>Would you mind terribly elaborating what you mean by this?  I'm not
>familiar with AvantGo.

Avantgo is a competitor of sorts of Plucker.  It allows you to specify html
content to view offline.  It works in a different way than Plucker, the
format is proprietary, and it costs money to list content with Avantgo
(although the viewer is free).  However, I think their delivery mechanism
is pretty good for Windows users.  You select your content through a web
interface (on their server), download their software (once), and press
hotsync.  Because this is so simple, most Palm users I know have Avantgo
installed on their Palm.

Without the Plucker desktop, Plucker users have to edit a text file to
change options, run the parser (which requires Python & Tcl), then sync
their Palm.  There's a lot more user knowledge needed and more room for
mistakes.  I felt like this was only aimed at "power users".  I think the
Plucker desktop does a lot to encourage Plucker use on Windows.  It gives a
familiar interface instead of text files and it uses widgets for the
options instead of options in the text file.  But it still requires two
operations, run the desktop to produce the pdb and a second operation to
sync the Palm.  IMHO, I think what is missing is a conduit (probably using
the Plucker desktop channels & options) to make it a one step process (once
the channels are set up).  I think we are close to this too.

I realize that providing parsing with hotsyncing may not be desirable for a
lot of Plucker users since the process could take a long time.  Or perhaps
they don't want to run it every time they sync.  Also, a lot of Plucker
users are using Linux which doesn't have a conduit type system (I'm pretty
sure).  But providing this option would benefit a lot of users (well at
least Windows users :-)

Bill

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