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Meet (yet another one of) the staff!

July 6, 2006 by Lee

I’m Lee, part of the support team, and if you call or email for tech support you will probably get Kevin before you get me, unless you are a bulk-purchaser or one of a select bunch of resellers.

I have been doing tech support of one variety or another for about 15 years, nearly five of those here at Ilium Software.  It truly is a great place to work; it’s nice to be around people who are caring and honest, and really believe in what they are doing.

I, too, am a big fan of our software, especially ListPro and eWallet.  I use them every day, both at work and home, and wonder how I ever managed without them.  Both travel everywhere with me on my Treo 650; it’s so nice to have my information at my fingertips!  I save a ton of time by filtering my grocery list to only show the items I need, and then sort it by aisle.  Then I print it out and check it off in the store (I really don’t have enough hands to wrangle two active kids, a grocery cart, *and* my Palm — and besides my kids will ask endlessly “Mom, can I play a game on your Palm now?”  Out of sight, out of mind).  One trip through the store and I’m done.  No backtracking to a missed item (this is a really good thing — see previous statement about two active kids…).

Also, since I am calendar-challenged (write it on the calendar and promptly forget it), I use a running list of appointments, events, reminders, etc. in ListPro.  Since I am constantly referring to it for one reason or another, I don’t miss appointments anymore.  When an event is past, I check it off to make it hidden, but I can easily look back and say “When was that?”.

Did someone encourage me to write about our software?  No.  Do I recommend it to friends, and even people I don’t know?  Yup.  It’s good stuff, and it just works.

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Filed Under: Our Company & Staff

Screen Resolution Rant VS. Samsung Q1:Fight!

July 3, 2006 by Kevin

After writing my little opinion essay on screen resolution, something was missing. “What about the new UMPCs!? Those have tiny screens!”

Actually, they’re not so tiny. The Samsung Q1 for example has a 800×480 screen, which seems small but it’s adequate. Anyone who remembers (or still uses!) the Handheld PC devices will recognize that as a similar format to the famous 640×240 screen, but with more wide and twice the tall.

The problem was, we didn’t have a UMPC to play with so I didn’t have any real-life experience. Well, now we do, and I’ve played with it.

In short, my verdict is: Needs Work. This is on a scale of, “Dismal Failure” to “Sliced Bread”. For a first-revision device in a ‘new field’, Needs Work seems to be a pretty decent assessment. Certainly not a Dismal Failure.

For more details, a quick review, and a picture, read on.

[Read more…] about Screen Resolution Rant VS. Samsung Q1:Fight!

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Filed Under: General, UMPCs

Meet (another) Member of the Staff

July 3, 2006 by Julie

Hi, I’m Julie. I’ve been working at Ilium Software since last September, and I help work on the website and marketing end of things. I also help answer the phones when everyone in support gets swamped. So, if any out there ever calls and gets me, you might not get technical help right away, but I am great at taking messages!

Besides working on the web site here, I am still going to school, online, for a degree in web development, so I am pretty much in front of a computer screen either here or at home, about 12 hours a day. Of course, I’m not complaining, really – I’m glad that there is such a thing as online school. I don’t know if I would be able to work here and attend a traditional college – there just isn’t much flexibility in on-site schools, but the Internet is always open.

I have to admit, before I started working at Ilium Software, I didn’t know much at all about PDAs. I mean, I’d heard about them, seen commercials and ads, but I couldn’t have told you the difference between a Pocket PC and a Palm handheld to save my life. Of course, it’s not like they always make it easy out there, as in the new Palm Treo 700w Smartphone, which actually runs a Pocket PC operating system. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s ever been confused by handheld devices. So I’m really glad that I’m starting to understand more about mobile devices and that I am able to use them when I need to around here – the world is definitely becoming more mobile, and wireless, and all those other technological-type adjectives.

[Read more…] about Meet (another) Member of the Staff

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Filed Under: Our Company & Staff

Meet (one of) Our Founders

June 27, 2006 by Ellen

I liked Kevin’s introduction so much that I’m going to encourage everyone else here to write one. Which I’m pretty sure means I should do one first.

I’m Ellen, one of the people who started Ilium Software, back in 1997. I’ve met some of the people who are reading this – many of the people who run the PDA and mobile related websites, as well as many other developers and even quite a few users – at various conferences and events over the years. I’ve also talked to a number of users (fewer in recent years, but still keep my hand in a little) over the phone and by email. And of course I’ve seen many companies and individuals drop out of mobile software completely. Like people say about old age, it’s definitely not for sissies.

If companies reflect the personalities of the people who started them, I guess Ilium Software reflects mine to a large extent. Certainly our emphasis on providing really good support is a direct result of my frustration with the very bad support I’ve received from too many companies over the years. I don’t accept bad support from anyone (at least not more than once), and as long as I’m in control, we won’t provide it.

