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Handhelds Hardware

Web Access on Handhelds 149

Posted by michael from the slasheverywhere dept.
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."
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Web Access on Handhelds More

Web Access on Handhelds

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  • Idea. (Score:1, Troll)

    by Renraku ( 518261 )
    I dunno much about the current state of netaccess on handhelds, so ignore this if its already been done. Web access on handhelds should be allowed by two methods. Ethernet, and wireless. Wireless being the easiest to impliment. Although why you'd actually want to view the twisted, mangled WWW on a handheld is beyond me. I'd just say get a laptop or use another computer, but I know some people have uses for internet capable handhelds.
    • Asside from the fact that wireless (via cell modem for example) would cost too much, and WiFi just doesn't provide the needed coverage, neither of these possibilities are much help for people using AvantGo to pull down pages from "free" sites. Personally I suspect that this will do more to hurt AvantGo, than it will the sites they are going to start blocking. If you have been relying upon AvantGo to pull down some specific web site, how likely are you to petition that web site to buy into being distributed across AvantGo. There are alternative MAL servers out there, though it may take a bit of work to find one. Then again, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong. -Rusty
      • "Asside from the fact that wireless (via cell modem for example) would cost too much"

        Not really. I pay around $40/mo for my Sprint PCS wireless access (w/ the Sprint springboard adapter). It's quite excellent, and is ready for 3G, whenever it's deployed, for faster speed.
        • I should add: the plan works like a cell phone. I get all sorts of crazy minute (3000 minutes total, 200 weekday, 2800 weekend (practically unlimited if you think about it)). It's a great value.

          Oh, btw, there is an SSH client for the Pilot, which means I am now a portable sysadmin. Woo hoo.
      • 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.
        • You may be interested in using something like http://www.quickbrowse.com/ they can e-mail you a collection of web pages, as one message.

          The two things that would concern me are the fact that I have not figured out how to get evolution to sync e-mail to my palm, and qb pages look like they contian a lot of graphics. Not shure how that will work on Palms.

          -Rusty

    • Avantgo is an awesome service that I use because it takes the data from my PC's internet connection and feeds it down to my PocketPC. The information is fast, the data was tuned to the PocketPC (no mangled WWW like you said), and I don't have to be in a coverage area (try that on an plane) to view it. Even if fast wireless internet did exist, there'd still be a use for it.

      Besides, try putting a laptop in your pocket.
    • AvantGo is not for accessing the general web. I agree, a handheld is pretty useless for that. What AvantGo does is download a huge chunk of specially-designed, mostly-text content to your handheld. Then you have a lot of content you can stick in your pocket and read when and where you want.

      AvantGo doesn't really work unless the content providers take the trouble to provide content that works well with a small-screen browser. Providers can't simply provide links to their regular frame-and-graphic-intensive web pages, because the result is unreadable. (Took some clueless providers a while to figure this out.) The best AvantGo providers are old-fashioned print newspapers and journals that have always catered to people who just want to read -- but are tech savy enough to understand what "minimal use of markup" means.

  • I use iSiloX for my Palm. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tim_F ( 12524 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @07:06PM (#3139727)
    http://www.isilox.com [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.
    • And the nice thing is is that it comes with a Mac OS X (and also Linux among others) console binary. Which means you can run a nice little cron job that grabs a bunch of web pages and plops the .pdb files into your sync folder ready for the next time you sync up.
      • Yes, but the command line iSiloXC utility is ridiculously complex. You have to write an XML file (no DTD provided) to convert anything! Is there a command line utility less user-friendly than this? I prefer to use wget to save the HTML onto the hard disk. After that I can use the older convertor for iSilo 2 (you can still download it): you only need to specify the root HTML file and it will do the rest. You could use wget in a cron job, and if you decide to switch to Plucker you can simply switch the convertor that you use on the downloaded files.
    • I've been using iSilo as a way to put a bunch of documents in my Palm for a while. I begrudingly tried AvantGo, just because I was "forced" to use it to get some information. All they seemed to do was force providers to hide a URL to a Palm-friendly version of their web page. A few times I found the URL for an Avantgo page, told iSilo where to find it, and I got the data just the same.

      Only slight advantage I see is that Avantgo is triggered by the hotsync process, but that in itself is a pain. If I don't have a net connection at that moment, or I'd just synced 10 minutes ago, I'd have to wait for it to try to sync. With iSilo I just run it prior to hotsyncing if I want to update.

      I just loaded iSilo 3 on my Visor. It did a great job of a site with pictures, I think I'll probably use it, rather than any of the photo album apps to view pics now.
    • I use iSilo and iSiloX to grab all kinds of web sites for offline reading. I also use iSilo as a general Palm DOC reader. Sure, it's closed source and not free (<$20), but for my money it's the best doc reader for Palm OS available.

