For all newbies...you gotta get Avantgo!

[tmiller]

Ok so I've been hearing Avantgo mentioned on these forums more times than I can count, but being brand new to PDA's I had no idea what it was. Finally, I took the time to check out www.Avantgo.com and may I just say WOW! This is an amazing app, and definitely at the top of my must-have list. Anyone who isn't familiar with it should definitely check it out.

~Tracy

[xyeta]

...and then, after reading up on this memory hog, go to www.isilo.com and www.turcic.com and use iSilo for web clipping and document viewing. Many eBooks are iSilo friendly, and with iSiloX you can clip any web page right from MSIE ...or sync a list of sites to your MS and enjoy 20% better compression than other web clipping apps.

Obviously, iSilo is my personal favorite, but maybe HandStory or AvantGo is your cup of tea... try them ALL... Web clipping is awesome once you get it figured out, and as for eBooks, I'd rather have a book on my NX80 than in paper any day!

oh, forgot to mention, with iSilo you can create your own documents or eBooks quite easily!

[na2rboy]

Plucker (http://www.plkr.org) ;)

[hherbzilla]

Here's the link to HandStory (http://handstory.com/)

[tmiller]

Of course everything is a matter of opinion. Speaking as a new user, I feel Avantgo is the simplest and I thought I might help someone else out who, like me, wasn't aware of the capabilities of an app like this one, so I passed it along.

To each his own.

~Tracy

[Flash-57]

Avantgo is a fine application. It's biggest benefit is that it's easy to use. You just log onto the Avantgo website, add a channel, and you're done.

Personally, I am in the iSilo camp. 90% of the documents I want to read, I do so with iSilo. But, I still use Avantgo for the daily news sites.

[starbuckk]

Avantgo is to iSilo what an auto-focus, auto flash, fixed lens point and shoot camera is to a changable lens, manual focus, program/auto/manual external flash camera.
The former is best for someone just starting out, and probably great for most general purpose users. iSilo is for the person that wants a lot more power and is willing to take the extra time to set it up and get things "just so".

Keep sharing those favorite apps! There's always someone out there that hasn't heard of them yet.

[strider_mt2k]

Of course any decent photographer will have several cameras.

Will any of these other programs allow you to get your pages when you are wireless on the road?

One of the things that keeps me using AvantGo is the ability to modem sync when I'm on the road.

For many users this is important.

[Cheechwhiz]

RE: memory hog comment above-
You can slam AVantgo up into the FlashZone with Jackflash and significantly reduce the hogging. Then, you put most of the rest of Avantgo's file on your card. Runs fine enough for me.
With Jack installed, even with multiple "large" programs installed to Flash,
I usually have somewhere around 6megs free memory available. I can do a NetFront install just for the day.

[dan3750]

I purchased both iSilo and HandStory over 9 months ago, largely because of all the hype they were getting on this website, but I have hardly ever used them.

But more to the point, there were no web-pages I cared enough to store on my nx60 for offline viewing.

May I ask what sort of web-pages you place onto your pda's for offline viewing, aside from ebooks, that is?

=Dan

 

[tmiller]

I use Avantgo channels for weather and news, and I have mapquest on there in case I ever need it for a particular trip. I created my own channel for my local movie theater listings, and I think I'm going to add a page for movie reviews for those times I'm standing in the middle of Blockbuster trying to figure out if the movie I picked is a good one.

The possibilities are endless!

~Tracy

[laconf]

I use Isilo for many different purposes,such as keeping technical information on palm such as formulas,statistical references,game walkthroughs for a quick glance while playing on PC, or for large web pages that is hard to read its all content during visit such as:

http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/JokEc.html

[strider_mt2k]

Originally posted by tmiller
I use Avantgo channels for weather and news, and I have mapquest on there in case I ever need it for a particular trip. I created my own channel for my local movie theater listings, and I think I'm going to add a page for movie reviews for those times I'm standing in the middle of Blockbuster trying to figure out if the movie I picked is a good one.

The possibilities are endless!

~Tracy


Agreed.
Avantgo is also a web browser.
Not a great one, but one nonetheless.

[starbuckk]

Originally posted by dan3750
May I ask what sort of web-pages you place onto your pda's for offline viewing, aside from ebooks, that is?
 

