Thursday, 29 August 2002
Last night I finally got around to setting up Plucker to replace AvantGo on my Palm Vx. (AvantGo has no OS X support and it looks like it is not forthcoming.) One of the best uses I've found for Plucker is reading my Radio News Aggregator page. I created a “lite” version of the news aggregator without the navigation bar in a few minutes—Radio's CMS rocks!—and pointed my Plucker home page at it. Setting the link depth appropriately means I can follow each link to the original source, and turning off images cuts out about 500K to produces a database of about 1.7 MB containing all the links in a self-contained format which I can read on the bus. Here's what it looks like…
One tweak I did was to exclude the links reachable via the “POST” button, by adding to my ~/.plucker/exclusionlist.txt file the line 0:-:http:\//127\.0\.0\.1:5335/\?idStory=.*.
Plucker's Palm OS client is extremely featureful and has excellent usability. The only bizarreness I noticed was that the auto-scrolling feature defaulted to scrolling up rather than down, but it was easily fixed. Especially given Plucker is a free software project, I'm very impressed.
Versus AvantGo, Plucker's design is more sensible. The ability to do Web page fetching separately from uploading is great, as are the multiple separate databases, and support for local Web pages and automatically segmenting long files. The only feature I miss in AvantGo is support for tables; the bus schedules turn to mush when viewed in Plucker.
11:38 AM
