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AvantGo Channel Developer Guide

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Testing on emulators

So you are previewing your channel on a high-end Palm device. It looks nice, but how does it look on a Palm III? Or a Palm IIIx? Or a Palm VII? Or a Palm IIIe? Or a Pocket PC machine?

Palm Computing has an excellent emulator available to the public from:

http://www.palmos.com/dev/tools/emulator/

The emulator is available for free, although in order to run it, you need ROM images of the various mobile devices. These are also available for free, but for legal reasons, you need to sign a license agreement in order to gain access to them.

Figure 3-6 Palm Emulator screen


Topics in this section:

Installing the AvantGo Client on the emulator

I will not go through the entire process of installing and setting up the emulator. There is pretty good documentation available at Palm's site. But here are a few steps you need to perform in order to run the AvantGo Client on the emulator.

  1. Start up the emulator.
  2. Right click on the emulator to display the shortcut menu.
    3.
  3. Select Install Application/Database|Other|Install.
    4.
  4. Select avantgo.prc, libmal.prc, and MobileLink.prc.

    5. If you have recently installed the AvantGo Client on your Palm OS device, chances are they are available somewhere on your hard drive, most likely in your Palm\(username)\backup\ directory.

  5. Right click on the emulator to display the shortcut menu.
    6.
  6. Select Settings|Properties to display the Properties dialog.
Figure 3-7 Properties dialog of Palm Emulator

  1. Check the checkbox that says Redirect NetLib calls to host TCI/IP.
    2.
  2. Click OK to save your settings.

Configuring the AvantGo Client in the emulator

Now you need to set up the AvantGo Client in the emulator, just like you would on a physical device.

  1. In the emulator itself, run the AvantGo Client.
  2. Go to the Server Preferences screen.
  3. Select Server|New Server from the Server Preferences menu.
    4.

    Your server address should be sync.avantgo.com, port 80, and use the Username and Password for whatever AvantGo account you would like to sync with.

  4. Click Done.

    5. This will set up the AvantGo Client on your emulator to sync with one of your current AvantGo accounts.

Syncing your AvantGo account in the emulator

To sync your AvantGo accounts Go to the menu, and select Channels|Modem Sync. If everything is working correctly, your AvantGo channels will sync up and you will be able to use the AvantGo Client as if it were on a real Palm OS device.

Incidentally, this is also how we are able to get screenshots of various AvantGo channels running on the Palm OS software — we just take screen shots of the emulator.

Emulator for a Windows mobile device?

While there is a Pocket PC emulator available, our customers report less success testing the AvantGo Client on it. If you want to test your page on a Pocket PC machine, either: a) Run Internet Explorer, and resize the window down to about 215 by 270 pixels (this will give you a pretty close approximation); or b) Borrow a friend's machine.



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