As all the others, daily news and weather mostly, along with funnies, movie times from Hollywood.com. I spend about 8 hours each week on a train where I can't connect, so its a matter of saving all that stuff for reading at a time when I don't have access.

I also save certain favorite Clie Source threads (see my post in Tips and Tricks for how to capture specific threads from Clie Source into iSilo) that I use regularly for reference.

Pages I use are
Accuweather (I capture two different cities)
Fresno Airport status (from FAA web site, you can get a page showing the status of any Airport you want, and it converts to PDA format quite nicely.)
USA Today news briefs
Hollywood.com movie listings for my zip code
Joke-A-Day
Coolquiz.com
Cato Daily Dispatch
Cato Daily Commentary
Geek News
Wired News
Yahoo Mail (turcic.com has a thread on how to download your Yahoo mail to iSilo)
Palm Boulevard
Palm Info Center
MSNBC

I used to get CNN.COM but they stopped their PDA feeds :(

Note that obviously all of these go to the Memory stick. That would be way too much for internal memory. This is one reason I switched to iSilo. At the time I switched, Avantgo didn't support storage to the MS.

[hherbzilla]

Originally posted by dan3750
May I ask what sort of web-pages you place onto your pda's for offline viewing, aside from ebooks, that is?

Weather
Area Codes
Various news clippings
Hollywood-com
Metacritic
MovieMinder (local movie listings)
the ONION
Variety
WIRED
etc.

[Flash-57]

Originally posted by dan3750
May I ask what sort of web-pages you place onto your pda's for offline viewing, aside from ebooks, that is?


Well, let's see. I have a link to the weekly Top 40 music chart. I have one to the weekly Neilsen ratings. I have some for the weekly NCAA Football and Basketball rankings. I also have the daily NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA standings loaded. I also have a page for the standings in our bowling league. I also have The Onion and The Straight Dope weekly papers linked.

Now, I don't look at all of these pages all the time. But, I know that they are available if I need to.

[bearboy]

If you like Avantgo, try Vindigo (www.vindigo.com)!!

[pee]

another alternative is jpluck (and plucker) http://jpluck.sourceforge.net/

[*YellowRose*]

Originally posted by dan3750
May I ask what sort of web-pages you place onto your pda's for offline viewing, aside from ebooks, that is?

=Dan
Weather
Drop The Donut
Geek.com
New DVD Releases
PalmInfoCenter
PDA Geek.com
PDA Thoughts.com
The Gadgeteer.com
Wes Salmon.com (He started PDABuzz, and he's a RIOT!)
Wired.com
And a local TV station now has a PDA version!! :D

[NX70BOY]

Originally posted by dan3750

May I ask what sort of web-pages you place onto your pda's for offline viewing, aside from ebooks, that is?

Weather
News
Sports

[spork27]

I used AvantGo for about 3 days before I found Plucker. While AvantGo was easy, Plucker just blew it away.

As far I stuff I sync every morning. Weather, Movies, The Onion, and weekly the local bar and music guide.

[notmuch]

Originally posted by tmiller
For all newbies...you gotta get Avantgo!

I think tmiller is spot on. For newbies nothing beats Avantgo.... sure it's bloatware, and the content is limited (although still very good). It is easy, free, and pretty fast. I still use it everyday along with iSilo for clipping the web.

[runher]

Gott'a ask...What's "Drop the Donut"?

[Illah]

THE ONION!!!

Man, I'm from Chicago and I almost forgot about our hometown precursor to The Daily Show! Now I'm gonna get this prog :)

But before I do... How much space on average do all these offline pages eat? Can they be stored on the memstick and NOT in RAM? And besides their 'sponsored' channels, can you easily sync up with any old site?

--Illah

[hherbzilla]

I use Handstory and, yes, you can store them on the MS. That's where I keep mine. The space depends on page depth, images (no images, 16 greys, 256 colors or high depth).

Some examples:
Weather - 7K
Hollywood.com - 572K
MSNBC - 99K
The ONION (it's broken into modules) - 124K to 657K

Yes, you can easily sync with any old site. However, if it isn't mobile friendly, it probably won't look very good. You can also create scripts to extract just the content you want, but I haven't mastered that process yet.

