Where's the Noobie Easy-As-PIE section???

Years ago I collected a small zoo of MP880s, 900cs, and J720. For the past decade or so, all were hidden away, batteries discharged. I thought of getting rid of them ( I see some still command quite a price). They run different WinCE versions with their own quirks...and tricks.

Yet, it is only now that I am finding the browsers have unique features or lack of features. Some render HTML 4.0, but not others...MP880 doesn't...(maybe HTML3 and it doesn't support Javascript so far as I can tell). That the J720 supports vbscript is a welcomed finding and deserves further exploration.

There is no comparison in time spent vs reward delivered IMHO in taking literally a few minutes to write an HTML file on Pocket word, especially if using a template...and customizing font size, background colors or images. Near instant creativity, No compiling delays, no limit to customization.

All I can tell you is my hpc's aren't in some closet gathering dust as they had. I have some absolutely great Date/Time clocks now located around my home reminding me of the weekday, time, day of month...FAR better than any of those store bought red LED alarm clocks. And I can change its appearance literally in seconds...different font family and font size, colors, change it for the different seasons, or for day and night. They run off my cell phone charger with my modified usb to hpc inverter mod...a few watts at most.

I can turn lights or sprinklers on and off and for a specific timed number of hours...IoT is really within the grasp of WinCE...all versions, especially the oldest retro versions (if one learns how to upload a webserver program on an ESP8266 microcontroller, elsewhere...not an impossible task). Make a dedicated Webcontroller client, or weather station, (and clock) all in the same boat...its possible using hpc WiFi cards. These are more challenging projects, of course.

Newbies could have a better initial experience here IMHO, if they spent some small portion of their early time working on HTML webpage design ...something that could serve them and the hpc community as well for years to come.

So, Where's the Easy-As-PIE section???? That's the Pocket Internet Explorer..(and its part of/or an extension of WinCE OS). I would like to see that Easy-as-PIE section up there in bright lights too, some day, some how. Is that too much to ask???





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DateTimeHtmlClock.jpg (50KB - 0 downloads)

Joval, you may have missed my post on the other thread, but instead of scratching your head around the broken MS Jscript implementation on PIE, why not try a mainstream browser for HPCs with better true JavaScript support? Two great options are:

1) Opera Mobile 9.65 Beta
Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20121211182256/http://hpcmonex.net/izemi...
Notes: Works great on the Jornada with RedGear installed. Change your date back to 2007.

2) NetFront 3.3
Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20131027074621/http://hpcmonex.net/izemi...

Then, you can get the same browser running on both MP900 and J720, and the same HTML code should render exactly the same way on both.

Thanks ntware, however...those links are dead...itemize site no longer exists. C:Amie confirmed it (and sought to make it available here)

What you are suggesting though misses my point...which is to demonstrate what any Noob(ie) can do with a "stock" J720 or "stock" MP900c . ..without ANY additions, no additional programs, dlls, RedGear, etc , and the associated time commitment and learning curve of downloading cabs, finding a usb to cf card reader to load all those extras cabs for the Jornada720, (fortunately, you can use a USB thumb drive to copy and save files to the MP880 or 900c, etc). That can come later for those so motivated.

There can be a lot of creative exploration and entertaining fun just using pocket word text files and converting them to HTML. I am only "mapping" out what the different PIE versions do on the hpc's I have, particularly regarding scripting within html files on PIE. MP900c with .net version runs javascript and renders the getElement ById coding...J720 doesn't render that, it does render some of the vbscript functions that yield the same result (as I will show later).

Bottom line is if you just acquired a HPC and happen upon this site...you can get going quickly on creating and customizing it, etc. No need to install anything, no need to copy a file from this site to your laptop and then to your hpc. Keep it simple to begin with, just open up a text file and write out a few lines and discover some new magic!






Edited by joval 2019-06-18 3:07 AM

Cmonex site is down, but the links aren’t dead, they are from archive.org. For some reason when I pasted the link here it got truncated. Here they are again just in case you want them:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121211182256if_/http://hpcmonex.net/iz...

https://web.archive.org/web/20160402154712/http://hpcmonex.net/izemi...

But using stock browsers and checking what they actually can do is a fun project.

I am so grateful for all of the resources on this site - I recently rediscovered my MobilePro 800 and found that it still works. Got my old wifi card fired up and even though I had to make an unsecured guest network at my house (128 bit WEP seems to be the limit for the old 802.11B wifi card drivers), it still connects to the internet!

Unfortunately though I'm running into a lack of general usefulness due to changes in modern HTML. One cool website that can still be visited though is www.thedodgegarage.com. Kind of an esoteric website though...

I agree though - I'd love to see more hacks and mods to to make these old devices serve a purpose. I wrote the majority of my college papers on my old MP800 - and that was back in 2007 when it was considered outdated even then!

The MP800 browser is really quite limited...it does not render HTML 4 so far as I can determine it must be HTML3. I am exploring its limitations but it does render some javascript (DateTime)

In the past,I used to plug an old wep enabled router into my WPA2 modern router (I think Rich Hawley did the same)when I wanted to use network resources, and unplug it when done. But, the MP800 has a workable usb port...so for most part that is what I use for file transfers, or the CF card.