Slashdot Mirror

. . . AvantGo

http://www.avantgo.com/frontdoor/index.html

I've been able to carry cached web on my palm for /years/ . . .

Nothing to see here, move along.

AvantGo has been doing this for many years! I remember using it when I bought my Palm V at JavaOne in 1998. It'll take any web page and let you read it on your PDA (or smart phone).

As if there were only Opera and Microsoft. Ever heard of these people? Or these people, who seem to be coming up in the news a lot lately? Plus there's always these people, these people and these people.

The smartphone market is a very competitive place.

I looked at AvantGo, but it doesn't support Linux.

Probably depends on your PDA. I'm using a (rather old) m515 with Linux & J-Pilot. Get the client for the PDA from AvantGo (the last files contain the .PRCs), then J-Pilot, and finally the MAL plugin (which might be already included in your distribution). Don't forget to enable the conduit in J-Pilot :)

Amazon.com - E-commerce pioneer seeking to offer the world's largest selection of products online. for details.

AvantGo - Mobile applications for handheld devices.

DynDNS.org - One of the world's largest providers of free and premium Dynamic DNS services.

Findory - Personalized news and blogs aggregator. Findory learns what kind of content you like by the pages you read.

Live365.com - The world's largest Internet radio website.

Salon.com - Online magazine covering news, politics, technology, art, sex and health; winner of numerous web awards.

Weta Digital - Weta Digital are well known as the special effects people behind the Lord of the Rings films. At his OSCON 2004 keynote, Milton Ngan of Weta Digital thanked some technologies, including Mason, which is used as part of their intranet.

A

AcuTrans.net - Home page for AcuTrans, a company providing an online content management system integrated with transcription services (built with Mason) for business, legal, medical, and self-insured companies.

Adventist.org - The official web site of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Alhazred - Progressive music project being produced with open source/free software

Alzabo.org - Home page for Alzabo data modelling tool.

American Lung Association of Washington - Assuring lung health for the people of Washington state through research, education, community service and advocacy.

Apartments - Apartments for rent by RentersInc.com. Free apartment search engine and apartment guide.

arabellan - Web presence of Ryan "Exide Arabellan" Zander, a graphical artist.

astrojax.com - amazing fun and action game - community website with lots of features.

Autismeinfocentrum.nl - Information- and documentationcentre about autism and related subjects in the Netherlands.

AutoSupplyUK.com - Used Japanese import auto store.

B BDO - Austrian tax consultancy

Beotechnic - Company specializing in knowhow transfer

Bikeworld.com - Online retailer, sporting a new 100% Mason-powered site that was developed entirely in-house.

bizjournals.com - Publisher of 41 weekly business newspapers across the US.

BlackSpider - Managed services provider focused exclusively on the provision of e-mail security solutions.

Burma-Shave.org - All of the original Burma-Shave jingles, plus the Burma-Shave Daily mailing list.

C

cibera.de - cibera is an online library site which offers a central access point to interdisciplinary material concerning the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking area as well as the Caribbean.

Cars - iCarsInc.com Cars for sale. Buy and sell new and used cars online. Your next auto purchase starts right here. Find new, used, classics, sports cars, luxury cars, trucks, SUVï½s and even motorcycles for sale.

I used the service with a Palm Tungsten T3 through a Nokia 6310i via Cingular.

Short version:
Works great. Wish I had it years ago.
The maps need to be larger to be useful on a 320x400 screen.
The layout of the page could be optimized a bit. The Google logo at the top pushes data too far down. Google should either shrink the logo or relocate it.

Long version:
I've been looking for a service like this for a long time. I tried Avantgo for a while but it was cumbersome, and of limited use if you needed to find info on the fly. MapQuest allows you to download maps and directions using Avantgo but it doesn't work as well as Google Local.

