1.1.2 How Plucker works

Let us start with a short description on how Plucker works. This will help you to understand certain procedures necessary to use Plucker to its best.

First of all let us mention that there are three parts:

1. The Viewer: this is the actual application you run on your hand-held. It is used to display your documents as the name suggests.

2. The Parser: more or less the brain of Plucker. The parser gathers contents from the Internet and converts it to a suitable format for the viewer. This part is installed on your workstation, not on your hand-held, so unlike other products Plucker uses your powerful desktop for the hard work.

3. Some transfer tool which sends the pages you gathered using the parser to your hand-held. Actually, this is not part of Plucker itself and how this is done depends on the platform you using. For example, on Unix or OS/2 you might want to use Pilot-Link whereas on Windows you might prefer to use the HotSync Manager. It is only necessary that you understand that you must transfer the data in any way to your hand-held. We stress this here as many users who converted from some other application to Plucker missed this point.

Consequences of this are immediate:

• Before you are able to view any page from the Net on your hand-held you have to run the parser (sometime also called hotsync in this document). Normally you will invoke it via some script, which we will explain later on. Even on Windows Plucker does not start the gathering process automatically if you press the HotSync button on your cradle, as some other off-line web readers do. We want to stress that you must start the parser manually (or by some tool that does this automatically for you), and after running the parser you must sync your device to get the documents onto your hand-held. What sounds a bit difficult offers you in fact many advantages.

• Since the parser is separated from the viewer and the transfer tool you will not have any problems if your HotSync-cradle shares the COM-port with your modem.

• It is possible to run the parser automatically at some specified time. That is you can have Plucker to collect your newspaper each morning at six o'clock without requiring your attention and then HotSync the retrieved data to your hand-held before you leave home. In fact the whole process can be automatized using e.g. cron jobs, by a (shareware) tool like AutoSync from http://www.rgps.com or some similar package.