How does Plucker (free) compare to iSilo (commercial)?

[Laurens]

(OK, I'm going to shamelessly plug my Plucker-related project in this thread.)

BlogPluck converts web logs in RSS format to Plucker documents.

http://jpluck.sourceforge.net/blogpluck/

BlogPluck is a Java Web Start application and can be downloaded, installed and run with just one click.

iSilo users might want to run Plucker just to read blogs, and keep iSilo for regular web sites.

[wumpi]

Laurens, really nice tool!!

[gghose]

I was surprised at the difference in file size for a large text only HTML file (a book). The original file was 1.6 M - the plucker version 406 K, and the isilo version 309 K! Plus with isilo there aren't a lot of annoying interruptions to reload the successive parts of the book: there is just one document!

Given my OS (Linux) I was leaning towards Plucker but isilo just seems so superior (and isiloxc works just fine under Linux).

[dgoeg]

Very nice review, Alexander.

...although I already made my decision.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally posted by dgoeg
Very nice review, Alexander.

...although I already made my decision.

Heh, I hope some Plucker fan will update my review soon since the Plucker developer team didn't sleep

Alex

[Zire]

Hey All,

I have used plucker, handstory, Avantgo, and Isilo. Isilo is my choice. I know that it is not free but it is a small price to pay for what it gives us Mac users. I couldn't figure out how to convert documents for Plucker using a mac. Handstory is too bulky I don't even know if they have a mac client. Avantgo stopped supporting macs and I was staying with the old palm desktop because of it and not upgrading to 4.0 because it would freeze my mac when Avantgo tried to load. The new palm desktop is so much better I like the vcard format cause now I can put contacts in my ipod. Isilo is just great. I read my books on it. The files are much smaller then doc files. The fact that you can convert websites to view on it is great. The addition of all of the readily converted websites thanks to Alexander is the best thing since sliced bread. I didn't miss out on any of the old Avantgo channels that I had. I currently have Cool Quiz, Joke A Day, Accu Weather, Dilbert (Couldn't do it with Avantgo), Mac Observer, MSNBC, Palm Infocenter and Voyeurweb (Couldn't get that with Avantgo). Also I have a full color palm and I like the fact that I am not limited to 256 colors as I was with Avantgo.

Isilo rules!!!

[TadW]

Hiho,

looks like the Plucker guys have updated their comparison matrix and now also include iSilo.

http://www.plkr.org/a-vs-p.html

Interestingly, a lot of times they compare a "will-be" version of Plucker (which still contains a log of bugs from what I read at http://bugs.plkr.org/view_all_bug_page.php) to Avantgo and iSilo, and not a "is" version.

Also they fail to compare the useability between the products. So instead of just counting up how many fonts which app supports, they should have also mentioned how fast the screen is refreshed, how smooth scrolling works, how fast a document is loaded, etc.

I keep an up-to-date cvs version of Plucker on my Tungsten, only to see how it evolves. But currently I see absolute no reason why I should switch from my rock-stable iSilo to a not-so-stable Plucker.

[brahamt]

Very nice review Alexander.

For me, I rarely change things when I have something that works. I just like the generally silky smooth way iSilo works. It is nice however, to read really in-depth reviews of other products.

Thanks for the information.

[bobengle2]

I have also used Avantgo, plucker/jpluck, Handstory, Mobipocket, and keep coming back to iSilo. There are things that I don't like about all of them on my clie, but now that iSilo has made it easier to do scheduled conversions, it stands as my reader of choice. But..... There are a few features I'd like to see iSilo add to the viewer. A few small changes would really put iSilo over the top. For instance the ability to show the date and read/unread status in the document list view. A little color would be nice there , also.(no, I'm not counting the new blue scrollbar in ver.4!)

[madmaxmedia]

The only real advantage Plucker has for me is the nice anti-aliased font support in the newest version. ISilo has decent font support now, but not nearly as pretty. On the surface this is not important, but with document readers you are looking at the letters all day. Nice-looking fonts just improve the overall user experience.

Now that there are some font utilities for OS 5 and a great font coverter program (palmfontconv), hopefully 1 of the utilities will support anti-aliased fonts. I would then use a nice font systemwide, so obviously iSilo would then look good too.

I am also "married" to iSilo as I have a large library of documents, so changing is not so practical for me.

Thanks for the review!

[rhubarb]

Sorry for the bad language in this post. I just want to ****ing test something.
I was very impressed by Alexander's review of plucker vs isilo, but was totally distracted and frustrated for the first 10 minutes trying to work out what the **** the word p****r was meant to be.
At first I thought it was plucker as in python plucker. But it didn't make any bloody sense. I thought maybe it was some proprietary term so he couldn't use it. It looked more likely to be p****r but then why the *s.

Then I worked it out, it is p****r but the word **** is blanked out.
Actually I'm not sure how much of this ****ing post is going to be asterisked out by some ****head censorship system. (Once again I apologize for my foul ****ing **** of a gutter mouth - all in the interest of testing).
So let me restate: I think it must be the word P-A-R-S-E-R with the word A-R-S-E automatically censored out.

Great, here's a whole forum about parsing web pages for reading on the palm and we can't say p****r.
I mean, I fully appreciate that the offensive bloody bastards of ****ing buggery swear words I have been using deserve to be censored. But P-A-R-S-E-R?! Please.
****holes
Assholes
****heads

Once again, terriby, terribly sorry to anyone offended by anything that managed to slip through the asterisk-nazi algorithm.

[hacker]

As a long-time user, contributor, and supporter of Plucker, I liked the review, however... it is very misleading in many places.

For one, Plucker Desktop is not Plucker. Spaghetti Sauce is not Spaghetti.

