We’ve all found them. Little tricks, tweaks, and techniques that make our favorite programs even better. I received an email recently from KS recently suggesting that we do a blog post where we ask all of you to share your favorite eWallet tricks.
“Great idea!” I said! So here it is! Please take a moment to share your favorite eWallet shortcuts, tricks, and advice!
Well, the month of January is over, and it’s time to announce the first winner of our Giving Stuff Away! contest. And let me tell you, it was no easy task. Not the choosing, because that’s completely random of course, but the writing of the script that would do the choosing was more than I had anticipated. I thought, oh sure, I’ll write up a little somethin’ to grab a random comment from the database. In fact, I didn’t think I’d have to do any work at all to get it done, because I’d just done something very similar a few weeks ago. But it turns out all that crazy spam we delete is still lurking around in the background, and we sure don’t want those spammers winning anything, now do we?
But don’t worry, I’ve got it all under control now, and here it is, the winner of the contest for January: Johan, who commented on the post Caching vs Copyright.
Congratulations, Johan! I’ve just sent an email to the address you supplied when you wrote your comment. If you don’t get the email, check your junk folders – I did use some “spammy” words like congrats and contest – or reply to this post and we can get it all straightened out.
To everyone else, it’s February 1st and time to start all over again. Keep the comments coming and maybe this month, the winner will be you!
I’ve written posts about naming products before and I gotta say, it’s a tough job. You search and search for just the right name, think you’ve found something really cool, and then…well then you usually realize it’s taken…so you search and search for ANOTHER name, think it’s really cool, go with it and find out later that it confuses the heck out of everyone!
A great example (and my current naming challenge) are our Professional Editions. Our Professional Editions are just a bundle that includes the product for a PDA AND Desktop for one price. Unfortunately people constantly get the impression that there is some sort of feature difference. Maybe the “Professional” version has more bells and whistles? Better encryption?
Unfortunately I can’t blame them. Often a “Professional” version of something IS a version with a number of different features not present in the “standard” edition. Well, it’s time to clear things up.
We’re getting ready to select a new name for our Professional editions bundles. So far we aren’t happy with the results. The biggest problem is the names just end up really long. Then it struck me…just ask the world! Someone is bound to have a great solution to this problem. So anyone have any ideas, insights, or comments?
One of the toughest things to do as a (relatively) small software developer is to get the word out about your product. We don’t have a multi-million dollar ad budget or a marketing department filled with people thinking up clever new ways to let people know how badly they need our software. At the same time we have some great products that people get really hooked on once they start using them.
Eric Sink, a person in our industry who I have a ton of respect for, wrote a blog post today about a near disaster with his laptop. It no longer recognized his fingerprint and he couldn’t remember the ultra secure password he’d selected for it! I read articles like this one quite often and all I can think is “We have the solution! Why doesn’t everyone know about it??”
We just posted a brand new keyboard layout pack for InScribe! This new pack includes eight layouts including Cloemak, Dvorak, Hcesar, Maltron, Plum, Qwerf, Quicktype, and Staggered. The layouts are self installing. All you need to do is download the pack here and when you run the installer it will automatically install the layouts for you. I want to extend special thanks to the folks at Plum for giving us permission to distribute a copy of their great layout.
In addition we’ve also posted a pack that includes all the default layouts. If you really botch up the defaults while customizing, running this installer will replace them with the original layout formats.
Michael Mace wrote a fantastic article about the mobile computing market. If you haven’t read it, you really need to read the entire article. I think he is on the money with his analysis and I quite literally could not have said it better.
BUT
The one thing he said that I disagree with is:
“Information manager [device] innovation has basically ground to a halt, and the users in this space are very frustrated.”
I agree that the users are frustrated. I don’t agree that innovation has ground to a halt. In fact, the information manager’s dream device is already out there.
The UMPC.
