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PRODUCT REVIEW
Resco Photo Viewer, a full-featured handheld photo application
By James Booth

With the inclusion of digital cameras in more and more handhelds of late, a full-function portable image application is practically mandatory. Resco has answered the call with their Photo Viewer for Palm, Pocket PC, MS Smartphone, and Symbian. This piece will specifically be addressing the Palm version because, well, my handheld runs Palm OS.

Overview
Resco Photo Viewer is a full-featured handheld photo album that supports albums, categories, external storage, slideshows, and resolutions from 160x160 to 320x480. The devices, features, formats, and third party applications that Photo Viewer supports are too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say that with its adjustment and cropping capabilities, Resco Photo Viewer rivals many desktop photo applications.

On the handheld, it supports JPG, BMP, and GIF images, as well as GIF animations and images from built-in Palm Cameras. See Figure A. Through its desktop counterpart, it will support TIF, PNG, and PowerPoint files.

FIGURE A

Resco Photo Viewer supports a lot of image formats for a handheld app. Click picture for a larger image.

How the picture develops
Resco Photo Viewer is probably about the most feature-rich handheld application I've ever used. Every time I thought, "Oh, it would be nice if it did such-and-such," I'd dig a little deeper and discover that it actually does do such-and-such. In fact, even though I'd love to cover every single feature and aspect, I know in the end I'll miss some things, simply because there's so much.

The interface, like just about everything else in Resco's Photo Viewer, is completely customizable. Figure B shows just one of the many customizing options. The explorer interface allows you to find every conceivable place on your handheld or external card that a photo could hide.

FIGURE B

Photo Viewer can be customized to suit your tastes. Click picture for a larger image.

The explorer tree can be flipped between a vertical and horizontal orientation, as in Figure C, according to your preference. Or, you can hide it completely to make more room for the photos. Speaking of photos, they can be listed by thumbnail only, thumbnail and name, or thumbnail and details (name, date, size).

FIGURE C

The explorer tree can have a vertical or horizontal orientation. Click picture for a larger image.

Photos can be displayed full-size, auto-zoomed to fit your display, or you can zoom in on a particular detail. You can rotate the images, flip them, flop them, twist them, or turn them. Well, ok, you can't really twist them.





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