I'm Thinking of a Number From 1 to 100....

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!

Please Don't Photocopy Your Wallet

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.

A Whirlwind of Activity!

“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!

Turn Any Computer into Your Personal Computer

I just found out about this amazing new product called MojoPac that lets you shrink your personal computer so it fits in your pocket! If this sounds like a line from a really bad infomercial, trust me, it’s not; and if it doesn’t sound entirely believable, well, it is. Okay, MojoPac won’t literally shrink your computer, but it does let you install any of your programs, files, and personal settings on devices like iPods or USB drives, so you can access them safely from anywhere. Now, to switch back to infomercial mode: But wait, there’s more!

If you have eWallet on your Windows PC, you can install it on your MojoPac device and carry it with you, along with any of your other personal Windows PC programs and settings you want to add to MojoPac. When you combine the already strong security of eWallet with the safety of a MojoPac PC, you never have to worry that your personal information can be seen by anyone but you. When you disconnect your MojoPac device from another computer, all your data stays with you. You can look at your eWallet files just as if you were on your home computer, and it all stays safely on MojoPac.

Visit the MojoPac website to learn more about how MojoPac works, and what devices you can carry it on - including iPods, USB flash drives, and even some cell phone models.

You can also check out our Windows PC eWallet information to find out more about the program, and how it works alone or with MojoPac to protect your information and make it easy for you to access when you need it.

Unintentional Success Story

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.

Congratulations to Marc!

Marc Tassin, our Product Manager (who introduced himself here a while ago) has just had a story published in a real book! The book is called Furry Fantastic, and Marc’s contribution is a very entertaining and well-written story about … well, I’m not going to say what it’s about. If you want to read it, you’ll have to pick up the book yourself. And if you do, be sure to read Marc’s description of himself at the end.

Again, congratulations Marc!