As many of you know, Laurens, the guy behind the wonderful Sunrise (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2815) tool for Plucker, is working on his own e-book viewer (http://laurens.typepad.com/sunrise/2005/02/viewer_faq.html).

If you are currently using Sunrise in conjunction with Plucker, and knowing that future (improved) versions of Sunrise won't be Plucker-compatible anymore, would you be willing to buy a single user license for Laurens' forthcoming viewer for $19.95? Too much? Too little?

This is a poll. Make sure to vote with 'yes' or 'no' and if you have a second, please comment your decision.

(In case it matters to you, I voted with YES).

Well, for $30, you can get WordSmith, which is a full word processor - not just an eBook reader.

Then figuring that Plucker and many other readers are free.

My vote would be "No". $20 is too much for such a product.

My thinking is that a price of $19.95 is probably on the high side of what I would pay. Considering there are quality, free alternatives a price of $14.95 would seem to be about right. That being said the suggested price is right in line with what iSilo costs. I guess it comes down to what exactly is the feature set.

No, because I'm happy with Plucker... And Sunrise is Windows-only...

I'm sure it's a good tool, but I can't exactly use it, and Plucker is currently more than enough for me.

I am eager to see it. I think $15 is more like what I would like to pay. But a lot of work went into it and I'm inclined to support Laurens so he'll write more cool stuff.

I am eager to see it. I think $15 is more like what I would like to pay. But a lot of work went into it and I'm inclined to support Laurens so he'll write more cool stuff.
Ditto. I'd say to begin with, $14.95 sounds like a good price. Over time, as more features are added to Sunshine viewer, a price such as $19.95 sounds more realistically.

The devil is in the details. You mention an ebook reader for $20, but the post is about an offline news reader more than anything. What will it do for me that the others can't?

Sorry, I just don't see the need for another proprietary ebook reader.

It really would depend on how much better it is against both iSilo and Plucker. Since I have both installed, I don't need another one unless it can do what the others don't. If it's much better than those two I mentioned then $20 would be worth it. On the other hand, if its just on-par or less functional, or buggy then even at $10, I wouldn't consider it.

AS I see it, Sunrise's commercial brethren would be better off as a good offline reader since most people already uses Palm Reader or Mobipocket for ebooks, both of which has free functional versions. For offline readers, the choices are Avantgo, iSilo, Handstory, and Plucker. Avantgo is mostly limited to its own partners, Handstory works better as a swiss-army knife reader/viewer than offline Reader. Isilo and Plucker are therefore the premier Palm offline viewers and Sunrise's successor main competitor. iSilo has a good desktop companion in iSiloX, while Plucker rely mostly on Laurn's own Sunrise tool. So how much better than those would determine whether $20 is worth shelling out for the next version of Sunrise.

I would buy Sunrise for $19.95, depending on the improvements, and IF it supported Plucker. Since it doesn't, then I doubt I would buy it for $4.95, let alone $19.95.

If Sunrise Viewer will be better than Plucker of iSilo, I am willing to pay the $19.95. However, from a marketing point of view, I think a price below $15 to start with would be wiser.

for 20$ it must be really much better than Plucker in funtionality. This means to be able to customising reading of text that I really want to read and not the other stuff in webpages. Sunrise desktop already does a lot in this direction.

tovarish

I guess the price would be justified if registered users of the viewer would get new and updated SDLs. I think the SDL has some value too because they have to be updated and tweaked. For example The NYT Tech and Circuits text edition SDLs are broken and I don't have a clue how to fix them. Well, in a sense only registered users would be able to use new and updated SDLs because eventually plucker support will be dropped from the Sunrise converter tool.

One thing that I would like to see in the sunrise viewer is the ability to save individual articles. When I use the export to memo function in plucker I only get whats shown on the screen and not the whole article.

I'm open to the idea of a commercial version, but for now I voted no since Sunrise Desktop + Plucker already do everything I need. I don't have any use for any of the feed management options that seem to be the main benefit of the proposed commercial version, and I have absolutely zero interest in supporting Yet Another Proprietary Document Format in any case.

I'd pay $10 for Sunrise Desktop though, provided it kept all of its current functionality (including the ability to export in Plucker format) and there was a commitment to continue maintaining it over the long term.

