Frequently Asked Questions

1 General

1.1 What is Sunrise?
1.2 Why is the support for the Plucker format "temporary"?
1.3 Why is this tool called "Sunrise"?
1.4 Can you tell anything about your new viewer?

2 JPluck

2.1 What is Sunrise's relationship to JPluck?
2.2 What advantages does Sunrise have over JPluck?
2.3 What disadvantages does Sunrise have compared to JPluck?

1 General

1.1 What is Sunrise?

Sunrise is a tool for converting websites and newsfeeds to Plucker documents for offline reading on your handheld.

Currently, Sunrise outputs Plucker documents, which can be viewed with the Plucker Viewer for PalmOS or Vade Mecum for Pocket PC. You'll need to download and install these programs separately.

Note that the support for the Plucker format is only temporary.

1.2 Why is the support for the Plucker format "temporary"?

Sunrise is a temporary project, made available for the purpose of letting users test the desktop tool for my upcoming offline web viewer, which will be a commercial product. Once my viewer reaches public beta state, the Plucker support will be removed entirely. You may, however, continue to use the older versions of Sunrise that still support Plucker.

I designed Sunrise in such a way that I can easily plug in different output formats to its spidering engine. I simply connected the core JPluck library (which is responsible for generating Plucker documents) to the new Sunrise framework through a thin "compatibility layer".

1.3 Why is this tool called "Sunrise"?

I think of starting my own business as the dawn of a new period in my life. Hence, "Sunrise".

My viewer will have a different name.

1.4 Can you tell anything about your new viewer?

At this point, I cannot go into detail. The only thing I will say is that my viewer will change the way you read news on your handheld. It has one critical feature that will make it stand out from all the other offline viewers out there. You will understand once you see it in action.

As noted earlier, my viewer will be a commercial product.

2 JPluck

2.1 What is Sunrise's relationship to JPluck?

Sunrise and JPluck are written by the same author.

With the release of Sunrise, JPluck development come to an end. Apparently, members of the Plucker team plan to fork the JPluck code into a different project. As of yet, nothing is mentioned on their website, however.

2.2 What advantages does Sunrise have over JPluck?

The main advantages that Sunrise has over JPluck are:

Native Windows interface that is just as responsive as that of other Windows applications.
Cleaner and more intuitive interface.
Liberal RSS feed parser that tries to parse feeds "at all costs". Many RSS feeds are ill-formed in one way or another, tripping up strict XML parsers like the one JPluck uses.
Converts multiple sites simultaneously. You can also cancel conversions individually.
Transparently handles HTML pages and RSS feeds, no need for separate "site" and "feed" definitions as in JPluck.

2.3 What disadvantages does Sunrise have compared to JPluck?

The main limitations that Sunrise has compared to JPluck is that it is Windows-only.

Many Plucker settings are not configurable through Sunrise because they do not apply to my viewer:

Links are always coloured blue and unresolved links are always coloured red. (My viewer detects unresolved links while it renders the document and changes their appearance accordingly.)
No support for standalone, alternate images.
No support for configurable output encoding. Always outputs in Windows-1252, which is the standard character set for western-European language (i.e. Latin) versions of PalmOS. (My viewer handles character encodings differently.)
Documents always use ZLIB compression.