Handstory even adds an icon to your IE toolbar so you can click on it and grab a page that you're visiting. Or if you see an image you like, you can right-click on it and select Save to Palm or Clip to Palm. At the next Hotsync, it'll be on your PDA and viewable from within Handstory. Want some text (e.g., directions)? Just highlight the text and ctrl-c, then click the Handstory icon in your system tray and you can convert it to Handstory.

The main drawback is that Handstory only syncs automatically once per day at midnight. You can manually update clips whenever you want, but it would be nice if you could schedule certainly clips to update on the hour or whatever. Hopefully in a future release.

Originally posted by Illah
THE ONION!!!

Man, I'm from Chicago and I almost forgot about our hometown precursor to The Daily Show! Now I'm gonna get this prog :)

But before I do... How much space on average do all these offline pages eat? Can they be stored on the memstick and NOT in RAM? And besides their 'sponsored' channels, can you easily sync up with any old site?

--Illah

[*YellowRose*]

Originally posted by runher
Gott'a ask...What's "Drop the Donut"?

It's really Put Down The Donut (http://www.putdownthedonut.com/archives/001510.php) :D

[wellsjs]

Personally, I'm getting tired of Avantgo's unreliability. Server's down or overloaded more than it's up! They need to throw full support into this product or dump it if it's not worth their effort. :eek:

[Dags]

Avantgo was terrible last time I used it and then promptly gave it up for good. Isilo or Plucker do everything better and Plucker is free too.

Have they fixed the issues with the MS sync and OS5 fonts yet in Avantgo?

[soman]

I have the 8 mb account

All the news from Reuters – UK 450k
BayArea.com Mobile 200k
BBC News 150k
BBC Sport 160k
Business Week Online Handheld Edition 150k
CNET News.com 200k
CNN international edition 150k
ComputerUser.com 200k
Economist.com Mobile Edition 80k
EuroNews 80k
FT.com 400k
Guardian Unlimited 150k
Guardian Unlimited Sport 150k
Guardian Unlimited Top Stories 80k
Le Monde interactif - actualités 150k
MediaGuardian.co.uk 150k
MSNBC.com Headlines 100k
New York Times 140k
New York Times - Front Page 70k
New York Times - Technology 30k
New York Times – International 50k
New York Times – Latest News 70k
PC WORLD.COM 60k
tf1.fr en poche 350k
The Times 140k
The Wall Street Journal 150k
TIME Asia Mobile Edition 200k
TIME Europe Mobile Edition 225k
washingtonpost.com 125k
Wired News 175k
ZDNet UK To Go 250k

[tts52]

With some sadness I deleted AvantGo last night. It was the first application that showed me what a Palm could back on my IIIxe.
I realized that I could get all my AvantGo content via wireless at PDAportal.com. AvantGo had become unreliable and took way too much precious memory.

[RD100]

Look at 03/20/2004 on this (http://cebooks.blogspot.com/) webpage.

You can upgrade your AvantGo account from 2MB to 3MB for free.

[Fez]

Is there anyway to get AvantGo on a Mac without the Mark/Space Web sharing Software?

[Nanook]

Yes, no thanks to AvantGo...

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21680

[ClieKun]

I like AVg Is great after years of use! I still love it :D

[swampcat]

Like TTs52, I've taken off Avantgo because it became redundant when wireless came along. All my news and information which I draw from Avantgo can be viewed from with my web browser.

Hey Tracy, have you tried Mobipocket's ebook & enews reader? Its free as well (unless you decide to buy pro version) and you can create your own channels too or just choose channels from desktop mobipocket and sync. Other features include making ebooks (from html). Also they have a great dictionary selection for sale. Downside: their ebooks aren't transferable to other users.

http://www.mobipocket.com

[ClieKun]

well for some its not redundant.

[swampcat]

Wireless not only made my avantgo redundant but whole other bunch of programs too! Anyone try Hand/RSS?

[*YellowRose*]

Originally posted by swampcat
Wireless not only made my avantgo redundant but whole other bunch of programs too! Anyone try Hand/RSS? I've tried it, but RSS feeds don't 'scoop' very much . . . I like more 'meat' with my web scoops . . . :)

[swampcat]

Yah, I wish it would too - looks really promising.