I've alread mentioned my main criticisms of Google Local. It gives a map but seems targeted at 160x160 screens. (understandably) A larger map option would be nice as the maps are a little small to be genuinely useful IMO. You can zoom in/out and scroll around via buttons. Not as smooth as the regular Google Maps but perfectly adequate for on the road. Driving directions are always available and work great. Once you've located what you are looking for you simply select driving directions and enter your From: address. Simple and logical and it works pretty much exactly as you expect it to.

Speed of the service is fine. I have a GPRS connection (not EDGE) which isn't speedy but download speeds were satisfactory. If you have a Treo or a Tungsten type device (like me) you should have no trouble finding regular uses for the service.

About a month ago I started using AvantGo on my Palm (Sony Clie, actually) for my 45 minute commute to work.

Syncs with New York Times Top Stories, Business, and Technology news. I also have it syncing with Reuters, which actually gives a better column at times. The coverage is more complete, at least.

Those two channels pretty much fill up my commute. I also have C|Net and a couple of others. More than enough news for most any commute.

It is not perfect, but it is free and it works.

Between that program, Vidigo, Metro, and MBTA on Palm my Clie is a very valuable resource commuting and just going around town.

If only Sony was still making them...

AvantGo has been around for quite a few years now, and seems to be what you're describing. I didn't find it overly useful on my Nokia 3650, since I could just fire up Opera for Series 60 and head directly to the BBC News's low-graphics HTML site (or the WAP version if I was in a masochistic mood), but it seems to be the ticket for devices without network capability.

Preferably something to flash card. I've run into errors in the PocketPC system from time to time that can only be recovered with a hard reset- and for that, you want a daily backup to flash card.

I use Sprite Software's Sprite Backup, the commercial version of IPAQ backup.

In addition to this, I find AvantGo to be highly usefull, as well as good Bluetooth GPS unit and software (currently using a no-name bluetooth GPS unit and iGuidance, but it's all pretty similar, except for Microsoft Streets and Trips 2004, which for some reason can't keep up with my car and keeps loosing track of the serial port at 65 MPH). You'll also want one of the many freeware task handlers- the task handler that comes with the IPAQ is total crap.

Semi joking aside, it's compelling content - and lots of it, frequently updated - that's required before widespread, mainstream acceptance. This has already been noted many times here and elsewhere.

In my own experience, I've been reading shorter-form ebook content for years. AvantGo is my primary news source, and Richard Lawrence's excellent AvantSlash is a main way I read summaries and comments on Slashdot.

I have never read a novel with an ereader.

Of a more niche front, I'd love to see e content that's more easily annotated: when reading articles, white papers, etc., I'd like to be able to note, quickly and easily, the ideas that hit me at the time. I'd like those ideas to be linked to the passages that spurred them. These annotations should be syncable to a desktop app for further editing and printing.

Per the parent post, it's good to see Mobireader can see at least some of this. I'll check it out.

Use AvantSlash. It's not a replacement for CSS on the /. page (which is seriosly overdue) but it will help make it readable on your Palm's and CellPhones. Just try and host it yourself if you're using AvantGo. Even Custom Channels can be expensive for providers.

Use AvantSlash. It's not a replacement for CSS on the /. page (which is seriosly overdue) but it will help make it readable on your Palm's and CellPhones. Just try and host it yourself if you're using AvantGo. Even Custom Channels can be expensive for providers.

What's weird is that WP Co. prints a free, dumbed-down (think My Weekly Reader) edition called Express. They even pay people to hand them out at DC Metro stations. (I say "no thanks," because I read the WP, free and so far registration-less, on my PDA-phone via AvantGo, thus saving trees.)

I think they are trying to get people to read the Express in the hope people will eventually subscribe to the print edition of the WP, but no sale. The WP used to be a great newspaper (i.e. Woodward and Bernstein's famed expose of President Richard M. Nixon) but no more, it is just another right-wing propaganda outlet like Faux News.

If the shill who hands out the Express were to ask me for my home address, birthdate, etc. I would slug him!

P.S. The Zip code for Nome, Alaska is 99762.

...Replicate your content to your Palm and then away you go. Do you really need to be able to browse the web from 1 mile away? Sometimes we geeks should be asking "why" instead of "how".

