How Plucker Works

Let us start with a short description on how Plucker works. This will help you to understand certain procedures necessary to use Plucker to its best.

First of all let us mention that there are three parts:

The Viewer: this is the actual application you run on your handheld. It is used to display your documents as the name suggests.

The Parser: more or less the brain of Plucker. The parser gathers contents from the Internet and converts it to a suitable format for the viewer. This part is installed on your workstation, not on your handheld, so unlike other products Plucker uses your powerful desktop for the hard work.

Some transfer tool which sends the pages you gathered using the parser to your handheld. Actually, this is not part of Plucker itself and how this is done depends on the platform you are using. For example, on Unix or OS/2 you might want to use Pilot-Link whereas on Windows you might prefer to use the HotSync Manager. It is only necessary that you understand that you must, in some way, transfer the data in any way to your handheld. We stress this here as many users who converted from some other application to Plucker missed this point.

Consequences of this are immediate:

Before you are able to view any page from the Web on your handheld you have to run the parser (sometime also called HotSync in this document). Normally you will invoke it via some script, which we will explain later on. Plucker does not start the gathering process automatically when you press the HotSync button on your cradle as some other off-line web readers do (not even on Windows). We want to stress that you must start the parser manually (or by some tool that does this automatically for you), and after running the parser you must sync your device to get the documents onto your handheld. What sounds a bit difficult offers you in fact many advantages.

Since the parser is separated from the viewer and the transfer tool you will not have any problems if your HotSync-cradle shares the COM-port with your modem.

It is possible to run the parser automatically at some specified time. That is you can have Plucker to collect your newspaper each morning at six o'clock without requiring your attention and then HotSync the retrieved data to your handheld before you leave home. In fact the whole process can be automated through a shareware tool such as Autosync [1], cron jobs, or other similar tools.