  • one solution... (Score:2, Informative)

    by AmigaAvenger ( 210519 )
    Won't help you Palm fanatics, but it works Ok for PocketPC. Mazingo [mazingo.net]

    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!

  • Consumers should pay, not content producers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beamz ( 75318 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @07:10PM (#3139748)
    In the state of the internet with advertising revenue down substantially, where are many of the sites that are struggling to survive themselves going to come up with these funds?

    I work at a newspaper and we've just recently scrapped the whole Avantgo feed idea because they want to charge content producers to deliver their feed.

    Everyone knows that nothing is free and someone should pay for this, it should hardly be Avantgo but it's too much with too little work.

    IMO a successful model would be for Avantgo to do some of the legwork and go out there and promote themselves instead of relying on all the content producers to fill the trough. It's a double burden because first you have to pay for a service and then you have to find some way to get substantial traffic numbers there so perhaps ads can pay for it.

    I think Avantgo even though they do a lot of corporate business is going to lose a lot of the people who thought it was a cool service. Avantgo should be charging the people who download and give a percentage to the content producer. It's a win win situation that way. This is the way the internet is moving, why not try to embrance and not abandon?
    • It's a cool service, but consumers aren't going to pay for it. It's just a program that crawls a site and downloads it to your Palm.. it is possible to write software that will sync a webpage to your palm without ever going through a "service provider" like AvantGo.

      Microsoft doesn't charge people for the priviledge of using IE to crawl a website.. it's no different here. AvantGo can boast one thing - a well-written cross platform browser for handhelds. they are not a service provider, they're a software company.
  • I've got to say, I'm a fan of AvantGo's service but not their client relations. I spent months trying to establish a channel through them, (I was practiaclly begging to pay them money) and they just about ignored me. And this channel wasn't schlock either, it was up-to date news information on the status of nuclear nonproliferation worldwide.

    I never have figured out how that business plan works. Ignore your customers and make them beg you to provide them service. We'll, I guess it works for my cable isp [lostbrain.com] anyway.

    tcd004

    • I haven't done the market research myself, but I would guess that their lack of enthusiasm was due to the nature of your proposed channel.

      Not only would the average reader of that channel need to be interested in "the status of nuclear nonproliferation worldwide", but they would have to be so consumed by it that they feel compelled to read about it on their handheld.

      Though I don't question the enthusiasm of such readers, I don't know if there is much of an intersection between the set of people that use palm handhelds, and the set of people who love to read about "the status of nuclear nonproliferation worldwide".

      • Re:AvantGo (Score:3, Informative)

        by tcd004 ( 134130 )
        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
  • I think that they made a good buisness decision. They are most likely almost at the peak of their subscription base. If they get out now and lose a large amoont of their customers then they may be able to recover and who knows? Maybe they can turn over a profit...
  • I admit I'm largely ignorant of how Palm and PocketPC users get web content, but we Newton users just access the *real* network over *real* TCP/IP using *real* ethernet cards and modems. I 've been told that to get internet content on a Palm and (but less so) a PocketPC, you have to use something like AvantGo and get is from your desktop PC when you're syncing! Ha! Is that really true?

    Maybe I'm spoilled, but I don't have to connect with a desktop for anything. I use Newt's Cape [dyndns.org] on my Newton MP2100u, and have scheduled pages downloaded every morning before I catch the bus to go to school. Yes, a *real* web browser downlading *real* web pages (IHT.com, slashdot, lambda.weblogs.com) over ethernet behind my router.

    Can PalmOS devices not do this? Are they intentionally crippled because of the lack of resources and tiny screen, or just because someone decided you should always be tied to your desktop? I know PocketPCs can grab stuff over ethernet in Pocket IE, but is it very common?
    • sure - you can do it real time. ppc and palm can both obtain TCP/IP connections using additional hardware (ie: ir to phone, 802.11b via sled or CF cards). there are plenty of browsers on the palm, blazer (by handspring) is quite sufficient. the only problem with using a *real* browser to view *real* websites is that the content of the page is kinda useless unless it is formatted for use on a 160x160 screen or similar.

      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.

      • Being able to read the pages while you travel or have other downtime isn't an advantage to offline sync. With my Newton, I'm not grabbing these pages wirelessly, although I could. They're downloaded either manually or automatically (on a schedule) over ethernet, and cached for later reading. No wireless or desktop required. That is, if I'm at work or school, and want to grab a page to read later in the day, I don't have to *go home* just and sync (ha!) just so I can have a new web page on my Newton.

        That's the point, I'm reading pages on my Newton while sitting on the bus. Downloaded to my Newton before I leave, along with my email.
      • On my Sharp Zaurus, I just use WGET to download my favorite web pages for offline browsing. I'm still tweaking the command line parameters to drop as much useless content on the pages (ads and such).

