Tag, I'm It

So apparently there’s this new game among bloggers where someone “tags” another blogger. If you’re tagged, you have to post 5 facts about yourself that most people don’t know, and then tag 5 other bloggers. I just got tagged by spmwinkel at solsie.com who had been tagged by Patrick from JustAnotherMobileMonday.

OK, this is going to be pretty easy, and fun. First, the interesting people I tag are:

Dan Hanttula a hugely interesting person who has more credentials than I’ll even try to list.

Hal Goldstein, editor-in-chief of Pocket PC and Smartphone Magazine.

Jen Edwards, the Pocket Goddess, which title I wish I could have.

My good buddy and sometime competitor Alex Kac (I hope this counts; he calls it a blog though it’s a blog in a forum format).

Howard Tomlinson, founder and CEO of Astraware.

And 5 things about me, in no particular order, are:

One, I’m in the small group of people who are huge fans of musicals. Oddly enough, both Dan and Hal, above, are also in that group, so when I write them that I’m going on vacation to watch people kill people while singing, they know just what I’m talking about.

Two, I am one of the original founders of Ilium Software, which, to a large extent, I started because I didn’t want to work for anyone any more. It’s managed to keep me out of a “real” job for over 9 years, which I’m pretty happy about.

Three, I got interested in mobile computing when I worked at what’s now AT+T, and they handed me a Newton and sent me to the first (and, I think, only) Newton Developers’ Conference. I think I still have the t-shirt, though the Newton was stolen in a break-in at our “headquarters” at the time. (Working at AT+T was a big factor in convincing me that I never wanted to work for anyone again.)

Four, I am also involved with Bits du Jour, a one-deal-a-day site for Windows and PDA software.

And five, I consider the name “Ilium Software” as my biggest business mistake. Here’s what I learned: never, never, never start a company or a website with the letters i L i. Or even i L, or L i unless it’s a really well-known word. Nobody can distinguish ili from illi from lli from lil in those little tiny fonts without serifs. Ilium is Greek for Troy - I was working in Troy, Michigan at the time, and liked the sound of the name Ilium, but never thought about the readability issue until it was way, way too late. It’s not my biggest life mistake, but definitely a candidate for the bad company name awards.

Where's my template editor?!?

Every time we release a new version of the software we not only get to announce what new features we added, but everyone quickly finds out which features we didn’t add. This makes a new release the best thing in the world for some people and a real frustration for others. For those of you who are frustrated, we hear you. It’s always annoying when a product you really like does an upgrade, and you discover that they didn’t include that one thing you’ve been asking for since 1997!

It happens to everyone, including us. Take ActiveSync as a great example. Pocket PCs have File Synchronization. Smartphones don’t. With every new release of ActiveSync or Windows Mobile for Smartphone we all cross our fingers and chant “Please include file sync! Please include file sync!” and every time….nothin’. Why Microsoft? Why?

Well, I can’t speak for why Microsoft does what they do but I can tell you about us. Here is what we consider when we try to make decisions about new features. There are always additional things that can influence a decision but these are the biggies.

What Users Want This is huge. We keep all sorts of lists of the things that users ask us for. We research the ideas, check out the options, and explore ways we could do them. The more people that ask for something, the more likely we are to include it. This is a prime area that we look at when considering a new feature.

What Users Hate Sometimes people come right out and say what they hate, other times it becomes clear in frustrated support emails about a particular issue. Either way we track this stuff and work to improve it. Areas of major annoyance get top ranking on the big list-o-future-features.

Where the Market is Headed We need to watch which way the wind is blowing. If we don’t keep up with current market trends we’re not going to be around to MAKE another upgrade. These are tough because sometimes people aren’t asking for the thing yet, but if we don’t add it we won’t be competitive 6 months from now. Windows Mobile Smartphone is a great example of this. We wrote a smartphone version before there was a smartphone on the market. This meant taking time that could have been used to add features to Pocket PC, but that’s where the market was going so we had to blaze a trail in that direction!

What Microsoft/Palm/Etc. Tells Us To Do I posted about this awhile back. There are things we have to do whether we like it or not. A great example in eWallet 5.0 is moving around a lot of files the software uses. From the info we’ve received, files that change as the user does different things (templates, sync files, custom graphics etc.) must NOT be in the program directory in the future. This means we had to redesign the file structure for eWallet 5.0, a big undertaking, at the expense of adding features. Failing to do so could lead to the software not working at all on new versions of Windows Mobile!

Making Things Better for New Users There are times when we need to make changes that will benefit new users more than existing users. For the existing users, they’ve often become used to whatever weird thing we did in the past. The problem is that every new user has to “get used” to that thing as well. To that end, we often make changes that will make the experience for a new user significantly better. This can be really frustrating for people who are used to the product working a certain way. There are a few of these in eWallet 5.0 and I’ll blog about them later, but these are things we just have to bite the bullet and do sometimes.

