About two years ago I stopped using AvantGo even though I was big fan of it from 1999 till then, and in fact it was the software which made me decide to make a ‘mobile’ version of the brightblack site – offering lighter versions of many of the pages. Unfortunately, AvantGo decided to become much more enterprise based, and even dropped any support for the MacOS X system, so I stopped using AvantGo and finally settled for Plucker, which I think has a lot of advantages still, to get web info on my Palm on a daily basis. The only thing is though, is that I know quite a few people use AvantGo to view my mobile site and I was concerned that I may accidentally serve a broken or ‘odd’ version of the the site. This meant that I really needed to see that AvantGo version through my Mac.
At first I tried Mark/Space’s Missing Sync which advertised AvantGo syncing (I actually wanted the SD mount-ability and the image viewer in that package too) but the problem with that software is that it wants to use your Mac as an internet sharing gateway to sync, and I didn’t want to do that.
So I went looking again, and found MalSync, an open-source sync solution, but I just never seemed to get round to trying it out. Today I finally did get around to installing it, and I have to say that it works fabulously. Just install one piece of software of my mac, and follow the simple readme, and put AvantGo viewer back on my Palm, and there we have it – fully functioning AvantGo syncing.
This ties in nicely with a response from AvantGo (or iAnywhere judging by the mail address) about changing the image they carry on the AvantGo channels page for my channel (search for ‘brightblack’). So I suppose the AvantGo train is pulling out again as far as I’m concerned.
I’m hoping they pay more attention to small providers like me again, as another reason I pulled ‘official’ support for AvantGo before was because of the very terse messages I got from them a few years back asking for up to USD1000 to allow having brightblack as a channel I said I couldn’t and wouldn’t pay for what is essentially a search listing, and that they could delete me if that was their position. They never did, and I’m glad they seem to be a little more open to content providers. So, I’ll be updating my sync info on brightblack and thank MalSync for such a great piece of software.