It was just asking for it. The front page for SlimPDF states

Get The World’s Smallest Desktop PDF Reader

and

10% of the size of Adobe Reader but views 100% of PDFs

Can this be true? Just as good as Adobe Reader but one tenth the size? They even show a comparison on their site, reporting SlimPDF as 1.43MB and Adobe Reader as 26.12MB¹?

The thing is, they’re measuring download size. Don’t most people download, install and then delete the installation program? Shouldn’t they be measuring the installed size? Ironically, if they did, it would be even better for them – 211MB for Adobe vs 4.69MB for them (2.22% the size of Adobe Reader!).

The thing is, though, SlimPDF lacks a lot of basic features. If you just want to read a short, simple PDF then it’s probably fine. However, SlimPDF doesn’t show page thumbnails, or shortcuts – so those long, indexed documents are going to be difficult to navigate.

The toolbar is also quite cluttered – sadly, if you reduce the window down in size then the toolbar simple starts disappearing from the right hand side. And as various button to launch their commercial offerings come to the left of the search, the latter disappears first. Adobe, in comparison, wraps the toolbar to a new line in this situation, so that all options are still accessible.

Small text is very hard to read in SlimPDF and scrolling is slow. Links, whether to other parts of the document or external URLs, don’t work.

So, let’s just go through the listed “Features and Benefits”

• “Eliminate Bloatware and help your computer run faster”. My favourite. No details of why they regard Adobe as “bloatware” as it seems to contain an awful lots of features that SlimPDF doesn’t have. A bigger download size doesn’t mean it’s bloated.
• “View any PDF File just like Adobe Reader”. No. Not like Adobe Reader. Adobe – got your lawyers ready?
• “100% Free”. It had better be.
• “The smallest desktop PDF Reader in the World”. With matching features. Although I suspect Cool PDF Reader, at 650KB download, may have something to say (and small fonts look better in it as well). Again, is that the rustle of lawyers and paperwork I hear?

Summary of SlimPDF Reader

All I can hope is that people see past the hype, which really doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, and realise that this is a feature-lacking PDF viewer which WON’T let you view a PDF like Adobe Reader does.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 24th August 2010.

1. should I point out at this point that the current size of the Adobe Reader download is 52.55MB [↩]

My WordPress plugin, Simple Draft List, has been updated.

Until now it’s been of use to display draft posts on your site. However, I’ve now added the feature to also include scheduled posts that have not yet been published. By default this feature is switched on but can be turned off via a new parameter.

As usual, all details can be found on the Simple Draft List page.

I often get asked about “the loop” in WordPress, as many of my plugins require knowledge of it for successful integration.

“The loop” is simply some WordPress code that handles the fetching of post or pages. Each WordPress theme has a number of files that handle different types of output – for instance, index.php is used for displaying a number of posts, page.php displays pages and single.php shows a single post. Each of these contains the code for the loop.

The first line is usually this…

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

And the last line is usually…

<?php endwhile; ?>

Everything in between is the setting up and displaying of the post/page in question.

So, let’s use Simple Social Bookmarks as an example. You will probably want to put the function call for this just before that last line of the loop – that will it will be the last thing displayed after each post or page. However, you may want other content to appear first, in which case you will choose a different location between the above 2 lines to put it.

What I can’t tell you is exactly where you need to put the code – that’s entirely down to you and how you wish the output. Indeed, there’s no reason why, in the case of Simple Social Bookmarks, you have to put it in the loop – you could have one at the top of each page. Bear in mind, however, that if you put code outside of the loop then it may not be able to get certain information – in out example, you’d have to supply a URL, as normally this is supplied by the loop to indicate the current post/page.

I hope this makes sense. If not, you can read more about it at WordPress.org.