On Sun, 14 Oct 2001, Robert O'Connor wrote: > > > All the other GUI subscribed portable Palm web systems I have ever seen > > > use the term channel, probably for easier first user/migration, and the > > > fact that new people are familiar with the concept of a 'channel' > > > > The only one I know of that does this is AvantGo. > > > > Sitescooper uses "scoops" or "nightly scoops", for example. I'm not > > aware of any others that actually ACTIVELY pull content from sites > > and parse it for a digestable view on the Palm.
Scoop has the connotation of News, and fresh news at that. However, many of plucker users are not native english speakers, and maybe it sounds like Flooz. > I certainly am not a lawyer, but I don't think there can possibly be a > trademark on the term 'channel'. SiteScooper isn't reknowned for being > the easiest of the cabal to be used. Well, I am fond of sitescooper, because perl is less esoteric than python, and sitescooper can slice and dice better than the plucker frontend - picking out certain porions of a page, for example, or converting the URL to the "print format" on the fly. > > With Plucker, the user initiates a script/gui/whatever, which goes > > out on the LIVE internet, gathers content from live sites, which may > > be up, down, or slow, and then parses it locally, which creates a > > file they have to sync to their Palm. > > There is certainly a different achitecture, in an AvantGo push vs. Plucker > pull model. From the casual user point of view though, the results on the > Palm look indistinguishable. The results are indistinguishable, but, surfing from a country where we pay for phone calls, (South Africa) I *really* like to be able to do the scooping from a cronjob, and the syncing separately. > > Calling what we do a "channel" is misleading in this aspect. > > Channels in the vein of telecommunications or television, indicates > > that you have something "canned" for your viewing pleasure (or > > displeasure of late), which has been audited/edited to suit your > > medium. This doesn't apply in our case, for a majority (most) of our > > users who use Plucker. > > I disagree with you on this. This is exactly what Plucker is doing, > and what is supposed to be doing. I tell it the source of the > information, then it is auditing out the javascript, the HTML > comments, and the other crap I don't want, and formatting it to suit > my medium which is a Palm pilot with a small screen and low processing > power. The power is in your hands - where it is not on TV. However, a TV channel represents the only power the viewer has - to change channels. > I am quite happy myself with a full-client side solution. That certainly > shouldn't exclude other mechanisms which would be useful for others, similar > to the way we have parsers for python, but also different languages. I personally must have an agent to do the transcoding. Scoop ... transcode ... view. My vote would be for "channel" or "scoop". Cheers, Andy! -- Free Palm game - http://www.wizzy.com/owari/
