{"id":235,"date":"2004-07-24T11:15:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-24T09:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ewanspence.com\/blog\/2004\/07\/24\/psion-rss-application-and-the-power-of-distributed-computing\/"},"modified":"2004-07-24T11:15:00","modified_gmt":"2004-07-24T09:15:00","slug":"psion-rss-application-and-the-power-of-distributed-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/2004\/07\/psion-rss-application-and-the-power-of-distributed-computing\/","title":{"rendered":"Psion RSS Application and The Power of Distributed Computing."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PsionRSS wasn’t around when the Psion NetBook was first released. In fact, it wasn’t until last month that a dedicated C+ Symbian RSS Reader application was released for Symbian OS under Series 60 (Wildpalm’s HeadLine<\/a>). so how come my netBook’s Wi-Fi oddessy is looking at RSS as the next application?<\/p>\n

Probably because it illustrates the power of distributed computing, and the use of modern day computers as ‘dumb’ terminals viewing a web site that does all the hard work for you. A long time ago, that’s how everything worked, with a central mainframe and a million VT100 terminals. The intervening years have seen a massive case of Moore’s law on the Desktop, but now we’re getting back to having simple Linux distros with a decent Web Browser interacting with a central remote server. What goes around…
\n
\nAnd this is how RSS on the Psion works. Using the built in Web Browser, pointing said browser to the Bloglines<\/a> mobile version at http:\/\/www.bloglines.com\/mobile\/<\/a> will give me a list of all my subscribed RSS feeds…<\/p>\n

\"Bloglines<\/p>\n

I can view each site seperatly, read the summaries, and launch the full article in a new window in Opera 5.14…<\/p>\n

\"Bloglines<\/p>\n

You know what this reminds me of? All the futuristic sci-fi “newspapers” that would tailor themselves to your own personal tastes. Sitting at the breakfast table, with my netBook, I can select that top option (marked ’51 Subscriptions’ in this screenshot), the netBook runs off over the Wi-Fi connection, and I get my daily newspaper, with tech news, sports, the Boing Boing column<\/a>. And my daily fix of Dilbert<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Look, I know RSS aggregators are old hat to a lot of bloggers, but there’s not a lot of us in the world. Heck there’s not a lot of bloggers on the web compared to the total number of people on the web, so this is really for everyone else. It’s a practical use of technologyl, it works, and it means that while something like Feed Demon<\/a> is a good windows app, it’s remote apps like Bloglines that are genuinly useful.<\/p>\n

Who would have thought an entire publishing system for multiple websites over multiple servers using a multitude of MySQL databases would have run on a Psion when they were first concieved? Because that’s what Movable Type allows. Here’s this post being entered on the netBook…<\/p>\n

\"Editing<\/p>\n

Distributed Computing, through web browsing, is in my opinion the way forward. It gives you true cross platform capabilities, it allows people to use their favorite computer platform, be it a second hand Mac<\/a>, a five year old Psion laptop, or the latest Pocket PC device.<\/p>\n

And that’s a good<\/i> thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new RSS Reader for the Psion netBook and EPOC powered computers. But it’s not really a new application – at least not in the traditional sense. Distributed computing, Wi-Fi, Bloglines, could this be the future?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wi-fi-and-the-psion-netbook","comments-off"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Gl0-3N","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}