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Alternatives to AvantGo?
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?"
Check out Plucker. It's better than AvantGo in nearly every way.
HandStory Suite reviewed as AvantGo Alternative by the Handheld Computing Weekly.
'HandStory Suite' 'Almost every Palm powered user knows about AvantGo. It's bundled on the installation disc with new PDAs, and it's long been billed as the killer app for your Palm. Its appeal is undeniable; the program is a free, convenient Web clipping service that delivers freshly-updated content you've subscribed to -- like the New York Times, Joke of the Day, and The Weather Channel--directly to your PDA at each HotSync to read on the road.' 'The once undisputed king of offline content is starting to show some cracks, though. AvantGo can't take advantage of the Sony Clie's popular full-screen, HiRes+display, for instance, and financial difficulties at the company have forced it to adopt a two-tiered service plan, with content beyond 2MB no longer free. Worse, the company has clamped down on its Web partners, charging them fees that have driven many to scale back their support for AvantGo.' 'But there are alternatives. If you'd like to experiment with offline browsing and want to see what the world has to offer beyond the reassuring AvantGo logo, step right up to... HandStory...' 'HandStory is the most complete and elegant of the AvantGo alternatives. Designed to be a complete media reader that features an integrated memo pad, doc reader, image viewer, eBook reader, and Web clip browser, it can also take advantage of the Clie's HiRes+mode. Armed with HandStory, you may be able to abandon several other apps and rely almost exclusively on one program.' 'The program's desktop component has conduits for converting Web pages, text documents, and graphics to the Palm. The big news, though, is that HandStory is trying to take on AvantGo in a big way, with a library of about 150 clips ready for download. That's small potatoes compared to the thousands of AvantGo channels available, but HandStory promises to continue building its collection.'
My recommendation is to create a "light" version of the site. No frames, no giant tables of contents, simple little graphics at most. If it's a site that updates often, be sure that the user will not have to specify a different URL everyday to get the latest (most current) day.
Then on your "regular" page, offer a link to the light page. That way people can use whatever they want. Personally I use Plucker, but as noted in this thread there are other options.
For an example, take a look at RISKs digest.
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks
Down in the middle they have a link to the latest version of the digest (http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/go/risks/latest). That link is to a much lighter than the "full" version of the latest digest.
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.
Have a look at our project at www.plkr.org and try it out for yourself. If you want to help us out, please do. We believe we have the superior product, for dozens of reasons. We're smaller, faster, more feature-rich, secure, and we put the user and content provider back in control of their own content.
The Plucker Desktop application can be found at desktop.plkr.org. It is written in wxWindows, and works on Linux, Solaris, and Windows.
The High-resolution viewer application for Sony and Handera high-resolution devices can be found at hires.plkr.org.
We also have an irc channel, so feel free to join and talk to other Plucker users and developers. Point your irc client to irc.plkr.org and join #plucker to chat with us.
If you wish to help out with PDA-sized websites, take a look at OpenURLS and help us out maintaining the list. I've done all of the work so far to fetch these urls (600+), but we need some help sorting them and categorizing them.
We have a lot of other things going on, and we are quite active. Jump aboard and help us out!