Just in case you don't know about this, you might want to try the AvantGo service to get the content you crave. You get 2MB a day for free and for $20/year you can get 8MB a day. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't firmly vouch for it, but I've been hoping to use it once I have a PDA (which should, hopefully, be soon).

Another solution, if you must have the remote mobile capability, is to just get a PDA+cell phone combo. There are a lot of choices (a lot of Palm ones especially) in that category now, and if you have an Internet option in your phone's service plan, you could access the net from anywhere, not just within the range of your antenna.

About three years ago I got to check out the Nuvomedia and their "Rocket eBook" (as it was known then) at the BookExpo America. Sure the screen had above-average resolution, but the device itself was about the weight (and size/shape) of a brick.

Also, about the same time I was getting into AvantGo on my Visor (which I still use btw) so I asked the eBook rep what the Rocket eBook had that my Palm didn't. She couldn't give me a solid answer, besides "the screen is bigger" and "you can download books to it over the phone" (whoop-dee-doo). Then she would change the subject by playing goofy "South Park" sounds on the eBook's speaker (books need speakers). I saw her use the "SouthPark" technique, so there wasn't much there.

Interesting sidenote - it turned out the NYC ooffices of Nuvomedia / Rocket eBook were just two doors down from my (then) employer - so I was able to con them into loaning me one of the ebooks for a week (we were "thinking" about putting our web site's content on the eBook - but had no such plans because it turned out Nuvomedia was making its money by charging an arm and a leg to convert content to eBook format). Long story short - the device sat on my cubicle shelf for a week.

Later that year they released the eBook for sale nationwide - complete with a promient point-of-sale display at Barnes and Noble stores...but several months later sales were so low that they didn't even release the figures to the public.

Later, when Gemstar (TV Guide?) inexplicably bought Nuvomedia / Rocket eBook my only thought was "are they crazy." Obviously, some TV Guide bigwig decided that they need to get "in" on the digital media revolution, and the eBook was their ticket.

I still don't see a market for the eBook reader...not when we've got AvantGo and Plucker to fill up our Palms' memory. And now most Palm devices can play goofy South Park sounds too!

What does it run on? The Palm OS! And carrying a newspaper, and several other sites in my pocket, on my Palm, surely makes me better read. Its just so convenient - take it out while standing in the train, or while sitting in a cramped bus.

Here's one service I'm sure other /.'ers can point you to others advantgo

I use my Palm Vx as an organisor. Sure, the palm doesn't sync Outlook contacts properly, but KeyContacts solves that.

Apart from that, if you have AvantGo installed then you can get TV listings, Film Listings and even read Slashdot on the go.

Useful for train and tube travel.

I use mine for schedule, contacts, e-books, and directions. I have also saved my marriage with it. My wife likes to hit the hay by 10:30 and I don't. I read all kinds of info from AvantGo to e-books after she turns off the lights.

We also use it to carry the Geocaching data points and letterboxing directions when we're off roving the countryside. The whole family gets in on that one.

My wife also is a dedicated Handspring PDA user. I helped wean her from her Franklin Planner and chuck all of the slips of useless paper she carried around with her. She is much happier with it and even has an up-to-date commuter rail schedule on her Visor.

• AvantGo -- Great for reading the news when you're bored to death at a meeting.
• Date Book -- syncs with my shared calendar. I forget how I lived without this.
• Memo Pad -- less messy than Sticky Notes
• Calculator -- I use RPN , for people that never got over their first HP calculator.

• Address book -- I don't trust the security
• Mail -- can't deal with my inbox on that small screen. Also, wireless replication to my company's email system is probably hopeless (just don't ask).
• Maps -- if somebody out there can read black-on-silver road maps at that resolution, my hat's off to you.
• M-commerce -- I've never felt the urge to buy stock/books/other goodies so strongly it couldn't wait until I got back to my desk. Or even tomorrow.
• eBooks -- I tried Stephen King's "Riding the Bullet". Not the worst experience I've ever had, but call me back when the screens are better.