[Read more…] about Meet (one of) Our Founders

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Filed Under: Our Company & Staff

Screen resolution: The (not so) Big Picture

June 26, 2006 by Kevin

I really love those parenthetical titles! The software industry – and in fact anyone who wants to sell something – is driven by either addressing customer needs and wants, or trying to invent a need/want so that customers will buy a product.

Push email is a good example. Do you need it? Maybe. Does everyone need it? Probably not. Do you want it? Maybe. Do you need it because you want it, or because your job depends on you actually being able to respond to an email within one minute even when you’re taking a pit stop? That depends entirely on you and your boss. Or do you want it because someone says, “Push email is big!” [Incidentally, here’s an article about why Push Email may not be so great  over at Modern Nomads that touches on the issue of want vs need.]

This post is about screen resolution. Screen resolution has gone up fairly steadily over the years. My parents’ first computer had a 15″ CRT monitor that cost $500 and could just barely handle displaying 1280×1024 resolution at eye-melting 60hz. Now, a 19″ CRT that can easily do the same at readable 85hz costs $90 from OfficeMAX. The 17″ LCD I’m using right now can easily support that resolution natively and cost about $200 – a similar one I just sold that I’d purchased in May of 2004 was $440. When my parents bought their first computer, the whopping 30″ Apple Cinema Display was completely unheard of as something a mortal could purchase, but now Dell has equivalently-sized displays that aren’t so crazy. Television screens used to be the size of a small toaster – today, even a college student can afford a plasma display (your college student may vary.)

We want bigger, we can have bigger, so we get bigger. What about PDAs? Instead of getting bigger, we want smaller. Witness the relative explosion of the Smartphone market as opposed to the palm-sized handhelds of various flavors. Smartphone devices are pretty cool any way you slice them – except for one thing.

The screen is really small! All Windows Mobile 5 Smartphones use ‘QVGA’ displays, 320×240 pixels. However, these phones don’t display any more data than the previous 176×220 displays – they just make it look prettier with more pixels. The same goes for VGA Pocket PCs, or high-resolution Palm-powered handhelds – a 640×480 Dell Axim X51V can’t display any more data on the screen than the 320×240 Axim X5 could, nor can my Treo 650 put anything more on its 320×320 screen than the original Palm could with its 160×160 screen.

It really is possible to cram more data on the screen – you just use a smaller font size. We get requests all the time – especially for ListPro – to add ‘high resolution’ support to our applications. The way I’ve seen this done, the screen font size is halved. My DateBk6 program on my Treo 650 can do this easily. The problem is… I can’t do it. I’m young, and even though I am nearly legally blind without my glasses, I can see pretty well with them on. That doesn’t make reading characters any easier when they’re as big as this period –> . [For a look at how this works out on ultra-portable and UMPCs, take a look at this blog post by JKOntherun]

We want smaller and bigger at the same time – smaller dimensions, higher resolutions. “QVGA is too small! It’s too ugly low-res!! Why would I want a Treo 700w when the screen is only 240×240! I want more pixels! More pixels! 10 megapixel cameras! XGA Pocket PCs!

Do people really need these tiny screens? Do people really want them? Are they being told they want them by marketing? Are they assuming that more pixels is better? Tech people aren’t immune to ‘more is better’ – I bought my new digital camera partly because it was just $20 more to get 7.1 instead of 6MP! Why get a regular value meal when you can biggie size it (disclaimer: biggie sizing no longer exists at Wendy’s) for just 40 cents more? Why get an Axim X51 (320×24) when you can get the X51V (640×480, four times as many pixels) for less than $100 more?

So what do we as a company do? Do we spend a lot of time adding a feature to our software just to make it more flexible, giving people the option to squint at their 2.5″ screen to see 300 lines of text instead of 150 (disclaimer: I made that number up.) Do we have to climb on that bandwagon in order to make sure we stay relevant? Or do we try to make software that is easily used on a 2.5” screen by people with average fingers and average eyeballs?

I certainly don’t have the answer. I would love to be able to see more of my shopping list in ListPro on my Palm, but I don’t think I’d be happy trying to check off “Get eye exam” using my thumbnail when my nail’s thicker than the item I’m trying to poke on the screen. Maybe the ideal solution is a compromise – give people all their data when they want it, and readable data when they need it.

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Filed Under: Software in General

4 Tests for Mobile App Success

June 23, 2006 by Ellen

Michael Mace wrote another great post (I’m a huge fan of his) about 4 tests that a mobile application has to pass in order to be successful: meeting a real need, being easy to install, being easy to learn, and being something the user is aware of.

[Read more…] about 4 Tests for Mobile App Success

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Filed Under: General, Software in General

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