Kevin wrote: >I'm new to the list and apologize for bringing the big, bad specter of commercial applications to >the great open source project you've all created. Simply put, I'm looking for a viable alternative >to AvantGo's "Custom Channels" for a client who wants to make their product information and website >available on Palm OS devices. Currently their site is essentially brochureware, with about 300 >products (the HTML-for-Palm version of the site I made has about 1,000 pages.)
>The Plucker Desktop application is great, and would work very well for our purposes. The initial >roll-out of the content would be only to dealers (around 1,500), but eventually we'd like a way to >have consumers be able to access the information as well. The problem is that the dealers are, well, >not all that technologically sophisticated... Put it this way - the sign-up and account process for >AvantGo was deemed too cumbersome and complex... :-\ This is about the same thing we do at my company. For the next release I plan to package up Plucker Desktop as is with my C++ parser (so there isn't a need for an interpreter to be installed), the conduit and the viewer. When last we built the viewer for distribution, we changed the name and icon for the Palm, but left everything else (including the info in the about screen) unchanged. I don't know that we will make the changes next time. In fact some of our users have since found the Plucker site and downloaded newer versions which is great. Our releases are pretty silent to the user, they either see no dialogs or dialogs where they can just keep clicking next and accept all the defaults. We will pre load a channel into Plucker Desktop for them. We also plan to use links on a web site to allow adding more channels if needed (via plkrdata). We also have the requirement to make everything as simple as possible - a one click install with no options and then sync the content when hotsync is pushed. We've been successful so far with our previous release. I don't think you will find it that difficult to make the changes you are suggesting. Also, Robert has the Windows installer Innosetup script available too. I agree with Robert in that the other parsers haven't been tested nearly as much as the Python one. In my case, I just plan to test it on our specific pages for now. I wait to be corrected, but the GPL doesn't prohibit you from charging money for the application (even when someone else wrote it). It doesn't prohibit you from using it or pieces of it and charging for them either. You just have to make sure you distribute the source and don't change the copyright notice. Of course then someone has the right to get the sources and compile them themselves. This might not be something your customers might do, but it might be something your competition does. Also, since the Plucker Desktop menus/dialogs/etc are based on XML resource files, it might even be possible to disable all the options you don't want people messing with just by modifying the XML resource files. I'm not certain of this however. If you think about it, you are getting a lot of stuff for free. Don't overlook the donate link on the site :-) I hope the Plucker team doesn't mind me mentioning it. My 2 cents. Bill _______________________________________________ plucker-dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
