A6•Times, Your User Friendly Electronic Newspaper

[Raphael Salgado]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.alien6tech.com/timesDescription.aspx' target='_blank'>http://www.alien6tech.com/timesDescription.aspx</a><br /><br /></div><i>"A6•Times is an enhanced news feed aggregator of surprising power. What sets it apart from conventional news aggregators is that it formats and displays news in a traditional newspaper format, adapted to the small screen of your Windows Mobile device."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/salgado-a6times.gif" /> <br /><br />Probably the nicest looking news aggregator I've seen yet on a mobile device, A6•Times is currently in public beta mode, so why not give it a whirl? It's content is derived from RSS, RDF, and ATOM feeds you can specify, and with preconfigured categories, it will give it that extra look that's comfortable yet versatile. While it's destined to support VGA screens, I hope it'll be just as friendly to square-screen devices.<br /><br />This program brings me to a sidenote that I've always wanted to address publicly: ever watch a movie or TV commercial where it shows some technical or mobile device, sometimes ones we actually own or see, and it's mocked up with some funky, cool, full-screen, animated interface? Then, when we look at our devices and that kind of pizazz is nowhere to be found. If all of our apps looked as cool as A6•Times, it just might give the added "wow" factor we've been looking for. ;)

[Phillip Dyson]

I installed this app to my SD card and it won't even start up.
-Toshiba e830-

EDIT: My mistake, I thought I already had .net CF installed. Somewhere between Hard resets I must have forgotten to re-install. It works now.

One item that would be good to add is an OPML import. That's probably the easiest way for people to convert to a new RSS reader.

[Hagow]

I want the full version will that come out after May 19th?

[Tierran]

Wow, I'm impressed

[caubeck]

Definitely the best of its kind.

It makes me want to pump it with URLs and watch them assemble into my own "newspaper." Great for those long trips.

I want the full version too!

[scottb]

Can anyone tell me how much space the .NET framework takes on your PPC device? The download is 25Mb. Surely it can't need that kind of space on a PPC!

[Nurhisham Hussein]

Quite a bit, but not 25MB - IIANM that's the whole distro for XP, and not necessarily just PPC.

[Leo the 3rd]

I believe it's 5MB for the .Net. I tried installing it to the memory card (a miniSD but I'm getting crashes so I'm going to reinstall the .Net piece). Otherwise a slick reader. You can install the DB portion of the app to a memory card though.

[Paragon]

Can anyone tell me how much space the .NET framework takes on your PPC device? The download is 25Mb. Surely it can't need that kind of space on a PPC!

5.4mb...and it will NOT install to a storage cad. You can try it, and it will say it has installed sucessfully, but if you go check the folder on your card it will be empty. It installs to the card for a few seconds during the install process then transferes all data to main memory.

Dave

[WorksForTurkeys]

and it needs work: I added about 10 feeds sucessfully yesterday. I went to install 2 Engadget feeds and as I finished entering the second one, it abended, truncating my feeds from 15 to 2. Newsbreak has no problem with the same feeds, on the same machine.

Guess its not only the lack of functions which makes it 'beta'... I'll wait for the production version and try again.

[Demens]

Hah, it's nicer than a horde of puppies.

But... How do you exactly clear out old news? I already seem to have like +300 news in it, most of them are already read.

[GadgetMan]

Indeed, graphically it is a very nice application. Unfortunately, this is not what I am looking for...

What I want is an RSS reader for Pocket PC that will pull not only the short news descritpion, but also the associated full articles and format them for display on small screen. The formatting does not have to be as nice as in case of A6 Times, but should at least wrap text to screen's width.

Does anyone know of an application that can do that?

Cheers,

[Phillip Dyson]

Indeed, graphically it is a very nice application. Unfortunately, this is not what I am looking for...

What I want is an RSS reader for Pocket PC that will pull not only the short news descritpion, but also the associated full articles and format them for display on small screen. The formatting does not have to be as nice as in case of A6 Times, but should at least wrap text to screen's width.

Does anyone know of an application that can do that?

Cheers,

You can set up Egress (http://www.garishkernels.net/egress.html
) to cache inclosures and the associated page. Its not perfect just yet, but it may be worth a trial.

[GadgetMan]

Philip,

Thank you for the advise. I do have Egress and unfortunately it does not reformat cached pages at all. Most of them look terrible when viewed on PPC.

I guess all I can do is hope for some clever developer to come out with this pefect RSS aggregator :cry:

Cheers,

[Phillip Dyson]

Philip,

Thank you for the advise. I do have Egress and unfortunately it does not reformat cached pages at all. Most of them look terrible when viewed on PPC.

I guess all I can do is hope for some clever developer to come out with this pefect RSS aggregator :cry:

Cheers,

The caching part definitely needs some work. Unfortunately there are RSS aggregators, and there are web cachers. But there doesn't seem to be a marriage of both.

On occasion I reinstall Sunnysoft's World Offline (http://www.sunnysoft.com/en_clanek.php?clanekid=98) to my PDA, but there is no RSS support. It has some problems sometimes too, though I'm not sure if its the app or the sites that I point it to for caching.