Unpqa and the Death of Web Clipping
With Palm OS 5, web clipping is effectively dead as a future-oriented technology. Neither the web browser shipping with the Sony CLIE NX70V/NX60 nor the browser on the Palm Tungsten T support web clipping files, a.k.a. PQAs or WCAs, and it doesn't look likely that the browser from PalmSource will have support for these either.
While many web clippings have become non-functional since they were introduced back in 1999, there are still some that are useful for people. I find myself using the Brittanica WCA to look up random encyclopedia articles for amusement, and the Google WCA has been useful from time to time.
In many cases, these sites now have some sort of device-friendly URL you can use. For example, Google has http://www.google.com/palm, which is a low-bandwidth entry to the search engine, with the result pages reformatted by Google to be quicker to send over wireless networks.
Sometimes there is no portal you can easily find. For those cases, the ZBoxZ project produced a utility called unpqa. While originally built for x86 Linux, I've done a simple port to Win32 using CodeWarrior for Windows, and I've posted the project and executable here as unpqacw8.zip. If you want to rebuild it, you will need to change the access paths to point to your local copy of the Palm OS headers, as the executable uses them for some of its constant values.
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Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
Palm OS is a registered trademark of PalmSource, Inc.
Metrowerks and CodeWarrior are registered trademarks of Metrowerks Inc.
The views expressed on this website/weblog are those of mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of PalmSource or Metrowerks.
qwertYAK / frobnovich
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