I still get Salon on my handheld thru Avantgo but I have to say, only about 3% of the articles really hit the mark. The rest are really offensive. In general, I wouldn't ascribe Salon's failure as a failure in the business model, but the content. I didn't see any Slashdot articles on the demise of Rosie's magazine.

AvantGo has been doing this for at least the past three years. Hopefully this will create some healthy competition in the handheld market.

Oh god, please no.

At the risk of some blatent plugging, if you're going to read Slashdot on a PDA or offline web-browser (like AvantGo) then try AvantSlash instead.

Hopefully someone a little less biased than me will post a review in reply to this comment. In fact, any suggestions for improvement would be appreciated.

Avant's Go Association
Indi's Go Association

Cost of living = high

It really depends on where you live and what you buy, but in a lot of cases (even factoring in exchange) things are often cheaper in Canada. Burger King, last time I checked, comes out to $0.50 more (USD) for a whopper meal. A lot of other things are more expensive south of the border. The economy is, by some people's standards, 'slower' than the US's, so prices (for some things) get adjusted accordingly. As for things like rent, it depends on where you live. You can rent a house in New Westminster for $650/mo, or buy one for $120k and up. In the praries and the far east (maritimes) where jobs are less common (theoretically), houses start at $80k, and I've had four job offers in three months, including three interviews and two jobs taken. I've basically had my pick of the employers I've applied to. Not bad, if you can stand the small-town atmosphere, isolation, cold winters, and mosquitoes.

Taxes = high (15% combined federal/provincial not counting hidden taxes or income tax)

I love it when people quote without indicating they have any idea what they're talking about. In BC, the sales taxes come out to 14.5%. In Saskatchewan, 13%. In Alberta, there is no provincial tax, so it's 7%. Income tax and federal tax are higher, but then you also don't have to pay (or pay as much) for health care, education (my tuition next year is a 'staggering' $4000 CDN, which is expensive). In fairness though, I think it comes out to 15% in Ontario, but you don't have to live there. BC is nice too, and they've recently slashed income tax.

lack of jobs = high (8% unemployment)

7.5% in June actually, down from 7.7% in May. I read that during my break today thanks to AvantGo. These guys rule.

One persons connection != anothers

Check www.DSLreports.com and listen to what people have to say. People in the Surrey area, which was closer to metropolitan Vancouver than I was when I lived in BC, were getting faster tranfer rates than I was. I figure there had to be something wrong with my setup at home that I wasn't getting what they were (some guys have hit 680 KB/s on numerous occasions).

Another note, rogers has started capping almost everyone @ 1.5Mbit/192Kbit. And has notified NONE of their customers.

This is the same Rogers whose video stores do not share accounts even within the same city, and do not honour their 'VIP packages' that you can get with your cable bill. Rogers has their hands in dozens of pies, and only one, the cable company, is making any money. Of course they're capping people, they don't own their own national data pipeline and have to pay for their bandwidth. Shaw, on the other hand, has no such restrictions, and could care less.

Ontario got shafted by switching from Shaw to Rogers. BC residents have never been happier. Either way, I'd never recommend moving to Ontario anyway. Too polluted, crowded, and busy. Move to Vancouver.

--Dan

it may not be a tar archive, but if your intrested in raw html, this is as close as it gets: http://slashdot.org/palm/
works well with Avantgo too

8mb isn't a waste if you're using, say, Mapopolis with a few county maps, have a few HanDB databases cataloging your media collection, you like to have a wide variety of web sites available on the go via AvantGo or Plucker, not to mention the Kyle's Quest levels and Planetarium star DBs.

Jeez, why carry around a little computer if you're hardly going to use it?

Network hotsync is slow, but adequate. PalmVNC and Top Gun ssh both work, but they're not usable enough to be more than curiosities on that tiny screen. The only browser I've found that works at all is the one that comes with AvantGo's mobile Internet service. I've never managed to get a static IP address to work, but that's a minor problem; the DHCP client works fine. More serious: the MultiMail email client built into the 802.11b module won't talk to a recent UW IMAP server; it doesn't grok the server's CAPABILITY response.

