Adios AvantGo, now what?

July 2, 2009 10:39 AM

Adios AvantGo... miss ya. Anything similar out there for a Palm OS smartphone without data service?

AG now references Snacs as a solution... but that requires wireless (and they don't have a Palm client anyway).

I already pay too much each month for my phone as a phone, so I'm not willing to add wireless data service.

Suggestions?

posted by omnidrew to computers & internet (6 comments total)

AFAIK, Plucker is your only choice for an offline HTML reader. You'll have to run it before doing a Hotsync but it will do pretty much what AG did.
posted by tommasz at 1:40 PM on July 2 [1 favorite]

Plucker (as noted above), is the solution I usually use - unforturnately, It requires an on-handheld reader and significant configuration, but it also compresses the files using zlib. And it's free/Free.

iSilo and iSiloX can be used to read webpages offline - It's a pay program, and I don't have any experience with it, but some people prefer it, so it's worth a mention.

Several versions of Blazer, the pack-in browser for PalmOS PDAs, will read files off of the flash card in the device, using a URL like

file:///web/mystartpage.html

to read the files stored in the /web/ directory on the card. The downside of this being that it's more complicated to set up, but the upside is that it's pretty strongly customizable, and will work with whatever small subset of pages iSilo and Plucker choke on but Blazer won't. Personally, I use this to cache the startpages for online searches with Blazer(I pay for data by the kb), but don't actively synchronize data with the card - Mainly because I haven't gotten around to setting it up.

Skweezer.com is also handy - It's a portal/proxy website that simplifies webpages for mobile browsers. If a site gives you problems, try accessing it through there.
posted by Orb2069 at 7:00 PM on July 2 [1 favorite]

...And AvantGo required listed sites to provide a special HTML version of their site just for their use. Some of the sites blocked non-avant-go access to that same version, some don't. There's several listed here, but further digging on your own might turn up more.
posted by Orb2069 at 7:42 PM on July 2

I now remember taking a look @ Plucker as an e-book reader a few years ago -- but AG was much easier to use for web, and TiBr for e-books.

I'll dig in and see what I can get set up. Thanks for the links!
posted by omnidrew at 9:10 PM on July 2

I'm trying to get Plucked... found this link which will make the OS X client work under Leopard:

http://blog.scottnolan.org/2008/01/03/mac-os-x-105-leopard-issues/comment-page-1/

I used textedit instead of vi...
posted by omnidrew at 10:45 PM on July 3

FWIW, Plucker seems to be plucked, at least under OS X 10.5. It never successfully got through a scan of a couple of web pages.
posted by omnidrew at 7:02 AM on July 6