[winexprt]

Originally posted by swampcat
Wireless not only made my avantgo redundant but whole other bunch of programs too! Anyone try Hand/RSS?

Hmm...I found the wireless capabilities of my UX50 greatly improves my AvantGo experience. With so many open WiFi access points here in NYC, I can update AvantGo often...for the times I can't connect via WiFi and have fresh content on my Clie for the train ride home! ;)

[ClieKun]

Again not for all is AvG redundant for some..........

[Fez]

Okay, I got the conduit. But I cant configure my device. When I try too, It downloads a 5k file called "AUTCONFIG.MAL". What do I do?

[tkyn]

Ok went and got avantgo as I am a total newb to all of this and you guys are correct it was easy for A nOOb like me to get it up and running. My question is what type of memory management do I have to do, I think that all the stuff I am reading is down loaded to my MS do I have to delete it or is all the old crap deleted upon a hot-sync. Yes I am that new :D

[RD100]

Hopefully some of you took advantage of my comment above about updating your AvantGo account from 2MB to 3MB for free.

My free AvantGo account now has 3MB of space.

Unfortunately the link I provided above is no longer available.

[winexprt]

Originally posted by RD100
Hopefully some of you took advantage of my comment above about updating your AvantGo account from 2MB to 3MB for free.

My free AvantGo account now has 3MB of space.

Unfortunately the link I provided above is no longer available.

If you look around on the AvantGo main page (after you log in) it's still there. I saw it a few days ago.

[winexprt]

Originally posted by tkyn
Ok went and got avantgo as I am a total newb to all of this and you guys are correct it was easy for A nOOb like me to get it up and running. My question is what type of memory management do I have to do, I think that all the stuff I am reading is down loaded to my MS do I have to delete it or is all the old crap deleted upon a hot-sync. Yes I am that new :D

AvantGo is fire & forget. It will update your channels with fresh content and delete your old ones automatically. Tres easy!

[Unregistered]

Originally posted by winexprt


AvantGo is fire & forget. It will update your channels with fresh content and delete your old ones automatically. Tres easy!

Just an update to your post about the free upgrdae to 3MB. As of this post it is still valid.

[winexprt]

Originally posted by Unregistered


Just an update to your post about the free upgrdae to 3MB. As of this post it is still valid.

Thanks buddy! :D

Yeah, AFAIK the free upgrade dealy is still on...just buried on the AvantGo homepage somewhere now. I say this because when they first began this offer, it was via a banner ad in my AG main page on my Clie. They just wanted yo to answer a few questions, then you were upgraded automatically. But I believe it's still offered. Grab it...it's a good deal! Why not?? ;)

[TheUltimate]

Any ideas as to if theres a 320X480 version? Looked everywhere didnt see it, but maybe im looking in the wrong place. Would love to have 320x480 version of avantgo..... Thanks

[winexprt]

Originally posted by TheUltimate
Any ideas as to if theres a 320X480 version? Looked everywhere didnt see it, but maybe im looking in the wrong place. Would love to have 320x480 version of avantgo..... Thanks

That's the current version's resolution, no? What they are missing is an 480x320 widescreen version for my UX50. I had an NX80V and when I did AvantGo used the whole screen, I mean it went the whole lenth of my screen. Sure you have the latest version for OS5? v. 5.3 Build 77??

[TheUltimate]

Yea I have 5.3 build 77...hmmm I havent tried it on my NX70, ive only used it on my T3 and it does do full screen support(320x480) Kinda upset by this....hmmm not sure...

[winexprt]

AH-HAAA! T|3...ya failed ta mention that little tidbit! ;)...this being a Clie site & all. :p

[TheUltimate]

haha its just a play toy palm...my main one is a NX70 ...thats my baby!

[winexprt]

ok...it should run fullscreen on your clie.

[TheUltimate]

yea thats what i figure....

[ClieBen]

Here is the link to the free 3MB upgrade: www.avantgo.com/update

BTW, thanks for mentioning that as I just answered their little survey and got some extra space. :cool:

[strider_mt2k]

Excellent!
Glad I checked this topic again!

I find the AvantGo and NetFront are a great combination.
Offline and online content.