Birdsoft Blog

My silly New Years Resolution this year was that it was the “Year of Golf”. It was a fun little game I played so that I can hype up the fact that I want to play a little more golf and hopefully get back to the level I was right out of college. Don’t worry I’m not good…

It is kind of a built-in excuse to play more and to finally replace my irons that I bought right out of college(~12 years ago). They were nice clubs but at the time I dont think they pushed custom fitting clubs as much. Im a little on the taller side so have been playing with clubs that were over an inch too short for me for 12 years. It definitely made me bend my knees but…  Anyway, I already have the new Taylor Made Irons and had them lengthened, and if the driving range stays accurate I may have added 12-15 yards to my iron play. Nice.

We also moved to a location where some really nice courses are more accessible along with a good driving range really close. So Ive already taken advantage of the range quite a bit for my ‘Year of Golf’. Its a good quick stress reliever when my head is spinning with C++.  Oh, and I also took the oppertunity to update my wife’s clubs so she plays a few more times too…

And finally, my father-in-law, brother-in-law, and I are semi-competitive and besides fishing the other competition that we have fun with  on our ‘Up North’ trip is golfing. I was pretty dominant for a few years, but now they both have purchased clubs and taken up playing a little more, so… I better too…

But the point of this as it pertains to Mobile is that with this I have set aside a few weeks to update one of my popular applications, FairwayWatch - our golf scorecard application. I plan on using it more, but if Im going to do that I will need to have it compatible with Standard devices(I carry a Q). So what Im looking for is feedback on what would make this a must have for all you golfers out there?   Here are some things I am planning on or already have added…

• Standard Support - I’m porting it to Win32 and WM5 and above only. Using it with the soft keys makes it infinitely more usable one handed, and obviously it has to be for Standard Devices. In doing so I also get to use our new editing and options list based dialogs.
• Other Interface updates - we have ideas for a bunch of things to optimize the use so it is much easier to use on the course.
• 320×320 Screen and better Treo support. Obviously some of the things above help with this too.
• A Facelift - Color Themes and way bettter looking Buttons and better use of the screen space. Some themes will be light on dark for better contrast in sunlight.
• More Statistic Tracking - We have an idea on some but would love to hear more ideas…
• Internet course library from within the program
• A desktop verison with score card printing and multiple round analysis which will also allow for easier course entry and basic synching. Because of the switch to Win32 we will have to use slightly new file formats so conversion utilities will probably end up in the Desktop version.

We are thinking it would be good to combine all rounds into one file for each course instead of separate files which would make analysis much nicer. Thoughts…??? Other ideas?  What would you like to see…

We want it to be your year of golf too…

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Well, what I really had thought would be a pretty quick Update with some really cool features and a lot of the Ulti-Planner leftovers caught up turned into a longer update with a lot of cleaning up done. A couple of the new features made it in but a lot of them are being held over for 3.30 which we plan to release much more quickly.

I had forgotten just how much work it was to do the VGA support the first time around. It is a lot of graphics work and a lot of adjustments to get it looking good. But I think I suceeded. And 320×320 screens are going to look great too, Extreme Agenda is ready for my dream device(come on Treo 800 please have a 320×320 screen).

Photo Icon List was the big piece that did get in. I have had this idea for a long time and finally sat down early in 3.25 development and worked out how to accomplish it, and I think it turned out very useful. I tend to leave my regular device in that mode a lot.

We did a number of things behind the scenes code wise and also had to do some things to make the Pro/Classic Devices feel more correct. ‘Ok’ buttons on Dialogs, the Help system with access to it from the Start Menu and a few others…

We’ve also added support for some new ideas from different developer’s we really liked. SPB Mobile Shell support is available with 3.25. The integration information is available in our forums. We think it turned out pretty cool, and we are big fans of that product to make your WM Pro device that much nicer. With this we also had to add a whole bunch of command line handling which should further help in integrating with other products out there. We will post the documentation for this on our forums soon.

And then we have added the files to make it compatible with AppToDate over at modaco.com. This is an effort to have one program that you can check and see if all of your applications are up to date. Of course with XA you can also use the “Check for Update” in the Options Menu, but having them both can’t hurt.

We did work to make it so theme files can look a lot better with light text on dark backgrounds, as we noticed when trying to simulate some of Mobile Shell’s themes that some of our text just didnt look good and was not able to be changed. Hopefully we have moved in the right direction for this. By the way, XA looks great if you use Mobile Shell’s cool generated backgrounds(kind of Vista-ish) as the Spin and regular XA background image and simulate the theme. We have given you some of the theme files and information for this in our forums as well.