AvantGo is weeding out what they call "Custom channel abuse". Basically its 8 or more people creating a custom channel to a site that doesn't pay up for a licence. See the Register article here and the AvantGo announcement here.

This means that things like Slashdots own palm friendly version and my AvantSlash (along with thousands of other non-profit making sites who provide an ability to view their content for free) are going to be left a little out in the cold.

I've been recommended Plucker for the Palm and Mazingo for the PPC - not tried either though.

AvantGo is weeding out what they call "Custom channel abuse". Basically its 8 or more people creating a custom channel to a site that doesn't pay up for a licence. See the Register article here and the AvantGo announcement here.

This means that things like Slashdots own palm friendly version and my AvantSlash (along with thousands of other non-profit making sites who provide an ability to view their content for free) are going to be left a little out in the cold.

I've been recommended Plucker for the Palm and Mazingo for the PPC - not tried either though.

I want a palm with 802.11b on it.

PalmOS device: HandEra 330. 802.11b card: Symbol Wireless Networker. Add some drivers and browser and you are there.

I don't know... I agree that the palm certainly isn't as easy as a laptop, but I use AvantGo and average 75-100KB per session. Perhaps I'm a little above the average user, but 100KB still seems a little skimpy for an entire month!

Plucker uses a completely different, server-independant solution to gather content. It is de-centralized, and does not rely on a single point of failure. It is client-driven, not server driven. Here's some other reasons why Plucker exceeds AvantGo:

• Plucker has two forms of compression (zlib/doc), AvantGo does not.
• Plucker supports 12 languages, AvantGo does not.
• Plucker supports local files (file://tmp/foo.txt) and intranet (including https://) content, AvantGo does not.
• Plucker supports runtime image scaling, panning, zooming via the parser ([alt]maxwidth, [alt]maxheight), AvantGo does not.
• Plucker allows runtime bit-depth changes in the viewer. AvantGo does not.
• Plucker is an 85k footprint on the Palm, AvantGo 4.0 is 399k, without content.
• Plucker supports Gestures, Autoscroll, Tap Navigation, and Hardware button configuration options, AvantGo does not.
• Plucker is free and open source, under the GNU General Public License, AvantGo is not.
• Plucker does not require that you have your Palm with you in the cradle to gather, sync, and create content. AvantGo does.
• Plucker uses an openly-documented data structure format, and integrates with other parsers and gathering applications like SiteScooper. AvantGo does not.
• Plucker works on 11 platforms, 5 operating systems (with varying degrees of difficulty), AvantGo supports 1.5 OS' (Windows, and "almost" Macintosh).
• Plucker does not "restrict" what websites can do with their own content, AvantGo does.
• Plucker supports multiple instances of the same content (NYTimes with images, NYTimes with color, NYTimes without images) loaded at the same time, AvantGo does not.
• You can beam your Plucker content to another Plucker user, with AvantGo you cannot.
• Plucker offers 5 font choices, AvantGo offers 2.
• Plucker does not have a maximum file size limitation; spider 20 meg databases if you want, AvantGo limits you to 200-300k.
• Plucker does not "block" content. AvantGo does.
• Plucker does not "charge" for usage of Plucker, nor "fine" people for using it too much. AvantGo does (and steeply, at $6,000 per year if you exceed "contract" usage rates.

Also, if AvantGo was the leader in this space, why are dozens of other companies moving to using Plucker instead?

• Fling-It (geared for classroom settings, direct "fling" of webpages from browser to Palm)
• BrowserG!
• streetbeam (infrared "beaming kiosk" stations, now interested in moving to Plucker)
• And let's not forget our friends at Bluefish who are in clear violation of the GNU GPL by taking Plucker source, closing it off, and distributing binaries made from it, without source, with Plucker attribution removed, and their names replacing it.