        When I find a new page I like to download, I add it to a script for future use.
    • A (commercial but pretty good) web browser with frames and forms support from Ilinx [ilinx.co.jp].
    • You don't actually need a pc to do avantgo syncing with the pocket pc - just go under settings, connections, avantgo "sync" button - it will download all your cached websites off the net over whatever wire you have connected to it be it wireless (802.11 or cpdp), modem or hard wired ethernet.

      Plus while you are online you can use internet explorer to browse the net just like your desktop pc.
    • Most Palm-based handhelds can use modems via infrared, or add-on modules. Handspring can use modems and ethernet cards (including wireless) that plug into the Springboard port on Visor handhelds. I believe Sony's Clie has some methods of using the internet and networks as well.

      PocketPCs such as the iPaq can also use various types of modems and LAN cards. They also have access to various wireless internet services and LAN technologies, just like the Palms do.

      I realize you disclaimed your lack of knowledge on this subject, but that was ALL your post was about. Basically it's just mocking other handhelds because of limitations you think are there, but are not. Instead of posting a lengthy pseudo-flame like this, next time just click over to Google and do a damn search or something. Research instead of rant.
    • Hah... I just pulled up this comment on my brand-spankin' new Kyocera 6035 (Palm OS 3.5/CDMA cell phone), so I just had to respond...

      The other day, I went to turn on my MP2100, only to discover that it wouldn't power up. Mainly, I've been carrying it around just to configure routers and such with a serial or telnet connection.

      So just a couple of days ago, I was cruising the PC parts at the local CompUSA and BestBuy (ok, I was *really* bored that day), when I noticed that the price on the Kyocera had been dropped from the original $400 to $150. After a double and triple take, I drove over to the Sprint PCS store to see what they were asking for it. Sure enough, $150.

      Now, I, being a Newton fanatic, haven't had much use for a Palm device, but after playing with the Kyocera on display in the Sprint PCS store for about an hour, and making a few test calls, it all began to make sense...Palm + Phone = Very Useful Device. Much more useful than any standalone Palm-based PDA I've seen yet.

      So that night I hopped over to to check out the specs. Me liked. The next morning I heading over to the Sprint PCS store again with plastic to burn and got one.

      Fortunately, I already know Graffiti, since it was originally a Newton product. Now if only this thing ran a *real* OS ;), like the poor dead Newton used to. Ah, well, it'll just have to do.

      BTW, the cheapest new Palm is $150, so getting one with a phone built-in is a steal. I even managed to score a real Kyocera car charger and real Palm Mac serial adapter off of the CompUSA clearance table for $10 each (saving about $40 in the process).

      Oh yeah, this baby has *real* net access, I don't even need a external device to connect, I can connect to any ISP using PPP, and with Sprint's free long distance, I don't even have to reconfig my dial-in number while I'm on the road (Sprint also has a special number for "Wireless Web" customers that I can use, as well.).

      I used to despise Palm's, but now, thanks to Kyocera, I'm hooked. The Handspring Treo looks nice, too, but pricey compared to the Kyocera.
  • Sitescooper automatically retrieves the stories from several news websites,
    trims off extraneous HTML, and converts them into formats you can read on your
    Palm computing device for later reading on-the-move. It maintains a cache, and
    will avoid stories you've already read. It can handle 1-page sites, 1-page
    with diffing, 2-level and 3-level sites, and it's very easy to add a new site
    to its list. Even if you don't have a Palm handheld, it's still handy for
    simple website-to-text conversion.
  • Well, I consider Palm systems mostly as toys. They are not bad for what they are designed for but surfing the web is not really what they were intended for.

    I however have Psion Revo+ and I connect to the "real internet": no problem checking your mail, neither having to miss the web on the road. Built in email-client and Opera for EPOC systems. The screen is even large enough to comfortably read from it.
    Of course it is rather expensive over cellphone, but hey, if you use it just occasionally (mainly for email) it doesn't even appear too hard on your bill. I woudn't trade my Psion for any PalmOS based machine :-)

    Too bad Psion stopped making hardware :-(

    • Well, I consider Palm systems mostly as toys. They are not bad for what they are designed for but surfing the web is not really what they were intended for.

      AvantGO is really not so much about "Web content" as it is just "content" in general. I don't think of it as downloading web pages. I think of it as more of downloading information. The fact that it comes from a Web Page doesn't matter. I don't care if my weather outlook, joke of the day, or new car shopping information came from www.weather.com, www.jokeoftheday.com, and www.edmunds.com. I just want the content, which is what I get with AvantGo.
  • One of these days, I knew it'd bite AvantGo users in the ass... Because it uses open protocols on an open device [1], it is immune to getting screwed when a company like AvantGo, which uses proprietary technology, decides to change their business plan!

