve made it a habit to simply safe PDFs of things to read or reference later; guaranteed immutable and offline, these represent a far simpler approach to read-it-later than any mercurial pre-acquisition web-service¹.

Combined with Folders, PDFs make for a wonderfully minimalist offline read-it-later solution

Armed with a library of PDFs, I wondered if I could come up with a lightweight solution for reading them on the Series 7. Unfortunately, although there are PDF readers for EPOC32, they don’t support newer formats, and these PDFs are often 10s of megabytes—significantly larger than the Series 7’s 16MB of RAM. Instead of leaving EPOC32 to do all the work, I wondered if I could pre-render a collection of MBM (EPOC32 multi-bitmap files) and write a lightweight viewer.

In order to

(I need to find a better way of capturing video of a Psion.)

Perhaps in the future, I’ll add support for generating these files to Reconnect.