NO Offline RSS Newsfeed Reader on P800 / J2ME !

August 05, 2003

NO Offline RSS Newsfeed Reader on P800 / J2ME !

Well, I have been researching the web now for more than 2 hours to find a tool for performing a common task on my Sony Ericsson P800 RSS newsfeed reading on my P800 ... and this of course *OFFLINE* while sitting in the pool - without additional GPRS transfer cost if I just took my P800 away from the docking station :-(

Can you believe it? No application found - no Opensource, no Commercial, no nothing - Am I the only person equipped with a Smartphone with some megs (80 to be precise) longing for an offline version of Sharpreader or some other Aggregator?

I used the great RSS Feed Reader Directory by Hebig and this great RSS resources page addition to good old Google (yes - including the New Fuzzy Search Operator :-)

Well, what I found of course were 3 J2ME applications (J2ME is Sun's Java 2, Mobile Edition. Which, up until recently has meant Java for cellphones) and ONLY one very neat native too supporting offline-browsing of feeds and pages for Palm and Pocket PC that I would hope to be ported to the P800 soon...

The 3 online tools using J2ME to test now are:

Friday v0.91 - supports ONLY the Syndic8 news aggregation site. In the near future, it shall support others, such as Meerkat and NewsIsFree... all online access of course and probably more for small-memory phones... no replication feature in sight, but even looks were interesting...
mReader v1.0 - Processing of RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0, RDF (cool ) - Importing of an OPML outliner file from the web (like Sharpreader and others create it, so you don't have to type all these extraordinary long RSS feed urls by hand...
PeekAndPick is demo-application from Sun's Java page - at least it's version 2, but it's already 1 yr old... read about it at Oreilly

The offline-browsing tool Plucker is an offline Web and eBook viewer for Palm OS® based handheld devices and PDAs and comes multi-platform tools that let you decide exactly what part of the web that you want to view on your PDA. Thats a quite specific way to extract pieces from the web including hyperlinks, images, etc. to your PDA [ not P800 :-( ] ... that would be cool! and that should be worth the effort to be ported to EPOC/Symbian by the plucker-developers...

Using other tools like JPluck it is possible to convert RSS feeds into the plucker format aswell. To get an idea of the comprehensive features supported checkout the Plucker feature comparison matrix...

Well, but after all - there is no offline RSS browser for my P800, so I will test the online tools and write a mail to the plucker creators to beg for a "Plucker Viewer for P800" :-)

20:05 in P800 | (G) | Feedback (6) |

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Posted by Rafe at August 6, 2003 12:16 PM

I will do a "heavy" version of mReader with offline browsing support if you like.

Will the P800's J2ME VM let me store a lot of stuff on devices that have the available storage though, im not sure, and I only really use the Nokia 7210 with a paultry few hundred K worth of storage space.

If you want me to give offline storage a go then drop me a line via email, it shouldn't take too long to get working.

Posted by Mark Allanson at August 8, 2003 12:00 PM

G'day

Awasu (www.awasu.com) has some support for working together with Plucker to allow you to read content while offline. I had been talking with somebody else about a while back about taking it further but he seems to have lost interest.

I would definitely like to add more support for this kind of thing into Awasu so if you'd like to be involved, please send me an email and we can talk.

Thanks

Posted by Taka at September 11, 2003 06:16 AM

I've looking for a solution to this very same problem for a while.

The best I have come with so far (which could be altered to do offline storage - which it kind of deos already) is here:

http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/applications/peekandpick/2.0/

great source and documentation to build your own :)

all by this guy: http://home.sprynet.com/~jknudsen/

Posted by Kosso at February 11, 2004 06:03 PM

I've looking for a solution to this very same problem for a while.

The best I have come with so far (which could be altered to do offline storage - which it kind of does already) is here:

http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/applications/peekandpick/2.0/

great source and documentation to build your own :)