What We Love I’d be misleading you if I didn’t include this one. Every so often there is a feature that we really love so we add it. Sometimes these turn out to be the things everyone wanted but didn’t know they needed. Other times they are that feature that makes everyone wonders if maybe there is something in the water over here in Ann Arbor. Most features get added for the other reasons I listed but this one does come up every so often.

So there you have it. A few of the big things that we look at as we add new features to our products. Not a comprehensive list since there are LOTS of ways a feature could end up in the product, but a good descriptions of the major ones.

And don’t forget the first thing I posted! We take requests VERY seriously so send them our way! (Or post in a comment here even! We’re listening!)

Giving Stuff Away

There’s a lot being written right now about Microsoft’s giving Vista PCs to bloggers, and the ethics of the bloggers taking them. If you’ve managed to miss it, there are a few links at the bottom of this post that you can read, but frankly, I’m already tired of the whole subject, and imagine that many other people are too.

But since I’m no longer averse to stealing good ideas (way too many of mine have been lifted), and since we’re trying to drum up more activity on this blog (both posts and comments), we’re going to start a monthly giveaway to people who comment on the posts.

Here’s how it will work:

• Around the first of each month, we’ll give away one of our titles (recipient’s choice, and you can choose one of our suites, so you’d essentially get 3 or 4 programs) to someone who has commented on any of the posts in the previous month. People who have all the software they want can instead get some of our swag, which right now is still just stylus pens, though I’m thinking hard about getting something else.
• We’ll pick the winner each month using a random number that we map to the comment IDs.
• To be eligible, comments just need to be legitimate, and somehow related to the original post.

To help this along, I’ll encourage everyone here to post a lot more, so there’s more content to respond to.

And, as promised, here are the links to a few of the articles about the Microsoft giveaway:

I Started Something Jason Dunn Ed Bott Joel on Software

There’s a lot more that’s been written about this, but starting with the above will probably lead you there.

Opera, eWallet and Me

I recently installed IE7, and for a lot of reasons, didn’t like it much. I’ve never managed to get along well with Firefox, but after spending some time with Opera, found that it worked pretty well for me. There’s a lot it doesn’t do - I do keep IE7 and Firefox both available as well, but I decided to use Opera as my primary browser. Given that Opera imported my IE bookmarks and that I only ever let IE save the passwords I didn’t care much about (things that I don’t really consider very secret, like my logins to sites where I have to register just to read an article), I figured the hardest part about converting would be retraining my fingers.

It turned out I had let IE save a lot more passwords than I’d thought. I haven’t been keeping formal count, but I’m pretty sure I’ve found over 30 so far, and I know I haven’t hit them all. Fortunately, I’d also recorded all the passwords in eWallet (in the Category I call “junk regs”), so it was just a matter of re-entering them all into Opera. But I was surprised - I would have thought I would have saved maybe 10 in IE. eWallet really saved me a lot of trouble on this one.

Why I like Opera - it seems to me a lot faster than IE7 and Firefox. I like tabbed browsing, and the built-in newsreader and RSS reader, but most of all, I like being able to search in my bookmarks, being able to pick “author mode” when I don’t like a page’s fonts and colors, and how configurable it is.

Why I don’t like it - it doesn’t support Web 2.0 very well, resized graphics look pretty awful, and I still end up surprised (at best) or puzzled (at worst) about where a window went or how to get back to one. But overall, it’s my current favorite. If you’re not happy with your current browser option, it’s definitely worth a look. Be sure you’ve got all your passwords, though!

(And, on an almost completely unrelated side-note, this preview is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. The reason it’s slightly related is that probably only people who are familiar with the kind of opera that involves singing, classical music, and live performers will find it funny.)

And, yes, we will be fixing our site so it looks better in the newer browsers. And I’m hoping that we’ll be able to extend eWallet’s AutoPass feature to work in other browsers as well as the IE ones.

Happy Holidays from Ilium Software!

Santa, I want eWallet 5.0 and Screen Capture and world peace and a pony….

(Thanks to our product manager Marc for arranging to have Santa come in during his annual pre-Christmas publicity rounds!)

'Tis the Season for New Freeware

Maybe it’s the holiday spirit, or leftover giddiness from the release of eWallet 5.0 last week, but I’ve decided today would be a great day to release another new product - and this time, it’s free!

Ilium Software Screen Capture is a fast and easy-to-use application that lets you take screenshots quickly on your Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone. In only a few steps, the program is ready to take all the screenshots you need at the push of a button.

Ilium Software Screen Capture is the newest of many handy utilities and fun games available for free on our website. Visit our freeware page today to download any of these great programs.