At 12:21 AM 3/25/00 -0500, Tom Zerucha wrote:
>On Fri, Mar 24, 2000 at 08:44:39PM -0600, Akshay wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > Was wanting to find information related to starting a development process
> > for microbrowsers - specifically for wireless PDAs. Have the following
> > questions and would be really grateful if someone could help me out.
> >
> > 1. How similar/dissimilar would such a process be to developing an HTTP
> > client for regular networks?
>
>For the most part the same, but you have to watch for Palm-isms (like
>the call timeouts and remember to check for events).
>
> > 2. Are there a lot of PDA microbrowsers out there already?
>
>There was PalmScape (I don't know if it is still around), there is
>HandWeb. Also there are proxy type things like AvantGo and ProxiWeb
>that do the browsing by proxy and send the compressed info down.
You didn't mention pdQbrowser at http://www.pdqsuite.com. It's like
PalmScape, but is a supported product and does true HTML/HTTP browsing. The
whole thing is about 100Kb of object code, and it runs easily on PalmOS 2
or higher (less than 14Kb of heap, 2K of stack). I'd guess that competes
favorably with other microbrowsers. Because it is a true HTTP/HTML browser
it can do is go to any web site. That is it's more the true browsing
paradigm that we're accustomed to. I think of WAP and Web Clipping more as
platforms for building wireless applications.
Also, an interesting thing is happening in Japan. They have more and higher
speed data services deployed than the US or Europe and are using two
standards for web browsing: WAP and CHTML (or compact HTML). CHTML
requires a little adaption by the web site owner, but not much compared to
WAP, and it is doing well. There's an interesting article in the "The
Economist", March 11 issue about this.
LL
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