    [1] Not open source or open schematics, but the OS is very open. Using NewtonScript, a language that resembles Self, Smalltalk, and Lisp but using a more C-like syntax, one can develop on the Newton itself or the desktop. Code developed on the Newton can replace parts of the OS or other installed apps. You can call methods and use objects from any app, without them being explicitly exported. A platform truly for a hacker. Unlike those Linux PDAs, which have the otherhead of using something like GCC (ha!), or don't have anywhere near the system-reflectivity even whem programs are written in a language like Python. Dynapad [sf.net] hopes to fix this, bringing it one step further, to a completely open system.

    • Re:ha-hra (Score:2, Informative)

      by Eponymous, Showered ( 73818 )
      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.
      • Ah, good to see someone on here that knows what they're talking about. :)

        For the kind of hacking you seem to want to do, the Newton blows. But the NewtonScript system is quite awesome, IMHO. I've no desire to use C, or anything low level- I just don't get off on it. What can I say, I'm a Smalltalker who only uses C when I have a really performance intensive method that I need to speed up. A hacker's environment the Newton is, but perhaps only hackers like me, who prefer a high-level system of interacting objects.

        The Newton is dead, but it's still more functionctional than anything else that's available. You may be (understandably) bitter about the Newton's demise or about the NOS's limitations on what you want to do, but it doesn't mean that the Newton is useless for the rest of us.
  • Maybe you could give each subscriber his/her own page. I.E. channel.html?ai23jfu3 or ai23jfu3.html.
    • maybe then you could track every user.... Passport anyone?

      • All you could track is how many times the user had hot sync'd. The actual browsing is done locally on the downloaded pages. Hardly a huge privacy risk.
  • Actually, despte the press claims on the sites, neither of these packages (or any similar) require wireless access: they simply allow it. The wired solution is to follow the directions for connecting through a cellular phone, except to use a standard serial connector and a modem (this requires a specal sort of null-modem connector: I don't remember details, but I think that the ground is cross linked to one of RTS/CTS/DSR/DTR one one side - they should be available from your favorite retailer). Connect the modem to your phone jack and you're all set.

    If you need broadband access (or just want to synchronize throuh your PC for some reason), connect the serial cable as usual (the provided HotSync cradle should work) and configure a PPP daemon on your PC: assign an IP address to the Palm via DHCP, and you can use the "wireless" content managers as you previously used AvantGo (although without the benefits / problems associated with the one-button HotSync that was AvantGo).
  • ISn't the problem trying to squeeze http pages into wap or is it somthing compeltly different?
  • What's so complicated about Plucker? I'll admit that setting up your own script to scrape the web might be too complex for grandma, but you the provider can build a Plucker.pdb of your own site.

    Users could then just download the plucker.prc (once) and then sync with your PDB whenever you update it. They never really have to install any of the desktop scripts at all as long as you provide them the PDBs.
    • I agree, Plucker isn't that hard and the if there's a "printable" version of the web page available, it usually looks fine on the palm. For example, try "printer.wunderground.com", weather information formatted just fine for a PDA.
    • This is Slashdot and the poster finds a simple text file (plug in the URL, link depth at minimum) too complicated? What next, someone posting to Ask Slashdot, "How do I get a job in IT after getting my MCSE?"

      Plucker is the only way to go. Not to mention that whole GPL thing.

  • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • People, people, people!

      Yeah, OK, free speech is nice... free beer is nice... but come on, a single-user license for iSilo is $17.50! Pay for it, already.

      Even if you're not that concerned with downloading Web pages to your Palm, it makes for a great alternative to first-generation Doc readers. Unlike those, it can do text formatting (justification, italics, bold, header-sized fonts, images, etc.) and its files compress down to smaller sizes than Doc format.

      • [...] but come on, a single-user license for iSilo is $17.50! Pay for it, already.

        Seconded! iSilo is an excellent DOC reader, and if you need text markup you can run plain ol' HTML through the iSiloX converter. It even does images and nested tables. Plus, it supports the hi-res screens of the Clie and Handera 330.

        I use iSilo every day, and I have no regrets about giving them my cash. They've earned it.

  • Cool idea, bad business model, IMO.

    I knew a site that was a popular AvantGo channel, but didn't bother paying them big fees when they didn't let partners be AvantGo partners for free. That no doubt hurt their content severely. Now they're charging customers, which will probably reduce their popularity even further.

    AvantGo would best exist as a technology to allow sites to provide content, not as a portal/service to funnell all the content.

    -me

  • ISilo 3.1 and ISiloXC (Score:5, Informative)

    by backlonthethird ( 470424 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @07:53PM (#3139931)
    doesn't help the PocketPC crowd, but the best PalmOS solution I've found to the AvantGo crunch is iSilo [isilo.com]. I posted a thread about it over at , [visorcentral.com] here [visorcentral.com].

