You Like Us! You Really Like Us!

The winners of the Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine Best Software Awards have just been announced, and we are happy to say that we’ve won four different awards!

eWallet (Professional Edition) for Pocket PCs won the title of Best Secure Information Manager. ListPro (Professional Edition) won Best List Manager, also for Pocket PCs.

And our news reader application, NewsBreak, won Best News Reader for Pocket PCs, as well as Best Feed Reader for Smartphones.

And because we couldn’t have done it without you, we want you to celebrate with us. For the next week, you can get a big discount on any purchase that you make with us when you visit our Handango-powered store.

Follow this link: http://www.iliumsoft.com/site/custserv/cath1.php to shop, and when you’re ready to pay, enter the code MAGAWRD in your cart to receive your discount. But don’t wait too long – the celebration will only last until October 25th!

You can visit the Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine website to view the complete list of winners. We would like to congratulate all of this year’s winners, and thank the magazine for honoring us with four awards.

Friday the 13th

I’m sure the fact that our network server seems to have completely bit the dust has nothing to do with the fact that today is Friday the 13th.

And my PC crashing every time I try to upload that picture of a calendar showing a 13 doesn’t mean anything either.

Who needs Exit?

A big challenge developers face are requirements given to them by OEMs (the people that make your hardware) and demands from folks like Microsoft and Palmsource. There are times when these requirements conflict with what we want to do or with what customers tell us they are looking for. Microsoft just put up a great blog post about one of these requirements (the missing Exit feature in Windows Mobile discussed at the Windows Mobile Blog).

Having read that, I figured I would share a developer perspective on this often frustrating topic…

So the easy answer is to just ignore the requirements. I mean, we’re doing this for the customer after all so why would we include some annoying feature just because we’re told to? Isn’t it customer purchases that keep us in business?

Wellll, sort of.

The problem is that in order to get those sales, there are a lot things that have to happen in the background. A big one, is getting that vital stamp of approval from Microsoft, Verizon, or whoever is sending down the requirements, and you only get that stamp if you do what they want.

So why does this matter? Glad you asked!

There are a bunch of reason but here are a few from the top of the list:

• Certain online stores require application approval to get listed. No stamp of approval and you don’t get listed, or if you do, you get the second balcony seat with an obstructed view.
• If you want a lucrative ‘in ROM’ deal (that is, the application comes installed on every device the OEM makes) you have to follow their rules. The OEMs only play with folks who are on “their team.”
• Large volume purchasers may avoid ’non-approved’ applications because if the application couldn’t get approval, they don’t feel that they can trust it.

There are plenty of other examples but you probably get the idea.

The Biggest Reason There is, however, a bigger reason.

We need the Big Guys to like us.

OK, maybe I’m sounding a bit like the high school outcast longing for the approval of the in-crowd, but the fact of the matter is that we gain access to a LOT of support by going along with the Big Guys’ game.

Here are some examples. Let’s say an OEM is about to make a major change to their hardware. Do you think they tell everybody in advance? Or just their “friends”. If that happens and we don’t know, our competitor now has a working version (because they played by the rules) and we don’t, leaving us in the dust.

Or perhaps an OS developer has decided to chop out some bit of code our applications depend on. If we haven’t played by their rules, they have no reason to let us in on this. When the OS update comes out our product suddenly crashes on every updated device.

Or maybe it’s just as simple as an oddity in the OS that we can’t figure out how to work around. By staying on the side of the Big Guys we have the opportunity to contact them and say “Hey…how do we make this work?” You only get those opportunities if you’ve been going along with their game.

In each of these cases we take a blow to sales if we lose the Big Guys’ support, and if there are too many of these blows we end up being one more memory in the sea of dead Mobile Software developers.

And this matters to our customers because if we’re out of business that means no more upgrades, no more support, and no more new software from a company many people have come to depend on.

So that’s why our Pocket PC applications don’t include an Exit option, our WM 5.0 applications now use the two menu system without toolbar icons, and our Palm applications have Unfiled categories. Maybe it isn’t the way we would have done things, but what it does is allow us to continue making enough money to stay in the software business. It’s part of the reason that over 9 years after we opened our doors, we’re still coming out with updates, offering top quality support to our customers, and producing great new applications for mobile devices.

PS: And don’t tell Microsoft, but clicking CTRL+Q on your Pocket PCs onscreen keyboard or tapping 7 in the About screen of our software on a Smartphone, will “truly” Exit most of our products! :)

The Danger of Cleaning House

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.

Making the Switch...

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!”)?

eWallet 5.0 Beta About to Commence!

That’s right! We’re about to start a full beta on eWallet 5.0. We’re very excited about the new features and look forward to getting reaction from our customers! One truth of software development is that sometimes things look amazing from our perspective, but once it hits the masses we discover that the “great idea” is far less impressive from a user point of view. Hence the need for a good beta run!

The beta group will include a very select bunch of people but we do have open slots so if you’re interested drop a line to beta@iliumsoft.com . Not only do we need our usual group of Palm, Pocket PC, and Windows Mobile Smartphone folks, but we’re also looking for people who don’t use a PDA at all anymore.