Since yesterday, I made nice progress in solving my issues with content creation for PRS500 and it's readability. There are several ways how to proceed: The simplest is to download Book Designer. It is free for non-commercial use and current version 5.0 Alpha does the job very well. It allows you to load source in text, HTML, Lit, PDF, PalmDoc (prd/prc), rb and few other formats and process them into native LRF format - plus few others I do not really care about.

After few weeks, I have got back to actually using my PRS500 again and I have finished the books loaded on the device. When I have connected the reader, first the CONNECT software as well as the PRS500 downloaded the updates. The firmware in reader is up to version 1.0.02.0130 from 1.0.00.21081 and should bring longer battery life and stability improvements. It better does, because so far the battery life is nowhere in the proclaimed range of 7000 page turns .

Now this is something really interesting: as found on Adobe Labs site, their technology codenamed Apollo is approaching Alpha status. What Apollo is - in a nutshell - is another virtual machine, similar to Java runtime or .Net framework, with few minor twists: it is multiplatform (as Java) as well as multi-language (as .Net) at the same time. Before flame wars start - I am aware that JVM is capable (more or less) to support multiple languages beyond Java and also that .

Often, scientific "failure" teaches you more than success ... An experiment which gives you a clear answer is not a failure; it can surprise you, though. Failure comes only when an experiment answers no question -- usually because it's been done with ignorance or sloppiness. The true trick in science is to know what question your experiment is truly asking. Gregory Benford Ten Thousand Years of Solitude

Actually, maybe not really new, but I have noticed it just two days ago while trying to to clean up the clips collected from the Web. It is sort of hidden feature, but very useful one: In Actions you can find 'Export in Google Docs & Spreadsheet'. It takes the current notebook and makes it a new document in you Google Docs. All texts, including pictures are transferred. It does very good job in keeping meaningful structure of the newly created document: every note will become an URL heading in document, pointing to the original.