Sunrise author explains why Palm OS is unfeasable

[Alexander Turcic]

"My decision to abandon Palm OS development for now has to be seen in the context of my business plan," Laurens explains. You should read his full blog entry, which makes it perfectly clear why Palm OS is currently unfeasable for small developers.

Just as a side note: Sunrise 0.36d is released today removing the HotSync Manager requirement (= Vade Mecum users can now use Sunrise as well).

[Bob Russell]

Great to hear of the new Sunrise release. I'll give it a try now!

[Bob Russell]

I'm very excited about how this looks. Just as I suspected from some screen shots, this Sunrise is gonna be great stuff! Working great with Vade Mecum as expected! I'm just getting started, so I'm sure I'll hit some gotchas, but let me tell you what I've seen so far:
1) Easy to install. You do have to install an older Java Runtime Environment (JRE), but that's no big deal.
2) Easy to output directly to your PocketPC ram by setting the appropriate my documents subdirectory that points to your PPC folder. I created one called "SunriseRAMfiles" to be explicit. I wish you could do something to send the output directly to a memory card, like my internal flash ROM or my 1gig card, but no big deal again. Besides, I suspect if it's not already there hidden somewhere, it will come soon. We PPC folks have to be patient and remember it wasn't really even a PPC tool until today!
3) Can extract directly from the browser, but I think I'll keep iSiloX for that right now. I did try this from IE and it works fine. I also added the FireFox extension, but didn't test it yet.
4) I was able to do fancy stuff within the first few minutes. I tried out Alex's new Washington Times feed liquifier (or whatever it was called), and it worked amazingly well. Maybe I just got lucky, but I set the source = https://www.mobileread.com, but did Edit Source Content which seems to be a place to replace or write scripts to edit the source content (imagine that!) I don't know javascript, so I tried just putting the following

"<a href="https://www.mobileread.com/avantgo/wttop_mobile.html" target="_blank">Washington Times - World</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mobileread.com/avantgo/wtna_mobile.html" target="_blank">Washington Times - Nation/Politics</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mobileread.com/avantgo/wtbu_mobile.html" target="_blank">Washington Times - Business</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mobileread.com/avantgo/wteo_mobile.html" target="_blank">Washington Times - Editorials/Op-Ed</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mobileread.com/avantgo/wtco_mobile.html" target="_blank">Washington Times - Commentary</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mobileread.com/avantgo/wtme_mobile.html" target="_blank">Washington Times - Metropolitan</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mobileread.com/avantgo/wtsp_mobile.html" target="_blank">Washington Times - Sports</a><br />
<a href="https://www.mobileread.com/avantgo/wten_mobile.html" target="_blank">Washington Times - Entertainment</a>"

and VOILA! I have a table of contents now for all the Wash Times content. Just like magic! I was flying blind because I didn't see any help or info about edit source content, but talk about well-designed software. My guess at what to do turned out to work like magic!!!!! Of course, I tweaked the link depth to 2 to cover the extra link from the TOC. Cool beans!!!!!! I know everything won't go as well as my experience so far, but I'm really excited.

Plus you can do URL substitution to get the print versions automatically (What is the difference between URLs and URIs? Seems like all the Java coders call them URIs so there must be something to it.)

And you can use dates and time in the doc name. You can do scripting in various places, but that might be too much for me to pick up without effort. And there's scheduling. Looks like you might be able to only refresh what's needed at some level also, not sure.

Anyone reading this can probably tell I'm really excited. If that annoys anyone, I'm sorry. But this is really cool. Like I said, there's always headaches and gotchas that come up, but so far so good. Wheee!

Using scripting, it looks like you can even control things differently for each link level. And I'm hoping you can do things like remove the first part of the page if there's garbage content like the menus on the left side column that comes before the center column "real" content. May be a long time before I can even figure out if that's possible unless there's some good examples there.

Oh, yeah, if you choose File...Showcase, you get a list of predefined sites, which I didn't try, but probably take advantage of a lot of the cool features.

