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Alternatives to AvantGo?

Posted by Cliff on from the looking-for-better-options dept.

docricketts asks: "I've been scoping out some ways to expand the content of a few sites that I manage and have been considering creating versions for PDAs and phones. I've looked around but it looks like AvantGo, at least on PDAs, is the only option for those folks not connected via wireless networks. Now that they have changed their pricing structure, charging $1000 for 'channels' that have one to 100 subscribers, this looks completely inaccessible for content sites that are there to provide info rather than make money. Is AvantGo it, or are there alternatives that I'm not seeing?"

1 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Plucker ... once some minor shortcomings are fixed by yelvington · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm an executive with a media company that owns newspapers throughout the United States, and we're seriously considering Plucker as a recommended replacement for AvantGo for our PDA-equipped readers.

    However, there are two serious "gotchas" - not with Plucker itself, but with the (very new and nice) Plucker Desktop utility, which solves most of the usability issues we had with Plucker.

    We need the Palm hotsync action to automatically trigger Plucker Desktop to perform the channel updating. This is probably a fairly simple bit of conduit work. (Under Windows, look into the registry, find the Plucker binary location, and exec it with the appropriate arguments).

    The other item is a one-click "sign up for this channel" functionality -- basically just a metadata file on our Web server containing URL, depth and follow/nofollow directives, probably in XML. This requires some more work on the desktop app and installer.

    I've corresponded with the primary author of Plucker Desktop, and they're both on his radar, but needing some smart programmers to dive in and help out.