    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 really like Vindingo [vindigo.com]. I ran across it a week ago while searching for software to fill up the seemingly vast 16 megs on my treo.

    You choose specific cities to download - they have most metropolitan areas covered - and then when you sync your handheld, the software checks on the web for updates.

    To use the software, you tell it what neighborhood your in, and then what intersection you are nearest. It lists restaurants (with reviews), movie theatres (with showtimes and reviews), and shops, sorted by distance from your current location. It will also generate walking/driving directions from your current location - all while offline!

    It also has a wireless sync option so I can sync using the modem in my treo and never have to hook it to a desktop.

    Overall, I think it's pretty damn cool.
  • Check out sitescooper (http://www.sitescooper.org). I use this to grab web sites for off-line reading on my Palm. It supports a wide variety of off-line readers and file formats.

  • HTML standards (Score:2, Informative)

    by rakeswell ( 538134 )

    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 [w3.org] 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.

    • This does mean that we have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that a webpage must look the same on all browser

      Any designer who thinks that a webpage could look the same on all browsers is very new to the game. Make sites that display the content reasonably anywhere that can understand the standards you use and forget about pixel accuracy. Personally I just write clean html code and let it look like it looks in all the different browsers.

  • (aside: I submitted this story 2 weeks ago... guess it's not newsworthy unless it hits the Register first!)

    Pendragon Software has a browser for the PalmOS and synchronization software that is a workalike for Avantgo:

    http://www.pendragon-software.com/browser/

    You can even point it at AvantGo URLs and it will load the sites and let you view them just as AvantGo did. For what it's worth, the Pendragon browser feels a lot snappier than AvantGo.

    Gotchas: It requires a Windows PC to run the synchronization software. You can run the Adware version for free, or pay for a version without ads.
  • I use Pendragon Browser [pendragon-software.com]. It runs entirely on the client, so you never have to worry about silly corporations indirectly trying to make a buck off your web browsing. (I haven't tried the other ones listed here just yet, maybe it's time to take another pass.)

    With it, the main website I visit just happens to be Slashdot, processed for PDA consumption by AvantSlash [fourteenminutes.com]

    The only downside is that there is no specialized content available for it, like AvantGo: it only knows how to read plain web pages. Hence, ocasionally, you'll need a preprocessor (like AvantSlash) to put the web pages on a diet.

  • www.poormojo.org/dod.html

    A quick and easy way to convert any text to a PalmDoc for distribution.
  • Perhaps the time for internet on hand helds just hasn't come yet. A critical mass of users and technology has to form before it will really take off, and that nucleus just hasn't formed yet.
  • AvantGo does 2 things: transcodes content to fit the abysmally bad PDA screens (both pocket PC and Palm screens suck for web content display), and cache the content so you have it when you're walking around away from your cradle (which is where your desktop or laptop probably is located anyway). Can we all agree that sooner or later both of these problems will be resolved by improvements in technology and delivery?
    As others here have noted wireless connections will make the second need go away. Better PDAs and a solution to the screen issue will make the first unecessary.
    Neither of these needs are going away this week, but perhaps those at Avantgo see their product for what it is and are preparing to give up ;-). Avantgo is not a solution, but a technical bandaid with a widow-of-life based on how long it takes these problems to be fixed at the source.
    Let's hope those that can will address the real problems.

    I say this loving Avantgo: it does what it does amazingly well. Things would just be so much easier if it didn't need to be there, and it doesn't.
  • If you can dig up the old distribution of the AvantGo client it goes directly to the sites and grabs pages; no AvantGo server needed with exactly the same result.
  • I've owned a Cassiopeia E105 (WinCE 2.11), and now own an iPaq 3730 (Formerly PocketPC 2002, now Familiar Linux).
    I tried nearly all the 'PDA Web' software out there - AvantGo, Mazingo, MobiPocket, but got really pissed off with them. The synchronisation was flaky at best, and downright broken at worst.
    As an end consumer, I really appreciate websites that offer PDA-friendly versions of their pages. Surprisingly, Slashdot is very PDA-friendly - the middle column with all the text just fits into the 240 pixel screen width.
    My take on 'synchronisation'?
    For the developer - go for a 'site download' model that downloads known PDA-friendly sites into a tarball, copies the tarball onto the PDA, which then uncompresses it and browses locally, using the native browser. Or even skip the tarball - just provide an app which 'rsync's a tree of PDA-sized pages onto the PDA.
    For the content publisher - if your site is PDA-friendly, and you promote it well, content-starved PDA users will find you, don't worry.
    All the WindowsCE and Linux-based PDAs have a free web browser available (built-in or freeware).
    • I hate to say it but one combo that works for me is to create a mobile channel from my Wince IPAQ to IE on an NT machine and get the latter to get offline content which is transferred automatically to my IPAQ during synchronisation.

