Port-a-Goph for PalmOS

[Cameron Kaiser]

Part of the reason I'm in the Gopher business is because it makes a great
transport protocol and simple interface for lightweight clients. So now I'm
putting my money where my mouth is.

I'm putting the final touches on Port-a-Goph for PalmOS. This is a Gopher
client for PalmOS 3.5 and up that lets you browse and search sites with a
primitive but fast interface.

There are a couple of showstopper bugs in it that are preventing wide
release which, unfortunately, have to await the next version of the runtime
engine it uses. I would, however, like to get any and all compatibility
bugs out of it while I'm waiting for the update.

I've tested it on my own Palm m505 and on an emulated PalmOS 4.1 unit under
Mac POSE. I would like to test it on hi-res models (note that because of the
non-standard API, the Clie's hi-res mode is not supported) to see if the
screen pinch is any better (rather than trying to word-wrap overlong lines
and potentially muck up an interface or ASCII file, you can tap on long
lines to see the full text), and I'd like to also test it on PalmOS 5 units
(the OS 5 Simulator chugs horribly under Virtual PC and is functionally
useless). If you're a network-enabled Palmster, give me a yell off-list.

Still to be done is to decide what to do with binary files and images.
(Download them to, say, a VFS card?) I'd rather not have to embed a full
GIF or JPEG display engine ...

[John Goerzen]

Post by Cameron Kaiser
Part of the reason I'm in the Gopher business is because it makes a great
transport protocol and simple interface for lightweight clients. So now I'm
putting my money where my mouth is.

One word: Suh-weet!

I have twice started to try to learn PalmOS programming in order to
write just such a thing, and both times ran out of time and had to put
it aside to focus on other tasks.

I have a Clie NX-70V (a Sony hires 320x480 device) with a WiFi card. I
Would be happy to be a guinea pig for any testing you need.

Post by Cameron Kaiser
Still to be done is to decide what to do with binary files and images.
(Download them to, say, a VFS card?) I'd rather not have to embed a full
GIF or JPEG display engine ...

VFS downloading is a good example. I don't think a Gopher client really
needs to do anything with them. You may be able to put in a hook to an
external viewer, but I'd definately say that would be a "post-1.0"
feature. :-)

-- John