flipthedolphin

Feeds and Syndication changed the way we look at the world wide web. This technology gave us the power to choose how we want content delivered to us.

Wikipedia has (as usual) a great article about RSS and News Aggregators. Also has a great (huge) list of related apps/services.

Anyway, back to the title: palm! I’ve got a Zire 72 (but I assure you that the stuff I’m going to write about is compatible with most of the Palm devices out there). You’ll be using your little jewel to read your favourite feeds! First of all you need to get the reader for the handheld: plucker!. This is not quite an RSS reader… well… not only. It’s a complete offline browser/reader.

With Plucker installed on your Palm, you can read any Internet web pages, ebooks, text-files, or other documents you want at any time, simply by converting it with Plucker’s desktop tools, and sending it to your Palm for reading on your Palm handheld.

To read feeds like I do you only need the Viewer app. No Distiller needed. Download Plucker Viewer and install it on your palm. Now go and grab a copy of Sunrise RSS (link at the bottom of this post) and install it on your PC.

Plucker + Sunrise + Palm Device = A Great Portable News Aggregator

The interface of Sunrise is pretty simple.

Once installed with the Palm conduit, open it and click on File-> New Item Wizard. You’ll be creating a new list of documents that will be synched. So select HotSync instead of Directory. Then select the destination on your palm (I use the Palm SD card and not the Zire’s RAM). Then select your fortmatting options and finish the procedure.

Now that you have an empty document list you need to import your OPML file. You can export it from nearly every news aggregator you may be using right now (FeedDemon, Pluck IE Edition, Bloglines…) and then use (again) the New Item Wizard to import it in Sunrise.

Once you get all your feeds imported you can update them all and then do an hotsynch with your Palm to get all those RSSes on your Plucker Viewer!

That’s it! Magical stuff that won’t let you down when you’re travelling by train without your beloved Wi-Fi notebook.

Anyway note that the sunrise blog you may find on google is closing. I don’t know if the development of the app is going to stop or not but it seems that the software is completely stable and functional right now!

UPDATE (02/09/2007)
Updated once again the link for SunriseXp. I’ll write an updated post about it soon.

UPDATE (01/26/2006)
I’ve updated the link to Sunrise as I was unable to find the correct link again. I’ve discovered that the author is writing a new version of this application, written in C++ and no more in Java. The new version is called Sunrise XP. Check it out.