Free utility brings long-lost AvantGo back into the Mac fold
December 8, 2003 | by Chuck La Tournous
The sun is shining, AvantGo is syncing and all's right with the world.
That?s right: AvantGo, meet Mac OS X; OS X, AvantGo. After almost 800 years (well, it seems like it, anyway) the moth-eaten AvantGo application on my Palm is being drenched in new data fresh from the mother lode. New stories from the New York Times, updated weather from Accuweather (weather.com has apparently jumped ship in our absence) -- even the latest Mac news items from this very website are pouring into my trusty Palm m505 on a daily basis.
Sorry to be so effusive, but the lack of an AvantGo conduit could very well be thing I missed most after my transition of Mac OS X. I scoured AvantGo?s website for an updated conduit; tried in vain to get it to work in Classic; even set up an OS 9 machine in my basement whose sole purpose was to allow me to get my AvantGo news fix.
For the uninitiated, AvantGo is a service that, among other things, delivers PDA-formatted versions of periodicals like the Times, BusinessWeek and -- of course -- RandomMaccess. The service is free -- you sign-up on the AvantGo website, select the "channels" you want, and each time you sync your PDA, new content is downloaded onto your device. It's like carrying a personalized magazine rack around in your pocket.
Unfortunately, the AvantGo Palm conduit, like so many others, was broken by Mac OS X; and AvantGo, which has been struggling to find a viable business model, has not seen fit to devote the resources to develop a new one.
The fix, like so many for Mac OS X users, came in the form of a UNIX utility. But malsync, as it's called, was of little use to most Mac users since it worked only through a serial connection -- and if you were a Mac user running Mac OS X, it was unlikely that you had a working serial connection. Ah, the irony -- the fact that you needed the fix meant you couldn't use it: a Catch-22 worthy of Joseph Heller himself.
Enter a mysterious developer known (to us, anyway) as "s_d" who took malsync and combined it with a utility called USB-TCP Bridge. The offspring of this mixed marriage is "AvantGo USB Sync," whose name may be uninspired, but whose function is anything but.
AvantGo USB Sync runs as a standalone program, not during a Palm synchronization. In fact, while it's running, it temporarily disables the Palm HotSync Manager. It doesn't run as quickly as the old Palm conduit, but run it does, downloading your selected AvantGo channels flawlessly.
If you missed having AvantGo on your Palm since upgrading to Mac OS X, or if you've never given it a try, AvantGo USB Sync is definitely worth looking into. Best of all, it's free. And please be sure to check out the RandomMaccess Mobile Edition. It's a special PDA-friendly version of RandomMaccess that's specially formatted for small screens.
And thanks, s_d...whoever you are.
|
