Slashdot Mirror
Web Access on Handhelds
An anonymous reader sent in: "According to The Register, AvantGo is shutting down unregistered (unpaid) "custom channels" with more than eight subscribers. Until now, AvantGo has been free (as in beer). What alternatives are there for Web sites that wish to distribute free information to PalmOS devices? Blazer and Eudora Internet Suite require wireless connections; Plucker is open-source and almost does the trick but doesn't automatically synchronize and the installation is way too complicated for the average user. Is there an alternative to paying AvantGo thousands of dollars? All I want to do is give away information, not charge for it."
http://www.isilox.com
It's not quite as customisable as AvantGo, but it does what is needed. You supply it with a webpage, and how many links deep to go, and it takes care of the rest. It also compresses the web page down to iSilo format, so it takes up less space.
It works in a similar manner to Avantgo, has just as many channels, but the only problem I noticed is that it sucks up ALOT of memory, guess that is what happens when you select the movie trailers channels!
there are great advantages of using an offline sync process. you can sync in the morning, and, read the news/pages etc while you travel to work. mobile internet connectivity isn't free - unless, like you had in your position wireless access using your own router. if i was behind my own router, i would probably use my PC to read webpages than my PDA. if i was on a bus, the PDA might become more useful for doing such tasks.
I use a PalmOS platform that does not have a wireless tranciever (I can pick up a bluetooth sled for it, but I would have to add bluetooth to one of my systems to make use of that, more expense...) What AvantGo provides is a mechanism for me to pull down content off the internet, i.e. newspapers, magazines, C|Net, Heavens-above, and the like, and review it when I am someplace where it does not make sense to pull out my laptop. Say on the bus, or a train to or from work, where I really do not want to spend five minutes bringing up the laptop, and another couple of minutes before my stop shutting things down. I am sure that there are other places where it makes sense. Sure I could pull this kind of stuff up on a cell phone via WAP, but if I sync first thing in the morning as I get up, by the time I leave the house, I will have far more information than I can go through on the ride to work, and I am not paying Verizon or AT&T 10 cents a minute to view that content. Hey, it's just my opinion, I am sure you have your own. I could be wrong. -Rusty
You never know...
This same discussion is being help at VisorCentral. So far we have come that if you want free, you use Plucker. If you are willing to pay you should use iSilo. Check out the thread if you want
Here's what I thought, in case it gets slashdotted:
Why iSilo 3.0 whales on everything else I've tried
Size: It has a smaller footprint. The documents are reduced too. Want graphics: you can choose page per page, greyscale, bw, color, or none at all. Same with Link Depth, as deep as you want.
Easy Automation: iSilo for Windows to set up the channels, iSiloXC to have them update nightly. It's not as dead simple as AvantGo, but it sure is easier than Plucker (for now, we'll see what I think when I'm not running a windows box)
Channel Customization: Each channel becomes its own document. No homepage to configure. You can
delete channels when you're done reading them.
Navigation: iSilo has back, forward, page up, page down, and % of a page navigation.
Scrolling: the Autoscroll is still not as clear as CSpotRun's (nothing is, IMO, and I can't say why..), butclear enough and handy. You can also customize the behavoir of scroll buttons, jog dials, screen scroll buttons...
Custom Views: Whatever you want, from straight BW up to the max your PDA can handle, be it Handera or Sony's monster-color. like the scrollbar, keep it. hate it? ditch it. Same with the top and bottom toolbars.
Speed: yep. She's fast.
Expansion: Ok, this doesn't apply to me since I use a Treo. But iSilo can install directly to expansion cards (though I don't know about visors... may not be there...).
Categories: Put your channels in categories.
One App for both Documents and Web sites.
Copying: easily copy text, whatever portion you want.
Button Customization: Set up all your buttons (including Handera/Sony's jog push and back.. and hopefully soon also for the Treo) to do what you want, scroll, next page, autoscroll toggle, bookmarks, back, forward, etc.
Bookmarks: Insert bookmarks in any document on the fly. You can also just "mark" a location for faster
returns.
Screen Regions: The screen is split into 4ths, each region can be set to dragging scroll, page scroll, line
scroll, etc.
...phew! That about does it.
The not-so-good
Custom content: AvantGo hides their channel links and some are just unavailable to others. I can't find the NYT frontpage or bookreviews. I had to sign up for Salon Premium and do their daily download to get it.
Link Depth: Somehow, even channels designed for avantgo get screwy. Slashdot, for example, gets hella-big when I set link depth to 3. when i set it to 2, no comments, so no point.
Not a Browser: well, this is a plus for me, b/c I've got a browser in ROM and therefore I don't need another. but still...
Easy Channels: Hunting for channels is a PITA, especially when you discover that you're just not going to find them. Your only friend in this endeavor is the site: tag on google.
...there ya go, get iSilo
I'm an AvantGo user and am happy with the free service. I don't use custom pages anymore -- page size and link depth are a problem when trying to get a multipage article. However, I think that our reliance on a service like AvantGo points out a problem that's only going to get worse, unless we look to consientiously follow standards.
The increasing popularity of PDAs of all kinds will start to pose a problem in terms of conveying content in a useable way usable for these devices. Until now, we've been getting by with various hacks like AvantGo, but I thnk we are starting to come to a breaking point. There are probably as many ways to retrieve web content as there are PDAs these days, and I'm sure some will do a better job than others.
Before we start to go the way of designing multiple pages for each browser and PDA (which will *still* lock some people out), maybe we should actually start thinking about standards.