And thanks to Doug at MyTodayScreen who suggested the “New Appointment” and “New Task” be added to the Spinner. He really does love that view. I guess you can’t blame him.

Specific Standard issues that were brought up were also addressed such as Treo 500 keyboard support in contact search. If you had one please try 3.25 and let me know if I did not correct a fix you had brought up.

 So that’s the development of 3.25. We now plan to work on a few other things along with 3.30 which will contain the rest of the really cool new features coming over from Ulti-Planner or otherwise. Drag-n-drop, Single Tap Mode, and more… Hopefully we’ll have it out by the middle of May if not sooner!!!

Thanks

I watch the market very closely for all mobile phones and obviously mostly Smartphones. And besides reading all the news sites, reports, and blogs a great tool is to watch the real market around you. And what really is one of the best judges for me is whether or not my friends and family have interest in the devices I write software for.

Obviously there is a transition going where consumers are going from Feature Phones to Smarter Phones and wanting to do more with them. Just as in the late 1990s to early 2000s we saw the main stream consumers all come over to the cell phone darkside. I remember the holdouts like my dad and father-in-law who would never need to have a phone along everywhere. The old system worked so well. Of course now my Father-in-law doesn’t go anywhere without his Razr on his hip and my mom and dad have a pay as you go that they take all over. 

Now my dad would be considered a Techie guy in love with his computers and his digital photography, so I was able to get him interested in PDAs, which lets face it, the overwhelming majority of consumers were never going to fully adopt like they would the phone. But even then he started slowly and bought one more to use as a picture display more than anything else. And he had to get a Palm right when they were going down hill instead of splurging for a Pocket PC. He got that used later for a cheap deal, but the X5 though groundbreaking, wasnt really a great carry-around size…

Another good friend of mine was as they say ”an early adopter” and did have an Axim that he used religiously for scheduling and to improve his Poker Game(with All-In) and so he has, like you would expect, moved on to a Windows Mobile Phone(Q) and Im sure will continue to move up the chain… Another friend uses them for work a lot in the Utility industry, but other than that most of my friends are still in the catch up ‘coming soon’ group with a couple having blackberry’s.

My Brother who is also a Developer(who even does a lot of Mobile Development) has just purchased a Mogul for his main phone. I thought he was going to hold out longer as well though he is the target guy for this phone. He always had work devices around but never would make the leap until recently, though him and his wife are the people I have seen utilize WM devices as Entertainment devices the most out of anyone I know, usually on car trips. 

But the True Guage that the Majority Market is outgrowing their Razr’s and is moving this way is that my wife just not only said how she was interested in an eeeePc type device out of the blue, but also that she played with my development Treo 700wx all last night and said how much she liked it and wanted one for texting, organizing and because Bubble Breaker is so addictive!!! Wait until she tries some Astraware or PDAMill games…   I may have to get 2 Treo 800s in a few months…

 Here comes the Consumer majority market. Fun!!

I have purchased a Mac Mini for iPhone Development. I have played with Macs a bit the past few years, but never really sitting and doing anything for long or trying to accomplish anything on it…

So I did spend part of today setting it up and trying it out.

It was an interesting experience. The Mac Mini is nice in that I will just get a KVM switch so I can use the same monitor,keyboard, and mouse as my current development box. I had to buy one ps2 to USB adaptor and the KVM will be around $30 so not too bad with a $600 mini. I expected to have invested a lot more with Apple’s inflated prices (it would have been $100 for their mouse and keyboard and $600 for their monitor).  Though I do still have to buy a Touch for testing. And possibly more RAM.

Initial impressions… It was very nice to setup. I plugged this stuff in and it worked and found and used my wireless network very easily during setup.

But man, I just don’t see why people brag up OS X… Its flaking out and getting in my way more than it is “intuitive and bug free”. Ive already seen system errors in one day of just playing around(it makes the little blue screen jokes that Apple geeks make seem silly, especially since I havent seen one in years)… And trying to watch Developer Videos from iTunes was just plain goofy. It ‘may’ be a little prettier(coming from XP) but some of that was getting in the way of functionality for me as well. Yeah, a few small things were placed nicer in the UI, but others….

 So now I’ve been there and done that, I don’t think I’ll drink the Kool-Aid, and definitely not when the cost is so high for something not really as good.

But who knows maybe my opinion will change…

But I do now have the iPhone SDK up and running and have played with compiling some sample applications and stuff so, now its time to decide where I want to go with it…Ideas?