Zocalo Web Feed Reader (sharp Rom) Options

[koan]

Hi

Zocalo is a lightweight web feed reader for the Sharp ROM. It is designed for the PDA form factor, i.e. make sensible use of a small screen, use keyboard or stylus to navigate everything, don't use a lot of memory or disk space. It can handle RSS, RSS RDF and Atom.

I have been testing Zocalo for a few months now and it seems stable. There are a few minor issues that I want to improve in future releases and I have a lot of ideas for features that I want to implement. I plan to port to the other Zaurus Linuxes.

Please find more details at the Zocalo web page.

This image is linked to a screenshot of the latest version on my website:

[jakfish]

I agree completely: Zocalo is a wondrous app, making feeds accessible and readable and doing it quickly. My concern only comes from the website on the other end. For instance, I have to fly a lot, and I've figured out a way to connect my Nokia E90 to the C1000 via infrared GPRS connection--so just before take-off, it would be great to download completely a lot of news and sports.

But it's clear to me that this isn't what RSS readers do, and my feeds rarely give even decent summaries. From NBC Sports, I'll get something like "Against his brother's team, Peyton Manning threw for" and that's all she wrote

I wonder if there might not be feeds of feeds out there, meaning an RSS feed that has pieced together complete articles from other feeds. I'll search that out.

But I in no way meant any disparagement of Zocalo itself. It does what it's supposed to, and very nicely.

Jake

[koan]

I've figured out a way to connect my Nokia E90 to the C1000 via infrared GPRS connection--so just before take-off, it would be great to download completely a lot of news and sports.

Tethering via IRDA ? That sounds like it might be slow. But then GPRS is not that fast. I've done tethering by BT on a PAYG phone, it was usable for short sessions.

But it's clear to me that this isn't what RSS readers do, and my feeds rarely give even decent summaries. From NBC Sports, I'll get something like "Against his brother's team, Peyton Manning threw for" and that's all she wrote

Right, some feeds are better than others. You're lucky that Zocalo parses out the advertisements because at the end of that useless truncated line would probably be an unrelated image complete with tracking.

On the other hand, some feeds squeeze in everything, so it's no longer a summary. Personally, I don't want to download the whole article because it's slower and takes up more storage space.

@xamindar

I'll do something about that dialog. Thanks for reminding me.

[jakfish]

Re: GPRS--I've yet to figure out bluetooth (I don't have a usb host, for one thing), and I was amazed to find the ir connection so easy with the Nokia.

My browsing is almost completely to mobile sites (instead of cnn.com, I use netfront for m.cnn.com) so it's not dreadfully slow. But, yeah, trying to pull up the real nyt.com on an ir tether would take forever, I bet.

Jake