• Plucker has two forms of compression (zlib/doc), AvantGo does not.
• Plucker supports 12 languages, AvantGo does not.
• Plucker supports local files (file://tmp/foo.txt) and intranet (including https://) content, AvantGo does not.
• Plucker supports runtime image scaling, panning, zooming via the parser ([alt]maxwidth, [alt]maxheight), AvantGo does not.
• Plucker allows runtime bit-depth changes in the viewer. AvantGo does not.
• Plucker is an 85k footprint on the Palm, AvantGo 4.0 is 399k, without content.
• Plucker supports Gestures, Autoscroll, Tap Navigation, and Hardware button configuration options, AvantGo does not.
• Plucker is free and open source, under the GNU General Public License, AvantGo is not.
• Plucker does not require that you have your Palm with you in the cradle to gather, sync, and create content. AvantGo does.
• Plucker uses an openly-documented data structure format, and integrates with other parsers and gathering applications like SiteScooper. AvantGo does not.
• Plucker works on 11 platforms, 5 operating systems (with varying degrees of difficulty), AvantGo supports 1.5 OS' (Windows, and "almost" Macintosh).
• Plucker does not "restrict" what websites can do with their own content, AvantGo does.
• Plucker supports multiple instances of the same content (NYTimes with images, NYTimes with color, NYTimes without images) loaded at the same time, AvantGo does not.
• You can beam your Plucker content to another Plucker user, with AvantGo you cannot.
• Plucker offers 5 font choices, AvantGo offers 2.
• Plucker does not have a maximum file size limitation; spider 20 meg databases if you want, AvantGo limits you to 200-300k.
• Plucker does not "block" content. AvantGo does.
• Plucker does not "charge" for usage of Plucker, nor "fine" people for using it too much. AvantGo does (and steeply, at $6,000 per year if you exceed "contract" usage rates.

Also, if AvantGo was the leader in this space, why are dozens of other companies moving to using Plucker instead?

• Fling-It (geared for classroom settings, direct "fling" of webpages from browser to Palm)
• BrowserG!
• streetbeam (infrared "beaming kiosk" stations, now interested in moving to Plucker)
• And let's not forget our friends at Bluefish who are in clear violation of the GNU GPL by taking Plucker source, closing it off, and distributing binaries made from it, without source, with Plucker attribution removed, and their names replacing it.

• Kyocera 2035 CDMA cell phone
  
• "Data cable" for above
  
• HP Jornada 525 pocket pc --or--
  
• Teeny little Fujitsu notebook
  

I create my own dynamic websties. How would I classify a page? Would it be for a certain view of the document or just the document?

On the other hand, AOL would get their two cents for every visitor they have because of their unprofessional pop-up. Not only will they pull money from users, but also from non-users. That would stink!

How about other sites like Ebay? Think how rich they would get just in one day!! Would I also have to pay for view pages with AvantGo? In the age of information, that would put a damper on my education via the web, or put a complete stop to it.

I would pretty much go back to snail-mail if a charge per page was inforced on me. M$ may just try that in the future.

AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on your Palm or WinCE device through AvantGo.

You could point Avantgo directly at the slashdot website, but you'll find that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at http://www.slashdot.org/palm but it has a number of problems. Here is what Scott Tringali had to say about it on kuro5hin:

First of all, this is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.

Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!

Finally, using /. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune" sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.

Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.

Thanks for listening.

is to read the content on your PDA instead. You only get the top two or three articles in each section and no images, but having the text in your hand at the breakfast table sure beats reading the back of the cereal box.

I use Palm Reader (umm just kidding) (formerly Peanut Reader) for books I purchase from them and iSilo for plain text, html, or web site downloading. Some also use AvantGo for web, but it is too slow syncing for me.

i take issue with your claim that palm freeware is "crappy". both ... vindigo and avantgo are extremely useful free tools. the former is available for palm only.