      Unlike AVANTGO the content isn't preprocessed and isn't compressed either, but it works quite nicely for some simple stuff like film listings. As long as the slash preprocessors keep going, I should be able to keep surfing off-line.

  • Sitescooper is an obvious choice for geeks.

    An open-source Perl program, it has plenty of
    pre-made sites to use.

    Output can be html, or piped to the converter of
    your choice. (ISilo for me.)

  • Shouldn't we have an XML app for this? I know XML isn't the wholy grail, but wasn't this type of problem the reason we have XML? We just need a DTD and then a Palm and a Pocket PC app to download the pages. XML should be easy for the content providers to use, and if the client apps are GLP'd, we won't have this situation again.

    Ok, now someone poke a big whole in this idea so everyone can flame me.
    • Shouldn't we have an XML app for this? I know XML isn't the wholy grail, but wasn't this type of problem the reason we have XML?

      Yes, it is. The reason that you don't see more sites offering filtering and content-negotiation is that

      It's costs more to implement and uses more resources to serve, and is more complicated to administer.

      Client-side support sucks mostly.

      Standards? what standards?

      The last item is kind of a red herring in that the standards we have work fine, and if you use lynx as your target browser, it will work reasonably well for most portables and you can then layer the glitz on using CSS and Javascript. Unfortunately people who pay the bills for web development don't quite get this, if some dreamweaver jockey shows them the fancy pants 80 jpegs per page site running off their laptops they drool and open their wallets; if you show them a site that has the info people are actually seeking when they visit the site and that loads in under a 2 seconds on a 28.8 dial up connection they'll say that it looks a little bland!

      It's the eternal battle between the content and the container.

  • Free services going pay (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AndyChrist ( 161262 ) <andy_christ@yah[ ]com ['oo.' in gap]> on Sunday March 10, 2002 @10:39PM (#3140535) Homepage
    Has there been a single one yet which hasn't created an enormous gulf between the lowest price point and free which just doesn't seem worth crossing?

    I mean, 9 users, and it's 1000 bucks a year? I thought the article said they were worried about BIG businesses using them.

    Every time a free service starts charging, it seems, they charge way too much for way too little, often while still leaving the free services there, which sometimes are good enough anyway. (Yahoo mail, for example)

    Is there an example of a service which charges small increments in price for small increments in service?
  • Yeah, I heard Mazingo was good, just like that other person said. Pocket PC Thoughts [pocketpcthoughts.com], the premier news website for the Pocket PC, very much recommends it, especially after they told us that Avantgo was going to cut off access.
  • The built-in Plucker instructions may be a bit advanced for the average user, but they're not that bad. However, when we found out about Avantgo's new policy a few weeks ago (a little slow on this one, eh /.?), our solution was to post our own simpler instructions [umass.edu] on installing Plucker (in Windows) as well as links to iSilo.

    BTW, if you don't like Plucker and don't want to pay for iSilo, iSilo-free is still available for download (older version with fewer features).

    Since we're on the subject... why don't these offline browsers let you set different Link Depth options for on-site and off-site links? (or is there a way to do this and I just missed it?)

    /.palm is a perfect example of where this would be useful... with Plucker you could set your onsite depth to a high number and offsite Depth to 1 so you could read the linked stories as well as the posts without creating a huge file.
  • I had Omnisky for a year, using Blazer (which is great). Problem was that Omnisky was never consistent enought to rely upon. The connection would be unavailable in many downtown areas, and it would drop all the time in moving cars/trains which was the time when I would have liked it the most.

    Over the last two weeks I've dumped Omnisky and went with the relatively low tech wired connection to my cell phone. Despite concerns about inconvenience and slow speeds, overall it's a lot better than Omnisky. Coverage is totall predictable, if voice coverage works I can make a data call. Speed is much faster, particularly b/c it never drops even when moving.

    Given that I use OS X and AvantGo isn't an option, this is really the best way for me to go. The only downside is the wire, which makes me anxious for Bluetooth. It's one of those things that has a bad rep as vaporware, but given how much more effective it will make wireless data I think it's got a real future.
  • A few years ago they published the MAL server source that you could use to set up your own site that the avantgo browser could sync to. Unfortunately, they yanked it after a while and went completely closed with it.

    Should be possible to reverse engineer the server protocol/formats/etc. from the SyncMAL tools, but sure would be easier if source were still available.

  • AvantGo squashing "palm-ified" sites? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PlatinumMac ( 251626 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @11:55PM (#3140845)
    I was a regular user of AvantGo (on my Macintosh) until this weekend, when I finally got my Visor and my Linux box talking to each other. I enjoyed the service very much, because I love being able to read the news or a short story while on the bus. I was never a fan of AvantGo, the company -- their website is annoying to use, they put ads onto your Palm, and now they are threatening to charge providers for AvantGo's right to slurp their content.

