SmallNews 2.5 is available for download. This version works with Mac OS X 10.7/Lion.

To get it to work with Lion, it is now a much bigger download than before. While this version does work with Leopard and Snow Leopard (10.5 & 10.6), I have left 2.4 available for download, as this has exactly the same functionality and a much smaller download.

That said, there is one other fix in SmallNews 2.5. A problem with creating PDFs of individual articles from the database is fixed. If you didn’t have Prince XML installed, this would fail. Now, it handles the installation of Prince XML for you.

SmallNews 2.4 is available for download. The main new feature in this release is support for the Amazon Kindle.

On the settings page, you can tick the box to create the Kindle version, and optionally provide an email address to send it to. This works well with the Kindle’s “personal documents” delivery service; if you put your @free.kindle.com address in here, the file will be delivered to your Kindle next time it connects by Wifi (more details on Kindle personal documents here)

The Kindle version generated is actually a .mobi (Mobipocket) file, so should also work with other readers which support this format, but I haven’t tried any of these. It is generated using Amazon’s kindlegen utility, which is only available for Intel Macs, so this feature will not work on PPC.

The licence prevents me from including kindlegen in the distribution package, so the first time it is needed, it is downloaded from Amazon. So if you are going to use this, you ought to agree to Amazon’s terms and conditions first.

One other change in this release – previously, PDFs could only be created if Prince XML was already installed. In this release, Prince XML will be downloaded the first time it is needed, in the same way as kindlegen. So, again, you ought to agree to the licence agreement before using this. Prince XML will be downloaded even if you had previously installed it, but it will be kept separate from your existing installation.

I finally got round to ordering my Amazon Kindle, and it arrived yesterday. First impressions…

• It’s very light, and very nice to hold
• It’s much, much quicker than my Sony Reader,.
• The screen contrast seems better as well, making it easier to read in poor light that the Sony was.
• Emailing PDFs to it via your @free.kindle.com address works well
• The 6” inch ebook format PDF from SmallNews works well on the Kindle screen. The text could perhaps do with being one point larger, but that might just be my ageing eyes.

However, one big disappointment for me is that it doesn’t support PDF bookmarks, which makes it much harder to navigate around a PDF created by SmallNews. This is a major thing for me, so I am going to look into the possibility of SmallNews creating a Kindle native format edition.

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Oops. The “fix” in SmallNews 2.3 for occasional crashes when writing to MySQL actually made things much worse. It wouldn’t crash… but it just wrote empty data to the database.

That’s fixed in SmallNews 2.31.

[ UPDATE: However, this does seem to have reintroduced the crashing problem. It only seems to happen on MacOSX 10.5 when using a MySQL database. More investigation required. In the meantime, to workaround the problem, just set the database type to “none” ]

This version also adds a new PDF format option. “Mobile phone” will create a PDF with pages 42mm x 42mm. The main device this is aimed at is a Samsung Genio, on which it looks pretty good. It also works OK with my Nokia E63, and I would guess it should be OK with other phones with QVGA screens and PDF readers.