> What I'm looking for are some successful projects that may have been
> in a similar situation. Are there commercial packages out there that
> have such severe memory requirements (the only ones I could find
> were media players where you pick and choose individual multimedia
> files to copy to your card -- not actual packages where the
> requirements out of the box were very large).
I regularly create 700-800MB+ documents with Plucker.
Here's one example:
http://code.plkr.org/ep/
> Has anyway had any experience with this? Any horror stories? Success
> stories? Pointers?
I've worked with several dozen people/companies with their use
of Plucker for lots of things, including a real-estate agent who was
using it to provide home "Walkthroughs" of his properties to clients
who had PDA handhelds (Plucker runs on PalmOS, PocketPC and Linux
PDAs).
The only major issue I've run into is with large jpegs that
need to be panned and zoomed, it can get tricky if you run out of RAM
to decompress them for viewing.
> At this point we are thinking the size itself isn't too bad (i.e.
> most people have large enough memory cards), but we are worried
> about installation time. We are wondering if it would make sense to
> market the product on a pre-installed memory card rather than a
> download off the Internet.
Yes, don't let the user fetch a 30M file over the net,
especially if its something that will be regularly updated. Providing
the data on an SD card (they're cheap in bulk) is always a good option
because it allows you to control the media and the integrity of it
from end-to-end. It also allows you to control who and what users have
access to your app (each copy on SD can be coded for _that_ SD card).
Another option is to send them the .pdb file on SD and then
update only the changed records with a network-based conduit (much
like what Vindigo does for their data). 30M at the onset, but
relatively little changes add up to only a few kbytes over time.
David A. Desrosiers
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://gnu-designs.com
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