And, oh oh oh, I hardly had to do anything to set it up to use my Firfox cookies. Haven't tried that yet either, but oh my gosh, if it's really that easy I'm delighted!

And another thing I haven't tried is RSS feeds, but you seem to be able to do those also. That's one place the refresh only, or get rid of old stuff would be great. I like the idea of having RSS feeds together with my other daily reading.

What I plan to use this for is my daily automatic morning web clips that I take with me every day. (Which reminds me... I should check out the cartoon page and see if that works in Sunrise also.) Now I can probably include daily RSS stuff I'd like to have with me. No time to read it all, usually, but it's nice to have around when I have time.

iSilo will probably continue to be my reader for things I find while browsing and clip to read later. Partly because it's so easy to use and I'm used to it. For example, I don't have to highlight text to clip the whole page like I do with Sunrise. I can click the icon for iSiloX, but have to right mouse click for Sunrise. [Edit: And the Sunrise desktop has to be running to clip.] No big deal at all, but since iSiloX works for me so solid, I'll keep using it for that. In fact, I have so much converted to iSilo, I don't think I'll ever leave iSilo reader behind unless it becomes useless or incredibly expensive. I hate the idea of ever losing all that content that I have in iSilo format.

I'll probably continue to use iSilo for reading Gutenberg ebooks also. It's just a little nicer to use than Vade Mecum for me and seems to look nicer on the screen.

For now, I like eReader Pro for purchased ebooks and for palm docs. It's also a nice reader and I really like the way the text looks. The background texture seems to help also.

Eventually, I plan to try to convert all my automatic daily web clipping to Sunrise from iSiloX. I think I'm going to see a big quality improvement in the clips because it can convert in parallel, and because I might even learn how to snip out the "stupid" content that isn't really the core articles I want. And I look forward to seeing what the Sunrise reader turns out to look like also.

Okay, I'll relax now. Time to go eat something anyway. But hopefully, this will encourage someone out there to give Sunrise a try. You don't know what you're missing! (And the more people using it, the better chance I have of getting help from everyone )

[Laurens]

Thanks for your post, BobR! Glad you liked it.

[Alexander Turcic]

Wooow that review makes Sunrise really SHINE I cannot wait to unpack my new PPC which is still somewhere in the middle of the road in an UPS container.

[gadgetguru]

You don't need a PPC for Sunrise (yet), the converter currently to convert to Plucker format and Plucker on Palm platform is more mature than Vade Mecum. Eventually the Sunrise successor (and viewer) will be Windows Mobile only, but that's not until February 2005. I'll stay with my NX80 until then...

Laurens: The roadmap stays the same (except platform)? That is, Sunrise development continues until the Viewer is ready. Then Sunrise development is stopped. And the unnamed successor (together with Viewer) will be unveiled?

The successor converter will be PC and the converted format will be accessible only on Window Mobile devices?

[Alexander Turcic]

gadgetguru: I know, but on my old Palm I haven't really used Plucker anymore (which works better on OS5 machines than OS4, at least that was my experience). That is why I wait for my PPC to try Vade Mecum.

Cheers

[ignatz]

Vade Mecum .6 is working well with Sunrise, just as Bob described. I just started using it today and I couldn't be happier. It doesn't have the options that Plucker or iSilo have, but for a no-frills reader it works just fine. Just being able to use Sunrise with PPC is great! BTW, I'm still on Sunrise 0.3.1a and it works fine with Vade Mecum. I haven't had any problems at all.

[cbarnett]

I really am going to have to give Sunrise a try, now, aren't I... D:

Craig.

[Alexander Turcic]

I will give Vade Mecum a try just because of Sunrise. I've tried a couple of other PPC e-book readers so far (ereader pro trial, iSilo, ubook), among which I liked iSilo the best. ubook looks fine but its UI is very different from what I seen before. And ereader pro doesn't seem to support VGA, at least it didn't look good on my PDA screen.