Sunrise and Plucker
Andy as one of our esteemed readers of geekyinfo has sent a fine review of two applications that he uses daily on his palm. I would like to extend the invitation to any reader to email me at phil@geekyinfo.com if they would like to post up a review of a gadget, software application or some geeky rant.
Sunrise and Plucker are two must-have apps for the Palm pilot.
Basically they allow you to synchronise content from the web and store it on your pda. For those familiar with Avantgo, it’s a similar application but has a couple of advantages:
* you can synchronise rss feeds
* you can add filters to what gets synchronised (eg. exclude particular link types - ads, unwanted content, etc)
* you can synchronise with content on your own PC (great for those who run their PC as a local web server)
* there’s a firefox extension you can get which allows you to select text, right click and select “Send to Sunrise” - great for those long articles you want to read on the way home or once off
* you can specify more complex synchronisation intervals (hourly, daily, weekly, etc)
Why the two applications? Sunrise runs on your desktop (Windows or Linux/GTK) - and converts online content to “Plucker” documents. Plucker runs on your Palm - you use Plucker to read the content.
There are plenty of handheld friendly links (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=7) and rss files you can download - here’s a few to get you started…
http://wap.cnet.com - CNET news
http://www.sitepoint.com/avantgo - web developer news
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/pda/world/default.htm - bbc news
http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss - summary of top stories from CNN