> Might be interesting to take a look at this viewer competition...
Very interesting indeed..
I've been thinking a lot about some things related to the direction
of Palm, Plucker's direction, and some other things we're doing. Here's a
quick rundown of some ideas I've been kicking around:
1.) We don't support the clipboard currently, and rely on external
third-party "hacks" to manage this function for us. When PalmOS5
arrives, that capability stops. No more SysTraps and no more
hacks. Should we consider adding a clipboard (Plkr-clip?) to the
viewer?
2.) Parser options..
a.) Cookies (shouldn't be hard)
b.) The ability to pass a post-gather, pre-write regex to
the parser, similar to the way SiteScooper does it
inside the .site files. I ran into this with the
Space.com website, who has an appropriate main page, but
broken links underneath. If you visit
http://space.com/avantgo/ in a browser, you can see the
bad links. The incorrect link looks like:
http://space.com/syn/avantgo/volcano_monitor_010807.html
The proper link is:
http://space.com/avantgo/volcano_monitor_010807.html
..basically 's#syn/##' to remove it.
c.) Parallelizing the spider
3.) Plucker "plugins". This has come up before, and SysZLib.prc is
one example of it. Keep the viewer lean, and add functionality
and not bloating the viewer. Some ideas are DOC parsers,
form parsers, editors, etc.
As I'm rolling up the code behind the my.plkr.org site, I'm noticing
a few places where usability can be improved. I'm going to try to help this
out a bit with the pseudo-online mode for gathering content, but we need
some help from "general" users. The schema is pretty in-depth at this point,
so I'll be adding features in the coming weeks as I "inflate" the site into
reality.
I'm sure others can jump in and add their own ideas for places where
little tweaks and pokes can be made to the project. Of course, we each have
a slice of the project and are normally busy with day jobs and other
projects, and hate to be burdoned with unnecessary requests, so please be
aware of what we can and cannot do. Feel free to jump in, send patches,
docs, or suggestions.
dd.