Laurens should post what we would get as an improvement to the current sunrise+plucker combo.

It all depends on what features are offered in the software. I agree that I'm more inclined to paying $14.95 for it than $19.95.

If there are enough features to justify paying for it compared to the freeware version then I would pay for it.

yes, if and only if it can update my feeds from my treo over the net

I think everyone would want this program even for $20 if it can cleanly and easily convert the average rss feed into a nice full article with the right links followed for each site, and if the viewer has similar capabilities to Vade Mecum or eReader or iSilo.

The real trick seems to be getting content isolated, which in my opinion is what would drive sales. An RSS feed usually gives a tibit teaser, and the link is an offline nightmare. The link usually has a lot of worthless header and left column stuff that you have to scroll past to get to the article text. Not only is it in the way, but it leads to a lot of extraneous links that waste space and clipping time. And in some cases, the articles linked to from the RSS feed are multiple page articles of unknown number of pages.

I think any tool that can isolate the real article on the majority of sites for clipping and reading would become the primary reader of most PDA users. Even if the value-added from the integrated reader software is minimal, it will be a hot item. (Assuming it's not a pain to read with, of course.)

Even if that content can't be trimmed, it would probably be sufficient if link control could focus somehow on the heart of the articles and then when the article opens it jumps directly to the text of the article (i.e. past the left hand column and top of page "garbage").

But at any rate, I want to support Laurens and this sort of development activity, so I'll buy it at anything <$25 if it's a program that I could make use of at all.

If it is a reader that I can use to consolidate and read all my web content and rss feed content, and it works for most sites without too much garbage or long conversion times or huge file sizes, then it would not only be nice, but revolutionary!

Look forward to seeing the "real deal" this summer. I'm on the edge of my seat. Best of luck with the project, Laurens!

Bob, Sunrise does support url-rewriting for RSS feeds! I think Laurens has already proved what he is capable of by writing Sunrise Desktop.

As Bob said, it now comes down to the viewer application to see if $20 is justified when comparing it to other offline viewer applications.

Bob, Sunrise does support url-rewriting for RSS feeds!Unfortunately URL rewriting is a dead-end, because it requires constant management of the feeds and feed "templates" (SDL files). Because of that, it doesn't scale, its not self-healing, and it always requires a human being at the wheel to fix things when the upstream site changes their layout or design.

Look at Sitescooper for a great example of this. They've been doing exactly this for several years now, and they have a huge collection of .site files that are used to cut, prune, and rewrite website content to give you a slimmer, no-fat, lean useful version of the site. Unfortunately, it requires someone to go through every .site file and check to make sure they're still working. Many aren't. There are thousands of them.

Great idea, but in the end, a dead-end.

Don't get me wrong, I think Laurens has created a great tool and suite for users to use, and it will no-doubt be successful. I just hope his community of users is willing to help him maintain the SDL templates for the next few years. Its not a trivial amount of work.

I'm not sure if link rewrites for RSS will solve the content isolation issue completely, Alex, but yes it would be plenty for me if it's included in the viewer. I'm really excited to see the "real thing", and hope it keeps a lot of what Sunrise has provided.

That's also true as Hacker says, that the site interfaces each have to be maintained. But if it's not too complicated, I don't mind that. I wouldn't want to maintain a library of hundreds or thousands of sites, but for the feeds that I want, I'm willing to do some simple tweaking if I don't have to be a tech guru to do it. Heck, I have almost as much fun setting stuff like that up as I do using it :D

The problem with Sitescooper for me wasn't the out-of-date .site files, it was the out-of-date Sitescooper community. No support or active forums. Versions were incompatible between Sitescooper and iSiloX. I was prepared to invest a little time to learn about Sitescooper, but it got too messy for my taste to make it work, and I wasn't willing to dig in one more layer down. Besides, I guess I'm really in consumer mode now, so I prefer something that is packaged up nicely and just works, even if I give up a little functionality.

I don't know what the the new Sunrise viewer will be, but it seems like it will be a simpler version of sitescooper functionality combining RSS feeds and web clipping, as well as a viewer. If so, that's just what I want, so I'm very excited about it. I look forward to seeing it this summer if it's still on track for that timeframe.