The dithering down of images happens because of a Palm limitation, not a Plucker limitation. It is also activated in Plucker Desktop, not Plucker itself (the viewer). I regularly have ENORMOUS images in Plucker, on my Palm, consisting of thousands of colors, with full-size alternate versions, without any "pixelated" dithering. I don't use Plucker Desktop, however, to create them. Nor do I use JPluck.

The 32k boundary is also a Palm limitation, not a Plucker limitation. We can get around it (and we have, if you try any of the last few stable release versions) with the stitching of pages together into one stream.

There were a few other misnomers in the review, which I will probably comment on later, but Plucker far supercedes iSilo in features and capabilities, but that is a given. Where we fall slightly behind, is in the sort of things that Palm devices and Palmsource forbid us from supporting (DIA is one example, we can't add support for the virtual graffiti area on Tungsten T3 devices, because the license to implement the code hooks specifically forbids use in any Free Software project).

We have full VFS support, advanced search, multiple documents that can be put in different categories, sorted, bookmarks, autoscroll, export to memo, dictionary word lookup, preferences, keyboard/graffiti handling, annotation, transliteration, advanced table handling (such as multiple images in a table cell), and a slew of other features that aren't present or available in iSilo. Additionally, we are free, and our doucment format is open and available to anyone wishing to contribute to supporting or improving it.

Many commercial companies have moved over to using Plucker over iSilo for this reason. They can't risk the "one-developer" path, and having no access to the source code, means they are stuck in a bottle. With Plucker, they have the flexibility to do whatever they wish with it (as long as they adhere to the license of course; we've nailed companies in the past who have violated that license).

But then again, we're not competing with iSilo, and they certainly aren't competing with us.

[hacker]

Originally Posted by madmaxmedia

Now that there are some font utilities for OS 5 and a great font coverter program (palmfontconv), hopefully 1 of the utilities will support anti-aliased fonts. I would then use a nice font systemwide, so obviously iSilo would then look good too.

Take a look at the author of palmfontconv. He's one of the contributing authors of Plucker.

[hacker]

Originally Posted by TadW

Interestingly, a lot of times they compare a "will-be" version of Plucker (which still contains a log of bugs from what I read at http://bugs.plkr.org/view_all_bug_page.php) to Avantgo and iSilo, and not a "is" version.

Are you referring to Bluetooth support? The hooks are there to build it, and it works fine, if you compile the support in for it (my private snapshots contain it), but no releases are made with Bluetooth support.

That is the only feature listed on the comparison that is a "future" (actually "non-deployed" is more accurate) option. The rest are up-to-date.

We support quite a lot more options for images (pan, zoom, scale, dither), MANY more language translations of the viewer (currently 17 different languages), HTML mailto tags to launch a selected Mail app from a link, Gestures, virtual silkscreen, clients for Palm, WinCE, PocketPC, and Linux PDAs, at least 8 document convertors support Plucker directly including an email-only interface, more font selections including custom user-supplied anti-aliased fonts. iSilo has none of these features, and we are also 100k smaller on average, than iSilo.

Trust me, we're way ahead in features and usability than iSilo.

But currently I see absolute no reason why I should switch from my rock-stable iSilo to a not-so-stable Plucker.

Bugs don't fix themselves, so I hope you reported these "not-so-stable" problems you're having, so we can take a look and see if they are really bugs and fix them.

[radleyp]

Talk about "misleading", Hacker! Your 6th paragraph mentions all these features that are supposedly present in Plucker but not in iSilo. In fact, with the exception of "annotation" and "transliteration" (not sure about that one, since I don't know what you mean, are you talking about spelling non-latin alphabets in Latin?) they are all in iSilo, along with many other features. I have found Plucker and JPlucker to be unsatisfactory: I never could get the latter to work right, and as a reader iSilo is much better, with its really smooth scrolling and its large choice of fonts. I would love to use the Plucker you are describing, but I have not found it. Philippe Radley

Originally Posted by hacker

As a long-time user, contributor, and supporter of Plucker, I liked the review, however... it is very misleading in many places.

For one, Plucker Desktop is not Plucker. Spaghetti Sauce is not Spaghetti.

The dithering down of images happens because of a Palm limitation, not a Plucker limitation. It is also activated in Plucker Desktop, not Plucker itself (the viewer). I regularly have ENORMOUS images in Plucker, on my Palm, consisting of thousands of colors, with full-size alternate versions, without any "pixelated" dithering. I don't use Plucker Desktop, however, to create them. Nor do I use JPluck.

The 32k boundary is also a Palm limitation, not a Plucker limitation. We can get around it (and we have, if you try any of the last few stable release versions) with the stitching of pages together into one stream.

There were a few other misnomers in the review, which I will probably comment on later, but Plucker far supercedes iSilo in features and capabilities, but that is a given. Where we fall slightly behind, is in the sort of things that Palm devices and Palmsource forbid us from supporting (DIA is one example, we can't add support for the virtual graffiti area on Tungsten T3 devices, because the license to implement the code hooks specifically forbids use in any Free Software project).

We have full VFS support, advanced search, multiple documents that can be put in different categories, sorted, bookmarks, autoscroll, export to memo, dictionary word lookup, preferences, keyboard/graffiti handling, annotation, transliteration, advanced table handling (such as multiple images in a table cell), and a slew of other features that aren't present or available in iSilo. Additionally, we are free, and our doucment format is open and available to anyone wishing to contribute to supporting or improving it.

Many commercial companies have moved over to using Plucker over iSilo for this reason. They can't risk the "one-developer" path, and having no access to the source code, means they are stuck in a bottle. With Plucker, they have the flexibility to do whatever they wish with it (as long as they adhere to the license of course; we've nailed companies in the past who have violated that license).

But then again, we're not competing with iSilo, and they certainly aren't competing with us.