I’ve swapped from Gregarious to OMGWTFBBQ a while ago, mostly because it rocks on the N800 when compared to the other stuff I’ve tried. And of course cause I named it, so I think it has a fantastic name. Give it a shot if you’re looking for a nice simple reliable multi-device RSS reader you can use from a phone, tablet, and desktop web browser.
Planet maemo: category "feed:196199090f06e631920e077b436da9fe"
I’m about to hop on a plane to New Hampshire. Not a well planned trip, not really all that welcome, but it needs to be done. So just to make sure I could just zip thru what I needed, I cleared my email inbox down to about 40 messages a wanted access to on the road. A nice small inbox is necessary when doing email from the ‘executive model’ Nokia E61. Otherwise it gets confused and generally crashes, sometimes hangs.
Good thing too! Cause as I arrived I noticed that I had written down both the fake flight info for my flight and the real info (one of those ‘operated by’ flights) but forgot to note which was which. Never fear, I have that message right in the creamy middle of my 40 message inbox.
So I fire up the messenger client and wait. And wait. And wait. Listen to music for a little while. And then bing! Messages synced. Except the message I’m looking for isn’t there. Almost none of the messages are. Just a bunch of garbage I thought I deleted. Weird, I must have screwed up and not actually comitted the inbox changes? Could be.
So I fire up the N800 running the open source Claws email program. It’s a lot more tolerant. It can deal with my screw up. And I connect it via bluetooth to the E61. Get that? Cause its important. Using the network connection from the phone, so theres no network disparity.
Claws starts up in literally seconds, shows me my inbox list, which does indeed have the 40 items I expect it to. Including my flight info. Yay! Man I wish I could get a Maemo device with a cellular interface. Theres just no beating what an open community can do. I hope Nokia is learning from whats happening.
Russ has raved about FBReader, an ebook reader for Maemo, in the past. I had installed it before and tried it out, but had problems with the format of the books. He walked me through the stuff he was doing and gave me his FBReader config files, I’ve been trying it out since. I still have format problems, unordered lists in HTML seem to become just mashed up text without and formatting. Which was what really turned me off about it before cause it’s normally the first thing I see. But I’ve grabbed a few HTML based books and read a ways into them (seeing as how I’ve spent the last week lying on the couch rolling around in some half conscious state of delirium, it seemed like a good use of time). There are still some formatting quirks later on, but normally most of the nastyness is up at the start.
Here’s a shot of FBReader running on my N800, with the screen rotated and all so that pretty much the equivalent of a “small paperback” worth of text fits on the screen. It works out pretty well. I’ve grabbed a few online novels from random places, but most of my downloads have been from Project Gutenberg. The site is pretty usable from the built in browser. I select the compressed HTML version of the book whenever it’s available, and compressed plain text when not. Lots of them have three or four pages of unformatted cruft before the book starts, but once you make it past the table of contents the books are pretty readable.