    So, I'm trying to switch over to Plucker (and SiteSweeper). I find this approach to be much more flexible & customizable (and therefore more useful), in addition to being free (as in speech). Plus there is the advantage that Plucker downloads and parses the websites before I hotsync, rather than during, like AvantGo (which was murder on my handheld's batteries). Plucker is also faster, because my handheld does not have to do as much rendering.

    However, I have had some trouble finding useable versions of many of the websites I want to use. For example, I have not been able to find good palm-ready Mac websites (like MacNN, MacCentral, and MacFixIt). There are rumors that this situation is due to AvantGo forcing channel providers to only make their channel available to AvantGo, not the general public.

    All in all, I have found the AvantGo alternatives to be much more useful than AvantGo ever was. I am certainly no Linux hacker, but I have had no problems with Plucker, which is very well-documented. If I can find all of the content I want elsewhere, I will get rid of AvantGo entirely, and be happier for it.

  • Plucker is not that hard to set up. And it kicks ace over avantgo anyway.
  • I have used HandStory for off-line channel. Yes it isn't aotomated like AvantGo. But we can use HandStory for reading E-Book, short note and view off-line channel. Try it here

    http://www.handstory.com/download/

    Free evaluation for 30 days.
  • Write your own Perl script to extract the data you need. "Unmaintainable! Dangerous!"? Well, maybe. In principle. But look at it. How many data sources do you really need? How often do these data sources change their layout? Remember, changing their layout costs them too. How many people could you potentially help with your service? How many of them would be willing to pay you a small fee? Would all of that warrant maybe a few days of work every three months or so?

    Even if you only keep it running for a few years it'll still have been good value.

  • Slashdot via AvantGo (Score:2, Interesting)

    by quigleymd ( 247217 )
    Up until a week ago I was an avid user of avantgo reading slashdot on it daily. Then one day under my slashdot link mysterious errors began appearing. I believe the error was something such as 'Connection Timed Out.' I find it odd that avantgo did not give a more specific error message, after all they knew why I couldnt have slashdot on my palm.. it was their doing.. those bastards.

    Reguardless, I would like to bring to light the idea of slashdot getting their own avantogo channel and perhaps funding it through the topic of a recent poll - OSDN Subscriptions. I know I for one would be willing to pay a small monthly fee to be able to read slashdot in class once again as opposed to listening to those damn professors... Anyone agree...?
  • "Is there an alternative to paying AvantGo thousands of dollars? All I want to do is give away information, not charge for it."

    Really? Then just give away your information. If you are being altruistic and that's your only motive, then you have no problem - if instead you want to maximise the number of people obtaining your content, then I suggest your motives are somewhat different to what you state.
  • If you're on Palm (or many other handheld platforms), just use the free MobiPocket reader software.

    http://www.mobipocket.com/en/HomePage/default.as p

    It also doubles as an eBook reader.
  • Hmmm, interesting to note that when I submitted this story when it broke (Thursday 21st Feb) it wasn't considered news-worthy enough. (see my comment about it here [slashdot.org]).

    This means that things like Slashdots own palm friendly version [slashdot.org] and my AvantSlash [fourteenminutes.com] (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.

    As already mentioned, Plucker is one alternative. For PPC users you could try Mazingo [mazingo.net]

    The biggest downside to Avantgo alternatives is that they don't have some of the custom channels that Avantgo has and you can't get the URL for. Some however you can, and Plinkit [bellatlantic.net] is a useful list of those.

    Come on guys, if you expect us to pay and help you out here, the least you could do it take breaking news that we submit and actually post it. Rather than waiting a fortnight and then sticking it up.

    "Stuff that matters" is all very fine and well, but "Stuff that matters, once everyone knows about it" would seem closer to the point, although less catchy.

  • Sports Illustrated and others have used Palm's Web Clipping applications (WCA, alias PQA - Palm Query Application).

    I've developed for them and you can actually surf web sites and view CGI output in the clipper browser built into the OS (English v.4 or with mobile lib). Palm's gateway will reduce image sizes for you for free too.
  • until an open source project comes up with an alternative.

    I don't see why wget and some scripts can't spider content from my own machine and put it onto my PDA without the need for some central control like AvantGo, which I have always be suspicious of.

    • Well, you can do this now with a little script voodoo.

      wget to pull in the data
      perl, python, whatever to mangle it to a single, simply formatted text file.
      makedoc or such to convert to pdb
      cp to move it to the install folder.

      No hyperlinks, mind you, but surely this is not needed for most apps. For slashdot, for example, you could pull down one article + all the +3 comments and turn it into a single DOC file, repeat, 5 files gives you the top 5 articles, bing.

