We want to wish a very happy 4th birthday to Aximsite. We watched Aximsite wade into some pretty deep waters four years ago as they went up against a lot of well established PDA and Pocket PC sites. They’ve proven their worth and have not only survived but thrived. Congratulations Aximsite, from everyone here at Ilium Software! You’ve got a great site! Here’s to your continued success!
I really hate it when people suggest photocopying your wallet contents for extra safety. Call me crazy (many people do) and paranoid (there’s some truth to that as well), but a photocopier is nothing but a scanner plus a printer. There’s no guarantee that your info is cleared out as soon as the pages are printed. If it’s your own copier in your own home office, fine, but if you take your wallet to Kinkos or CopyMax or any commercial place, keep in mind that what you’re doing is using their scanner to scan all the numbers you’re carefully protecting other places.
(If you don’t believe me, try this: go to a copy place. Take the paper out of the copier (or the tray you select for copying). “Copy” a few pages of something. The machine will scan your pages, and your images will stay in the copier memory until someone puts more paper in or hits clear.)
Buy eWallet. Buy a competitors’ wallet. Copy your numbers using paper and a pen. Photocopy them using your own home copier. But don’t go around telling people to photocopy their confidential information without giving them a little warning about how to do it. Somebody’s going to do this, walk away without all his pages, and give away his information by trying to protect it.
“Hey, remember those Ilium guys? Didn’t they used to have a blog?”
We’re not gone! It’s a whirlwind of activity here at Ilium Software as we rapidly approach the completion of eWallet 5.0. Needless to say everyone has their hands full and it wasn’t until today that someone finally said “Um…has anyone updated the Blog lately?”
So please pardon the long silence! You’ll hear much more about eWallet 5.0 in the coming weeks and we’ll likely talk about it first right here!
I had to share something that came up in a support call yesterday. It’s either really horrible or incredibly funny depending on your point of view.
We received a panicked call from someone trying desperately to access an eWallet file that they didn’t know the password for. This isn’t all that unusual. We all know that it’s easy to forget the “really good” password you came up with (one of the things that makes eWallet so handy!) The problem of course is that eWallet, being a secure information manager, really IS secure. If you forget your password there is NO backdoor, NO way to reset the password, and NO reasonable way to hack the wallet*.
In this case though, the problem was that Company A bought out Company B and laid off all the IT staff from Company B. Unfortunately for “A”, the IT staff at “B” stored all the vital IT info in eWallet and no one bothered to ask them for the password when they laid everybody off.
Needless to say, panic ensued. As a person who knows how bad it would be if we lost access to all our passwords, I can feel their pain…but on the other hand, as a guy who has seen his friends dumped out on the street during a merger, I can’t help but snicker.
\* There are numerous articles about hacking 256-bit encryption. Estimates to do so typically involve a few hundred thousand computers linked together and working continuously for tens of thousands of years. Yeah…pick a good password and you’re all set.
Every day people contact us to change their software from one device type to another, Palm to Pocket PC, Pocket PC to Smartphone, Smartphone to Palm, etc. I’m curious to know what drives this switch. What single thing, or combination of things, makes people drop a perfectly usable, high-dollar device and buy a different one?
I started out PDA-dom with a Palm Kyocera 6035, but when I spent more time banging it on the desk in frustration than actually using it, I started looking at other devices. I looked very hard at the Pocket PC phones, but the ones with the functionality I wanted were outside my price range (I will only pay so much for something I can lose or trash so easily!). The interface for the Windows-Powered Smartphones gives me hives, so they weren’t even in the running, and that brought me right back to Palm. Surprisingly, to me at least, the Treo suits my needs pretty well.
So what makes people switch to a completely different operating system? Is it the promise of “better, cooler, faster”? Is it “I hate this device, so that one has to be better”? How much of your device choice is based on actual functionality of the device (“gotta have a phone and a thumb keyboard”), and how much is purely personal preference (“the Pocket PC is so easy to use, but the Palm is so alien!”)?