In case you’ve never heard of AdvantGo I thought I should briefly explain what it is. AvantGo is a program that you install on your PDA and your computer. When you sync your PDA the program goes online and downloads the channels you have selected. Channels are like the channels on a TV, there are different channels catering to different interests. Most newspapers have a channel and most technology related magazines do too. So once you’ve installed the software and set the channels you want you sync your PDA and all the info is there for you to read.

Unless you are running Mac OSX. Unfortunatley AvantGo have still not released a conduit for palm desktop 4.0 for OSX. So unless you can be bothered to switch back to OS9 everytime you sync you might as well forget it. However, do not fret fellow infoseekers, you can get around this by using iSilo. It’s not as easy as AvantGo but it is far more versatile and useful in the long run.

iSilo seems harder to use because you have to tell it to download and convert the channels everytime you want them. In my humble opinon this is actually an advantage as it means that I only have to wait for the download and converting if I’ve finished reading the articles I have. The other advantage is that you can convert other documents and webpages (this is how I create iSilo versions of these articles). There are also a lot of user preferences such as toggleing images on/off and setting the link depth and other rules as to which links it follows.

This tutorial is specifically for Palm OS 4 devices (with card slots) connected to Macintosh computers. iSilo is also available for Pocket PC’s and Winblows based machines and can be configured in a similar way. Palm Powered PDA’s are available from Palm, Sony and others.

You will require; a PDA running Palm OS 4 or higher, an Apple computer with OSX and Palm Desktop 4.0 installed, a memory card (SD or MS depending on PDA). You also need to install the folowing; iSiloX for Mac OSX, iSilo for Palm OS and iSiloX Mobile Web Channel Collection

iSilo isn’t free, at the time of writing it costs $15 but I encourage you to buy it. Just think how much you would spend on newspapers or magazines in a year (one 35p daily newspaper costs £91 per year). Download and install iSiloX to your mac. Then download and install iSilo on your Palm. Then download and unstuff the mobile web channel collection from turic.com. Double click the icon you get and it should open iSiloX. Now you have a list of channels available to you to download. You will need to ctrl-click on them and then choose properties. Under destination remove the current destination then you will need to click “add file destination…” and browse to:

Macintosh HD:Users:xxxxx:Documents:Palm:Users:zzzzz:Files to Install:SecureDigital (SD) Card:

Where xxxxx is your username for OSX and zzzzz is your Palm user name*. Then click on your username in the top box and remove it. Now you’re ready to try it out. Connect to the net, select the channel you want and click convert. Then HotSync your palm and you should find that when you open iSilo on the Palm the appropriate news will be in there.

*If you are using a Sony Clie then the last folder will be “Memory Stick” or something similar.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2003 at 8:43 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.