How to store and view medical references on your Palm Pre
Keeping medical references on your PDA phone is very convenient. We often prefer local storage to online access as it is faster and does not rely on a wireless connection which may be slow at times.
The types of documents vary, and commonly these include;
1) PDF files. These are easy enough to copy to the USB partition on your Palm Pre (the /media/internal). I suggest you organise the folders and keep the PDFs separately. If you launch the PDF viewer, it should locate the available PDF files for you to view. The default PDF viewer does not support landscape mode, but there is a landscape patch available for the PDF viewer (you need either WebOS Quick Install or Preware to install the patch). Landscape mode is much better to read journal publications and most medical PDF documents.
2) Plain text files. For short documents, you could keep these organised within ClassicNotes for easy lookup and reference. For longer documents, consider a dedicated ebook reader like pReader which is freeware and supports conversion from html, PalmDoc pdb, mobipocket formats. It allows you to set bookmarks, search (from version 0.7.5 onwards) and image support but unfortunately does not support hyperlinks at this point in time.
2) Hyperlinked (HTML) documents.. These are useful for larger references since hyperlinks allow you to jump easily from section to section. Images are also supported as are tables and so on. iSilo is the preferred reader for such medical documents and there is a ready converter for HTML to iSilo.
Unfortunately a WebOS version of iSilo is not available yet. You could run iSilo for PalmOS in Classic but you don’t get the full screen and all the WebOS goodness. There is however a solution to view local Hyperlink documents on your Palm Pre provided you have the source HTML document.
1) You need to install Lighttpd, a web server, on your Palm Pre. This is available from the Optware section of Preware (if you haven’t installed Preware before go here).
After you have successfully installed Lighttpd, you can read your USB Internal drive from the Pre’s browser. To do so, just navigate to
http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1
2) Plug in your Pre to the PC, select USB mode, and drag and drop your HTML documents to the USB drive. Again, you should probably organise your documents in subfolders to keep things neat.
Open your browser and you will see the directory structure of your files from http://localhost. All you have to do then is navigate to the index html file of your ebook and load it in your browser.
3) Read away!
Here’s a sample screenshot of a text reference in landscape mode on the Pre’s browser:
You might want to tweak some settings:
- Change the settings on lighttpd.conf, particularly the http port to something else other than 80 eg 8282 for security.
- Change the default local folder to the subfolder where you keep your HTML medical references.
Where do you get medical references in HTML format?
1) Create your own. Meistermed has a useful reference on How to Create Hyperlinked Documents from Word if you have them in Word format.
2) Download files from websites like eMedicine. Hint: You could always select “Print” view to get neater webpages before saving them from your browser.
3) There are sites like Free Medical Books for Doctors with a ton of resources. Otherwise Google is your friend. If you encounter ebooks in HTML help format (CHM) you can use a tool like the free CHM Decoder to convert the CHM file to HTML format, preserving the formatting, hyperlinks and images.
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About the author, Alan: Alan Teh is a Malaysian Physician who specialises in Hematology-Oncology & Stem cell Transplantation. He has been using Palm PDAs since 1997 and is absolutely reliant on them. His current PDA is a Palm Pre and is a strong advocate of the webOS platform, Palm's latest operating system. Caught the blogging bug in 2004 and has been addicted ever since… |
If the Palm Pre had the equivalent of Papers for Iphone by Mekentosj compagny I would consider it as a replacement for my beloved treo 680. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Isilo for Palm Pre would also be a must for me to swtich…
Well I’d give it some time. I’m sure an app like that will come to WebOS. In the meantime, I use Evernote as an archive for interesting papers.
Thank you for such an informative article
I tried it on my favourite referance book. but the chm conversion created a javascript style menu that could not be presented on my webos palm.
Can u see the side menu? is there another simpler conversion option>?
Which CHM converter did you try? Did you try the free one I linked to above?
For some other converters you might want to select the Mobile option if any.
yes used just that. didnt see a mobile option. do u know any others that has one?
This one does:
http://chm2web.aklabs.com/
but it’s not freeware
Can anyone debate Android vs Palm Pre. I will start an IM Residency soon and would like to purchase one of these verizon phones. From what I have read Android may be better for medical apps, Palm Pre Plus is newer with 16 GB memory, so apps may be coming?
Chad, I’ve started the debate here:
http://palmdoc.net/?p=2838