I've been reading /. on AvantGo for a while (cos no PC's are convenient to my bed or bathtub) and it's kinda unsatisfying:

• AvantGo only DL's 2MB for all my sites combined. That leave 5.75MB on my Visor with nothing to do.
• Insufficient control over what links to follow (haven't tried the DigitalPaths yet, so I can't compare). Since most /. pages even in light mode have many links, a relatively low level of links to follow maxes me out quickly, but I have to follow a lot of links to satisfying reading.

Here's how configure my slashdot channel in AvantGo:

I welcome tuning suggestions

I had just finished writing a custom PHP-parsed Slashdot page from the slashdot XML file for use with AvantGo on my Palm..

I switched the file location in the script from a local copy to the real slashdot one and this was the first thing that showed up!

Mike.

-- Jason Lefkowitz

-- Jason Lefkowitz

Yes, I could do both on a Palm, but this is the _proper_ web (not clipped or synced)...

Of course the Palm does the proper web just fine. You can get the Eudora Suite for Palm, or you can just use Avantgo while on-line.

My wireless Web setup is:

• A Palm IIIx, running either AvantGo or Browse-it.
• A Motorola StarTac ST7867W cell phone.
• A cable linking the two from Syncable Solutions

This stuff allows me to browse the web wirelessly. I'm not actually sure how you'd upload starting with this setup; I suspect that's a software problem, and I'm hoping it's solved elsewhere in this thread.

That said, I'll throw out some other notes on systems like this. First, they are flaky, and don't like you moving, so when you get a connection, stop moving. A modem connection seems to be much more fragile when switching between network cells than a phone call is. Second, think redundant. Get multiple paths of connection, because there are so many places where the connection can break down, and you'll go crazy if you absolutely depend on any of them. Lastly, forget about sending up pictures and enjoy the ride. Experiences like that aren't for sharing with other people over the web, they are for experiencing first hand, while it's going on. The 3rd California AIDS Ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles changed my life, but it wouldn't have if I'd been fretting over hardware the whole time.

mahlen

See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion; see how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious. --William Dean Howells (1837-1920)

The fact is, you need simple, backwards compatible pages not because you're desparately hoping that the portion of Lynx users will someday rise about 3%, but because you have to face the reality that more and more people are going to start accessing the web from lightweight, portable platforms such as palmtop computers and WAP-esque phones.

No amount of Flash-DOM-whatever insanity can be crammed into a platform that small, and that's fine with me. Whine all you want to about how these "luddites" are holding back your web designers masturbatory portfolio fantasies, but in this case the best way to prepare for the future (xhtml, css, etc) means carefully *not* rejecting the past. In this case, moving simultaneously forward *and* backwards is both possible and necessary.

Telling your designers to force people to upgrade or be left out is both wrongheaded and short sighted. It's fine for someone on a moderately new PC/Mac/Foonix system (as long as there's an alternative to Mozilla, which sucks too badly to put into words; guess that rules out Foonix...), but anyone on oldish hardware or a (currently) "exotic" platform such as a palmtop or a cell phone has no choice in the matter. Don't ignore that.

I downloaded three of the .prc books. Unfortunately, they are loaded with HTML tags. I guess another option is to load the HTML pages using AvantGo.

So I was setting up a handheld AvantGo channel for our school online paper (http://silverchips.mbhs.edu ). I had everything set up server-side: the template file that contains headlines, a CGI script to convert them to handheld-friendly formatting, and a nice, 160x160 readable page. I went to avantgo's website(http://www.avantgo.com ) and started going through the process to register as a "content provider" (ooooh!). There was, at one point, a big, EULA-style contract that i had to read and agree to. I almost blew it off, like the things you have to agree to for free web space or web-based email. But for some reason, I skimmed though it... and some very large numbers caught my eye. Specifically, the fact that I would have to pay them $5,000 (give or take a power of 10) of we got more than 5,000 (give or take a power of 10... I don't remember exactly) subscribers to the channel.

Ouch. I stopped right there, and I'm now setting up the channel differently. I don't know how legally binding such contracts are (nor do I expect 5,000+ subscribers), but it's not a risk I want to take.

I still usually don't read software EULAs (EULAe?), though.

-J