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This page is dedicated to PocketPC (Windows CE) tools which I have written for my own benefit.

Contents

Screenshots
History
Lister
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The screen shot below shows lister in action. This is viewing a preformatted News archive file in HTML format.

History

Around 2000 I acquired a Compaq iPaq 3630. Kind of quirky device which took me a while to get used to.

I started off by using offline-browsing to keep up to date on my favorite web sites. Very useful when away from my main machines (e.g. shopping, eating, travelling). It was like having an infinite pocket-book or newspaper to keep me entertained without having to throw away paper.

I gave up buying a daily newspaper, and was hooked.

Sure, I downloaded games - lots of them, but hardly played with them much (except on holiday, when reading got too much for me).

Offline browsing proved to be a pain. Getting Internet Explorer to refresh the pages proved to be problematic: IE was buggy and it was just too slow, and would hang on certain sites.

I tried to improve things by writing page smashers - removing adverts and other useless page fragments. I wrote a crisp macro to get the pages and reformat the HTML. There are many tools out there on the internet which can do this. But keeping this tool upto date was painful - pages would change, and trying to decipher the complex regular expressions to split pages up proved too time consuming and unfriendly a task.

I have been using the Internet since around 1985 and spent many early years reading the Usenet newsgroups. These groups are ideal for off line reading - real people talking about real issues of interest to me, no graphics, just pure text.

So I set off writing a tool to download newsgroups of interest and to reformat the plain text into a format readable on a small Pocket PC screen. This is quite straightforward - trim out some rubbish.

I thought about loading the files into Pocket Word, but decided this would be too painful - having to close the file I am browsing and go find the next one to load was too painful.

Next I hit on the idea of creating HTML out of the newsgroups (similar to what Google does for news formatting). If I created *.html files then suddenly a whole new world would open up!

I could use the "File Explorer" to browse the files, click on a file and have it loaded into Internet Explorer and start reading. Paging down til I got to the end of the file.

By putting "Next" and "Prev" links on each file I could spend all day in IE and browse easily.

I also wrote out a Table Of Contents at the head of each file so I could quickly decide if anything of interest was worth reading in the file and quickly skip to the next file.

I was set!

Statistics

If you go to a web site to read up on something, generally you will see all that is good about a product or topic.

Go to a newsgroup and real people will discuss and slag off products they have had problems with (whether computer related, cars, DIY etc).

One can get a much better balanced view of a subject and learn from real aspects and see what issues newcomers have with the topic at hand.

Typically I might subscribe to maybe 20 newsgroups. Every two weeks I grab all the articles for these topics. This comes to maybe 30MB of data. (Some voluminous groups I tend to not download everything but put a size limit on it.

Maybe if I am lucky or bored I can get 2 hours a day reading out of this. After two weeks, I have maybe read around 10-20% of the articles!

Anything I dont read stays on my PDA (I have a 1GB Microdrive - enough for more than a years worth of dross to read). I change subject reading depending on my mood - heavy technical or light-thinking. So things I dont catch up on this month I can return to at prior times.

That is a huge amount of information. In fact the Microdrive is overkill. A 128MB flash card would be fine for a good few months of stuff, and thats without any compression. (Compression would reduce the size by about 75%).

What Happened?

I decided I wanted a lighter weight PDA and a better screen. I bought a PalmOS device (Sony NX something with camera and wonderful 320x480 pixel screen). I died in horror at the primitive file system and no browser. I experimented with ebooks and found them very lacking. ebook readers are aimed at reading books, e.g. novels and for this that is fine.

But newsreading in the bulk that I do - they were just not for me. Plus I needed to recode my text->html converter to fit the PDB file format.

I lusted after a Sharp Linux SL-5500 device and when prices came down, thought this was the answer to my dreams! Linux, bash, perl, Opera (my favorite browser).

I was disgusted. Opera would take 2 minutes to load my 100kb file vs seconds for IE on the iPaq. This wasnt the same Opera I use on my desktop. It was a joke.

I was so fed up with the crappy networking of the Sharp Zaurus that I just plainly gave up. I was close to just using "more" on the Sharp but it required work.

DELL AXiM

IE on the WinCE 3.0 device was a slight disappointment - IE wouldn't honor <A HREF="...#..."> construct. This means links to within a document didnt work which meant my table of contents in the files was underutilised.

So when the DELL device was released, I thought great - more of what I know, running twice at fast (wowee!), two memory slots, half the price! Yes Sir ! I was in heaven.

....or hell.

Whats this? IE has the features I need, but hey! Its about 10x slower than my old ipaq.

After a few days of this I gave in. I did what I should have done a long long time ago.

Lister

I downloaded the Microsoft Embedded Visual-C++ SDK and within seconds (using their wizard), I had a "Hello World" application! (Yes seconds!)

I looked at the code generated and it was nearly identical to Win32! I was in heaven.

Ok, starts coding....48 hours later, Lister was born. Lister was good enough to replace IE, and about 50-100x faster than IE.

I spent the next few days trying to tighten up the code, and add the features I wanted, and at 19K, it was exactly what I wanted and needed.

After a chat with Peter Da Silva on the comp.arch newsgroup, I started adding additional enhancements. Peter had previously advised me about various Palm and PocketPC eReaders. I tried them all but none were what I wanted. But I learnt a lot about what other people wanted.

So Lister was born and is being developed. You can download, for free, a copy of Lister below and try it for yourself. I plan to add more features to make Lister better.

So what does Lister do?

Well for a start it is a quick HTML renderer. Then it supports PalmDoc (.pdb and .prc) files.

Next it contains transparent decompression, supporting GNU .gz file format. What this means is you can take an existing .html or .pdb file, gzip it up and still browse the files without any need to uncompress on the PDA. You get more space in your PDA for the data you need. Not only that, but it allows inter-file links and will automatically look for the appropriate file (compressed or uncompressed).

Supports full history - backwards and forwards.

File explorer so you can quickly navigate to files and folders where you store your stuff.

Configurable font size and full-screen operation.

Stay tuned for updates.

Download

13-Oct-2004	lister-1.03.exe
17-Mar-2002	lister-0.39.exe
13-Mar-2002	lister-0.38.exe