Today's standards/recommendations from W3C basically are tilted at separating style/layout from content. If site designers as well as web-client programmers work to implement the standards, then there would be no reason to creat alternate versions of a page for each device. Since content and style/layout is seperated at a structural level in the markup, then it will be easy for any client to serve up the content and display it according to its own necessities (screen size, colors, etc).
This does mean that we have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that a webpage must look the same on all browser, or that it's okay to make a webpage that can only be displayed in one type of browser, or only if certain plugins, etc are present.
The web, and the net, for that matter is not about, style, it's about content. Let's focus on content.
If we would have been doing this all along, chances are that services like AvantGo wouldn't be necessary in the first place.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
The OS in *very* closed. The *OS* runs at a layer below NewtonScript. The NewtonScript layer has a very fixed number of APIs available, period. Hardly a hacker's OS. The NS interpreter runs as a thread in the OS, with the digitizer running in another and the HWR in another (there are a few others as well, IIRC). If you want to do any hacking at all (i.e. outside the box that Walter Smith and friends decided you should live in), you have to break out to a god-forsaken, highly limited C environment (global vars not allowed, for example) which *requires* a Mac and MPW (and resembles no C environment any self-respecting hacker could love).
I was an early Newton adopter, a member of the dev program. I had the Apple Newton Toolkit (and even beta tested NTK for Win, complete with NDA) a registered Newt's Cape and Newt user and even had a semi-functional PGP implementation which will never see the light of day. I still have emails I exchanged with Walter Smith, designer of the Newton OS and Newtonscript begging for some low level APIs and him explaining how they decided not to allow any real low level programming whatsoever to prevent developers from hurting themselves (not exactly a hacker's heaven here). Many things about the Newton were great and NewtonScript was elegant in many ways. But let's face reality - The Newton is dead. The heart stopped beating years ago. Steve killed it in a jealous rage, laughing at Gil Amelio as he crushed the Newton division. I sold all my Newton hardware and software (and the obligatory McKeehan & Rhodes books) in disgust shortly after it got Steved.
Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that your MP2100 is anything but an Osborne at this point. Dynapad sounds cool, and Squeak is sweet, no doubt. But bragging about the Newton is kinda like doing donuts in the parking lot in you DeLorean. No offense - just stick to that iPaq.
Coverage is the big issue - 90% of my commute is underground, and there is no wireless coverage period - not even AM or FM radio. You have access only to what you bring with you.
I also record to local radio morning show from 6AM to 8AM to 4 MP3 files. My AvantGo sync and mp3 sync (separate devices) take about 5 minutes, and by 8:15 I can depart and have "internet" and "FM radio" without needing to be in contact from the subway.
The best alternative to AvantGo that I could see would be an online data gathering app that condensed everything down into a few Palm DOC files. That could run automatically at prescheduled times, and when you sync your Palm you just load the latest set. (It doesn't have to be Palm DOC, other formats could work too.) But it's got to be easy to set up. AvantGo has a significant edge in sync-transactions - you can make changes to your setup on the Palm, and they take effect next time you sync.
The other alternative for AvantGo is passthrough pricing, where smaller sites can set up for free but can only be loaded if the AvantGo user pays for them through AvantGo. Don't knock it - AvantGo has a significant aggregation edge there. This is exactly how DoCoMo's i-mode is doing it.
I totally understand your skepticism, (I had the same thought when I started the development of the channel for my client.)
What I didn't realize was the number of diplomats, politicians, defense contractors, scientists, policymakers, speech writers, journalists, etc. who all like to be able to quote the most recent numbers for how many Nukes North Korea has pointed at South Korea. And these people all use palm pilots.
T
http://www.handstory.com
This is already happening. For example, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) recently added support for Plucker; the LDP now automatically generates Plucker format for all HOWTO, mini-HOWTO, and FAQ documents. The LDP also automatically regenerates the files when the documents are updated. Pluckerbooks has over a thousand pregenerated books and they have links to other sources of Plucker documents.
In fact, I've recently added support for Plucker to my own website. My paper Why Open Source Software / Free Software? Look at the Numbers! also has a Plucker version available. I also generate a Plucker version of my book on writing secure programs. So I'm speaking from experience here.. Plucker works well for at least some content providers!
Downloading the tools and then generating the Plucker format is easy if you can use a command line interface. Plucker's format is essentially compressed HTML, so for most websites it's easy to support. Plucker is GPL'ed, so its components (the generator and reader) can't be "taken away"... and they are free for any use. This combination of free reader, free creator, and no risk (because it can't be taken away) makes Plucker much more appropriate for many content providers. The Plucker viewer itself is quite capable, for example, it supports larger fonts for headings, bold text, italics, hypertext links, images, horizontal rules, and tables (formatted as one cell per line). If you click on a hypertext link to a page not included in the file, Plucker will show you the URL so you can look it up later.
Installing just the viewer is actually quite easy for end-users; you can download just the viewer from the Plucker website, and Plucker users can beam the program to other users of Palm-compatible PDAs. Generating Plucker files is pretty easy from the command line, but I do agree that currently grandma may have trouble generating documents on her own. It's also true that getting "new" versions of Plucker documents isn't automatic; you have to do something to get an update. The Plucker folks are actively working on solving these problems, e.g., creating GUI interfaces. Since Plucker is already a really nice viewer, and other work is already ongoing, I think that the Plucker developers will quickly succeed in making it easier for naive users to generate their own documents.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)