Registered: Aug 2000
Location:
Posts: 9

Howdy folks!

The geek percentage here has to be pretty high, so this is the best place to ask... anyone know any good sites that discuss developing sites that are optimized for the PalmOS? VisorCentral should REALLY have an article on this... I haven't seen one on stars.com or anywhere on this site, and it seems like it'd be handy. I ask this because I've loaded sites with AvantGo that won't work (the sites may be scripted or what not, but the LAST thing I imagine ANY company wants to do now is block themselves out of the Palm revolution.)

I'm a web designer, and I think this would be some massively useful info. I'd be happy to plod through a list of links and compile an article for this site or something if it would benefit anyone else here (assuming it doesn't exist, and I'm not a moron!)

I really want to learn the WAP limitations ... what can and can not be displayed properly, and what can and can not be formatted properly for cell phones, PDAs etc. It's going to be a huge thing within a very short time.

- Chris
someoneATdigitalrodent.com

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: bright side of the moon.
Posts: 996

If you go to AvantGo's website and click around under Developers or Development (can't remember) you can download a fair amount info on developing avantgo friendly sites. they have some examples of javascript, etc. hang on...let me find the link....ahh...here it is:

http://avantgo.com/developer/web/index.html

pretty interesting stuff....someday when i get to it, i've always wanted to set up my own personal avantgo page with links to the channels that i like and other 'palm friendly' sites so that when i'm surfing on my visor i could use my page as a starting point. A good website for this is used to be http://www.pawgo.com but for some reason this site doesn't exist anymore!

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Stealth-Mod.

Registered: Feb 2000
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 165

Developing for handhelds

Hey, Chris!

There's a pretty good article at Webmonkey about designing for PDA's:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey....html?tw=design

Also (plug, plug) be sure to check out my article on vectorizing Diddle graphics:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey....html?tw=design


Hoser beat me to the punch with the AvantGo developer page - there's a lot of good stuff there. If you do start doing some serious page development you'll probably want to download the Palm Emulator (You can download ROMs for all of the different Palm Models, including the IIIc - not sure about the Visor, but if you have a serial cradle you can download the ROM from your own unit.)

http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/tools/emulator/

With the emulator on your desktop and a simulated modem connection, it's a lot easier to check your works in progress by refreshing in AvantGo, ProxiWeb, etc. instead of resyncing, plus you save on batteries.

http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/tools/emulator/

OK, back to building that Quake III Map I was puttering with... so long!

-Andy

Registered: Aug 2000
Location:
Posts: 9

Thank you both. I am about to hit the books! I will certainly be DLing the emulator and going nuts for the next couple weeks. I have a free consumer to consumer info site that I'm developing that I think would be awesome to take portable ("It says here that most people are only paying $19,900 for this Accord V6. What's the story, tough guy???")

Thanks again, and to anyone else, keep em coming! I still think that this stuff should be linked via an article on this site!

- Chris

Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Edgewater, MD
Posts: 41

Developing Palm-Friendly Sites -- Easy.

It's very easy, actually, and AvantGo is very helpful. When we had questions, one of their technical people was made available to us, and when I had a slight logistical problem, I received email from both the CEO and the CFO smoothing the waters. We are looking forward to creating some fabulous wireless intranets in the near future using AvantGo technology.

The graphics are extremely limited, of course. You're limited to icon-type graphics in small sizes -- exact info is available on the AvantGo developer's page.

The content has to be extremely concise. Otherwise, it's just too unwieldy to read easily.

You'll want to get a URL like pda.yoursite.com that AvantGo will point their server to.

We boiled down our large B2B website to the essential info that we want our visitors to receive and built those pages in HTML. For the pieces of the site that need a lot of updating like the press release section, we already had an existing Cold Fusion interface that allows any authorized person to launch content to the www site -- so we just changed the code a little so that it would simultaneously launch to the PDA site.

We have some other neat stuff on it. The calendar for our Investor Relations is maintained by the IR dept in the same way that our press releases are maintained. There are forms that users can fill out which email requests for info to our sales dept when the user syncs. We are currently about to add another form that when emailed upon syncing will generate an automated responder that has product datasheets in PDF format sent to the requestor's email address.

We had the whole thing done, from conception to launch, in less than a week. If you'd like to see what we've done, and personally I'm very proud of it, visit our home page and click on the picture of the guy using a PDA.

http://www.usi.net

Thanks!
Jay

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Jay
Building a Boat & a Dream
http://www.adventuregrrl.com