Ilium Software Blog

Behind the Scenes at Ilium Software

Third-Party Articles

And the Winning Number Is….

by Julie

Here it is, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The winning number for the ListPro contest at SolSie.com is: 16!!

I just checked the comments on SolSie.com, and it looks like someone guessed that number right on the nose. Good job! And congrats to everyone else who guessed close enough to win. Thanks to everyone for playing – I had fun with this contest myself!

And, in case anyone is curious how I chose the lucky number 16…I just added all three of my nephews ages together – so there you have it.

Thanks again to everyone who played and thanks to SolSie.com!

I’m Thinking of a Number From 1 to 100….

by Julie

There was a recent post on SolSie.com in which the author described a very handy list he had made using our own ListPro software. To thank them for this article, we decided to let them give away five copies of ListPro for free this week!

All you need to do to enter the contest is visit this post on their site and pick a number from 1 to 100. Then just come back here on Friday, November 24th at three p.m. EST where I will announce the top-secret number that I’ve picked. SolSie.com will check through their comments and the five people whose guesses are closest to my number will win!

And if you’re as disorganized as me, this is the perfect time of year to try to win ListPro. The holidays are coming, and that means gifts, parties, recipes, and other holiday madness to remember! So go to SolSie.com right now and post a guess. (Remember, don’t enter it in the comments to this post.) Good luck!

Unintentional Success Story

by Kevin

Every once and a while, Ilium Software tech support gets a heads-up about an interesting and unexpected use of one of our products. We aren’t the only ones; Patrick at MicroISV on a Shoestring had the same experience and his story prompted me to think.

Sometimes the use case isn’t much of a stretch; ListPro is a program to make lists, so it’s hard to find a use for ListPro that isn’t obvious by definition. Prayer lists, scavenger hunts, web bookmarks, flight checklists… they’re all still just lists. NewsBreak is the same way; RSS and ATOM are usually used for simple ‘newspaper headlines’, but all sorts of information such as your NetFlix queue, Gmail account, eBay search results and weather reports are available via RSS. These uses are just part of what NewsBreak is designed to do.

eWallet, on the other hand, is really designed to be a program to hold your sensitive personal information like passwords, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, frequent flier mile cards. That’s it; you put personal information in, eWallet encrypts it under one password. That doesn’t stop people from coming up with their own uses.

Just yesterday, we had a user mention that she used eWallet to keep track of things she wanted to buy on the web. She would create cards with the backgrounds set to a picture of a particular item, with the weblink to the item and a description in the notes. That way, she could see at a glance exactly what something was, instead of having to go visit the website to figure out why it was in the list.

This is not something eWallet was intended to do, but it works and made the user happy. The ‘pictures of stuff to buy’ list works because eWallet supports both card background graphics and Picture Cards (useful for pictures of your dog / cat / gerbil with fruitless dreams of freedom / kid / favorite flower pot / car / boat / that really big fish you caught that was thiiiiiiiis big, really! / etc.) You know, stuff you would keep in a real wallet.

It also brings up the great can-of-worms question, “Should we pursue this with eWallet?” I definitely don’t have the answer. Questions like these are great, because they open up all those weird little opportunities you – the developer, or tester, or anyone else in software development – wouldn’t necessarily think of on your own.

Great Article on Getting Organized with Windows Mobile

by Ellen

Todd Ogasawara wrote a great article about Getting Organized with Windows Mobile. Of course I liked it because it mentioned eWallet and ListPro, but even without that, it’s very useful information. Everyone I know can use all the tips they can get about getting (and staying) organized.

I personally find it easy to get organized – it’s staying organized that’s much harder. Good software helps.

Thanks, Todd!

NewsBreak and ListPro Get More Action

by Ellen

A great review of NewsBreak by Todd Ogasawara showed up on Microsoft’s website. Thanks very much, Todd, for cheering up a day that really needed it (though the weather’s beautiful) (though not as beautiful as it no doubt is in Hawaii).

ListPro got a bunch of sales from being featured on Bits du Jour, and one very nice comment about how well it runs on Kubuntu under wine. I’m fuzzy about what that is, but am very happy it works!

Many Nice Words about ListPro

by Ellen

Thanks, Andrew and Jeff for the very nice words about ListPro.

And thanks to Pocket Goddess and Clinton Fitch for the great reviews too!

To the people who commented and asked: Yes, we’d like to do a Mac version, but I’ll be honest here and say don’t hold your breath waiting for one. Each additional platform takes away from adding features. It’s a difficult trade-off.

Copyright © Ilium Software Inc. | All Rights Reserved. | Contact Us