      Or use something on the palm that reads HTML if size is not a problem.

      Easy enough I imagine. Step II is probably the hardest.

  • Software companies when they move from 'give it away for free just to get users' to 'I must make money now' often take a poor approach to the problem of transition.

    Ask yourself who is getting value from using Avantgo - the obvious answer is both consumers and providers of content to varying degrees. But as far as Avantgo is concerned they need to go after the ones that are willing to pay, be it either. It looks likes they have gone after the providers because they probably have invested more in the relationship with Avantgo and are more likely to be willing and able to pay for prices Avantgo will need to charge to make it worth their doing it. Avantgo like many software companies probably does not have the infrastructure to charge micropayments that might make sense to consumers of content.

    The problem with going after providers is that they come into several groups some that have money and will pay and some that do not or will not pay because the value Avantgo offers them is simply not worth the money that Avantgo is asking.

    One group is the non commercial customers - they don't make money out of whatever service they offer to consumers but they do increase the value of Avantgo to the consumers in general. These are the people that suffer with Avantgo's new model and it looks like the original poster is one of these. Now if Avantgo could identify these people as non commercial users and license them to use Avantgo as long as they stay non commercial then they would keep such users recognising that there is no money in that relationship at the moment and keeping the increased value of having them part of the Avantgo network. A very good example of the implementation of such a model would be Cincom's Non Commercial Smalltalk license.

    Another option would have been to migrate all their non paying providers over to a consumer payment service whereby the consumer pays a small monthly amount for unlimited access to the non paying providers and gets paying providers for free. In fact everyone would get the fee paying providers for free. this way Avantgo would have gained a consumer service they could charge for and a free consumer service for the providers that it make sense to do that.

    But I am sure that they thought long and hard about the right way to change their charging model - it is absolutely critical for any business and getting it wrong can have catastrophic effects on a business. They seem to have opted for a simple to implement and straight forward model that is likely to generate more money in the short term (from the providers who do feel the need to pay the $1000 to continue this service) rather than one that will build their network over time and add value to the network. They are clearly willing to risk losing many valuable providers (who add value in terms of the breadth of their 'channels') because they do not bring money to Avantgo's bottom line. I suspect they implemented this change too late in their business and when the need for money was to strong. But it may just be that they did not realise they had other alternatives and if so maybe they will react to this /. discussion.

  • We were looking to deploy an avant go channel about six weeks ago, when this cropped up as an issue. I don't believe for a moment that we cuold raise advertising revenue to cover the expenditure, and we're not likely to be able to charge folk for content which they're used to getting for free. The costs that avant go want are from another planet. For us to support 1,000 users we'd be paying twice as much to avant go as we do annualy to our hosting firm for co-location and 10 gig of data a month. There is now a real need for a solution that will allow both PalmOS and Pocket PC users to use the same software to synchronise web pages for offline viewing. It's beyond my ability, but I hope someone in the free software community will take this need on board and provide a way for those of us that want to give information away, and for the users that want free [as in beer] information to download their daily fix.

  • HandStory? (Score:2, Informative)

    by snellm ( 259805 )
    http://www.handstory.com [handstory.com]
  • What about doing what slashdot does [now]... stick banner ads on the free channels? A better comparison (with regard to the business model) is the free web hosts. They'll stick a banner on all of your pages in exchange for no hosting fees.

    Perhaps the ad revenues on the handhelds are pretty low (I wouldn't be surprised... you can't "click through" very far) and the model wouldn't fly.

    Slashdot's model is much better makes much more sense... just as a previous post suggested... let the consumers pay for that which we consume.
  • Plucker [plkr.org] is a very good solution to the problem. If you're a content provider and want to support Palms, just generate the Plucker format yourself. That way, users don't have to figure out how to generate the format; they just download and synchronize.

    This is already happening. For example, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) [linuxdoc.org] recently added support for Plucker; the LDP now automatically generates Plucker format for all HOWTO, mini-HOWTO, and FAQ documents [linuxdoc.org]. The LDP also automatically regenerates the files when the documents are updated. Pluckerbooks [pluckerbooks.com] has over a thousand pregenerated books and they have links to other sources of Plucker documents [pluckerbooks.com].

    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! [dwheeler.com] also has a Plucker version available [dwheeler.com]. I also generate a Plucker version of my book [dwheeler.com] on writing secure programs [dwheeler.com]. 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.

  • All I want to do is give away information, not charge for it....

    Unfortunately Corporate America(TM) doesn't understand the concept of "free" (as in speech and beer). They rack their brains 24/7 on ingenious ways to bilk money from people online. But, one after another they fail [fuckedcompany.com]. We understand your desire to give away information for free... why can't they?

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