AvantGo comes back to life
I just learned that there's a recently activated AvantGo Beta program and decided to give an old friend another chance... I was hooked on AvantGo early in my Palm days and even used VirtualPC to sync it before there was a proper Mac conduit. There's still no proper Mac conduit directly from the source, but it's simple for non-Windows users today if you use a wireless device (you can do it over the air) or on Mac OS X you can use Missing Sync with the MAL conduit as I've done.
The latest beta is version 5.7 Build 26. I am not completely certain, but I think it's the first real release since the company was acquired by iAnywhere. I had given the previous version 5.5 a run, but was really not that psyched with how it worked on my Treo - limited 5-way support and it just did not look all that great.
This latest release fully supports the Treo and allows for much great account management on the device itself. You can now fully customize the display order for channels and even browse the entire collection of available channels from your device which is a very nice addition and enables mostly computer free control. While you can choose to surf or sync the channels you have selected (or any site actually since it is a browser after all) with a live connection, you will be more impressed if you use AvantGo in an offline capacity as the speed in which pre-cached content loads is great.
AvantGo existed before RSS came into the mainstream and it looks like it just might keep on pushing to bring professionally formatted content down to your device with each sync. You can easily read news or site updates from a variety of sources during your commute or simply just killing a few minutes. You'll need about 2MB of free space in order to install the required .prc files and store content from your account. If you've paid for the premium level of service you can keep up to 8MB of information -- assuming you have that much free space.
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Comments
Hi dude. love your weblog. highly informative, read it everyday since a couple of weeks that i discovered it. I read today that you own a mac. I was wondering what html editor you use to make webpages. I bet you'll say some text edit though. do you know a WYSIWYG that works well on mac? i'm fed up of using VPC just for frontpage. Cheers for helping
I'm sure Andrew would appreciate me stating -- Thanks for reading!
I guess I am the resident Mac guy at Treonauts and I don't do much coding of pages myself. This site runs on Typepad which is a WYSIWYG blog system. All you have to do is select simple buttons to bold, link or whatever you want and you get the page layout you've previously defined from a template stucture that manages the site.
I have used Dreamweaver and GoLive, which I know are quite expensive for a single user, but it's an excellent way to visually get what you need if you are not comfortable with the code. If you are, you might just like a nice text editor like BBEdit, SubEthEdit or TextMate.
Unfortunately there are still some AvantGo sites that don't fit into the Treo screen. These are just text pages but it seems they're hard formatted to require scrolling horizontally to read. AvantGo should be able to override this and autoformat for the screen. CS Monitor is one such site
Loading seems to take much longer in the beta.
Try the above link for a free WYSIWYG web page designer just for Macs. I have only used it to tweak sites made with other apps but it is coming along nicely.
In installing AvantGo on the new Treo 650, only the libmal file (171K) needs to be in system memory. The sync software and the main AvantGo app can be copied to and run from your SD memory card.
I just tried moving via Initiate on my Treo 600 and found that when launched it still has to copy back in order to run which means you need the space available.
thanks guys. I heard a lot about GoLive, i guess i have to take a closer look at it. Nvu seems very interesting too!
Hi. I just purchased a treo 600 and love it - but my syncing gets hung up on the previous mal conduit I had downloaded for my zire. It has been so long since I have messed with Avantgo installations and conduits -I just used it all the time after I figured out how to get it on my palm. Are you saying there is a new conduit? Can you be specific on the steps to upgrade to the treo for avantgo or at least the conduit site i should go to? thanks
Jennifer -
You might want to try installing the non-beta version...
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