How about a little palm (or wince) app that basically has the halfbakery submission form and a little database. When you get a halfbaked idea, say, while eating at Denny's, just whip out the ole palm and write it down. Then when you go home and sync your palm, a conduit will sumit all your newly minted halfbaked ideas to Halfbakery for you. Could also have a WAP version for Palm VII and cel users.
-- amadeus, Jul 29 2000

(?) AvantGo http://www.avantgo.com/
Portal provider for wireless handhelds. [jutta, Jul 29 2000]

(?) Yopy http://www.sem.sams...roduct/digital/pda/
Just make everyone use PDAs with on-board Internet Browsers. This particular PDA probably doesn't have a whole lot of market penetration yet. [hippo, Jul 29 2000, last modified Oct 17 2004]

Wow, this would be interesting - and it does just straddle the point between baked/halfbaked/bakable. Even though the potiential market for this software is somewhere in the single-digits, it's still a keen idea.
-- bear, Jul 29 2000


AvantGo would do pretty much precisely what you want here, but their conditions for content and marketing were a little too restrictive for the halfbakery. I wonder how much intellectual property trouble one would run into, were one to build a free (as in speech) co-op version of this...
-- jutta, Jul 29 2000


In the meantime...tap it out into your palm pilot anyway, and then copy and paste to the Halfbakery later.
-- blahginger, Jul 29 2000


jutta - any possibility that HalfBakery will be free (as in beer)? (I'd like to help code it.)
-- Thing 1, Sep 02 2000


This is a pretty trivial and common Palm app. I'm actually developing something pretty similar that could be adapted (well, I'd have to learn how to do conduits in Linux but heh minor detail). Someone else could do the conduit for other platforms. I'll let you guys know if this comes to anything.
-- amadeus, Sep 22 2000


Or you could just track down one of the old Apple message pads (newtons) and just use Halfbakery the way its is from Denny's. Hell, they even have software to SERVE websites while eating your pancakes.
-- wrenchndmachine, Sep 22 2000


I don't eat at Denny's.
-- thumbwax, Sep 22 2000


I don't eat.
-- wrenchndmachine, Sep 22 2000


< (o) >
-- StarChaser, Feb 19 2001


.
-- bristolz, Feb 19 2001


Baked. I now have HalfBakery on my IBM Palm thingy courtesy of AvantGo.
-- hippo, Jun 26 2001


So they've started doing generic, user-specified RDF? Or do they just have some sort of automatic web portal? Details?
-- jutta, Jun 26 2001


It's fairly basic - you just specifiy the URL of the page you want to strip, how many levels you want AvantGo to follow links to (1, in the HalfBakery's case), whether you off-domain links followed and whether you want graphics used, and it creates a version on my Palm device with the ability to follow links up to 1 level from the front page.
Obviously this is going to work better for some web pages than others. In the case of the HalfBakery the UI would be improved on the Palm if the 'front page' used for stripping was just the 'since last logon' section of the recent-by-date screen with none of the 'meta', 'idea' or 'account' sections, and if the idea pages also missed off the "other ideas in this category" bit and the 'meta', 'idea' and 'account' sections. I only got it working today though so a full usability study will have to wait for my train ride home :-)
The HalfBakery main graphic and the little croissant and fish symbols look lovely though (viewed on an IBM WorkPad c3).
I just checked and the table on the 'overview' page gets transformed into a single column, left to right, then top to bottom, so the category names don't appear above the ideas to which they refer.
I'm not complaining though - I'm excited with it just as it is (sad, hmm?) and am eternally grateful to you for the joy that the HalfBakery has brought me.
-- hippo, Jun 26 2001


Ah. Interesting. Thanks.

Why would the cross-category links and controls from the idea pages themselves matter? Aren't those 2 steps down from the index? Or is it just that the clutter gets in the way?
-- jutta, Jun 26 2001


Right. Yes - the real volume is two steps removed from the front page (although the 'by name' page for example is pretty big on its own). It's just clutter.
I don't know how they do the packaging of other sites - news.bbc.co.uk for example is excellent on the Palm - they've removed absolutely everything you don't need from the full-size version. I don't know if the channels they offer at the AvantGo site are hand-crafted or whether there's a description language you can use to specify what goes on the Palm and what doesn't.
One thing I noticed on my journey home: In snapshotting the HalfBakery pages, they're not picking up any of the cookie information on my machine. Also, these new palmtop screens are much more readable than the old ones.
-- hippo, Jun 26 2001


[jutta] - Since starting to use AvantGo, I have heard that some sites block AvantGo users because of the volume of page requests they make (obviously this would be less if there was a special cut-down AvantGo-users HalfBakery page... :-).
How would you know that a request was coming from an AvantGo user? (other than by noticing a spike of a few hundred page requests within a few seconds from the same IP address).
As I seem to be the only AvantGo user, I'm probably not breaking anything, but do you notice AvantGo-related spikes of activity?
-- hippo, Jun 28 2001, last modified Jun 29 2001


Yeah, it's a little spiky. But I think we can handle it.

(How can one tell it's AvantGo: the avantgo "spider" process sends a browser ID in the HTTP request header that contains "AvantGo".)
-- jutta, Jul 04 2001



random, halfbakery