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Extreme Agenda 3.25 Development

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

My Mobile Market Guage

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!!

 

Ramping up for iPhone

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?

iPhone’s Free Pass

Couple of things right off the bat. 1. I am heavily considering developing for the iPhone which will require a significant investment, so I do see potential and do think that some things the iPhone does are very very good. 2. I am also obviously heavily WM biased, since I have lived and breathed the platform for the last 8 or so years. That being said…

I am extremely surprised by the almost blind following of Apple Drones. And Im not saying that everyone that has an iPhone or Touch falls into this category, far from it. And not even every Fanboy falls into this category either. And some even slip in and out of these characteristics. But I’ve seen and tired of it since 6 months before the iPhone release and a new crop of droning has popped up with the release of the SDK.

What I mean by this is that some of these people, instead of admitting that something is potentially a very bad thing about the iPhone, actually go to the other extreme and think that anything Steve Jobs does(most of which is actually done for the $$ but then glossed over for these drones to believe) is the best possible thing that can be done.

Some Examples:

1. The SDK will not support Multi-Tasking.  I actually have heard arguments about how great this is and how they don’t want it to turn into $#!#$ Windows Mobile devices that are so slow,  and how they actually say there would never be any reason why they would ever need 2 applications running at once. It is Laughable!!  

THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING!!! Yeah, I will admit that Microsoft should allow you to close applications and should have a little better memory management, and should up the minimum specs for WM devices. BUT… this is not a problem on most devices and you wouldn’t believe how many applications run on WM devices at once… It takes a lot to get them slowing down(and you are in control of what is and isn’t)… 

As MOST mobile enthusiasts know, the main thing that people have been waiting for from a NEW PALM OS is good true multi-tasking!! But now Apple comes along and says, oh yeah, we’ll only allow applications to run one at a time and have to persist themselves, well we are right back to PALM OS.

Now the non-drone fans are out there too saying that the Jailbreak community will still be out there and  hopefully there are ways to circumvent this or get exceptions… Me too…

2. Now I do like what Apple did with the “Store” with it on every device and they are originally offering a fair revenue share. But they also then basically have a monopoly on the Store and keep up with the iTunes like thinking. Everything you buy for your iPhone, you will buy from Apple!  I hope most people know economics enough to know that this isn’t a great thing!

And then I see the drones regurgitating Apple’s claims about not wanting to make money on the store. I’m sorry but if they didn’t want to make money they would have a considerably smaller % setup for developer revenue sharing. There are much smaller companies out there offering the same share, but having to maintain much larger web solutions and infrastructures. What I hope is that they stick with this percentage as I’ve seen these numbers go up later in the stores life as well…Who’s to stop them?

So please… We know you love your iPhone. We think some things with it are pretty cool too… And a few choices Apple has made recently have improved their cause, but it still has some things that need to be fixed and some that won’t ever be.

So if you have ever fallen into the drone category, Please Wake Up!!

Windows Mobile’s Bum Rap

A post over at one of my Favorite Mobile Blogs (JustAnotherMobileMonday.com) got me thinking. Why is the media being so harsh on Windows Mobile.  A lot of Bloggers and Media are hard on WM and how it is not Innovating. I know some of it is “fanboy” type attention from mobile guys that believe another OS(iPhone, Palm, Symbian) is somehow superior, I understand that, but… I made a reply post over there and will re-iterate some of the same points here.

Windows Mobile 6.1, which offers a bunch of pretty nice updates including new applications and even built-in Threaded SMS(competing with our Extreme Text), but yet the poster and a reply from some very in the know guys(and Ive seen many others) wrote how lackluster it is and how they expect more. 

For one thing, Windows Mobile 6.1 is a point release. Windows Mobile 7 (as some leaked screenshots have shown) and WM8 is where the real innovation will happen. And they are already well on their way so you know Microsoft has most of its Mobile Development Resources working in that direction. And people are quick to point out that WM6 isn’t doing what newer things are doing… There are 3 things wrong with this… 1. Windows Mobile is still arguabley the best out there. 2. WM is different. It is an open platform. Carrier and Manufacturers can license and develop anything they want to use with it. 3. It is competing with Applications for itself, Locked down platforms, and early APIs for overhyped Os’s that are still being created.

People think that Windows Mobile’s Internet Explorer should work as well as iPhone Safari.. And it should to an extent. And the features added in WM6.1 help that tremendously. It definitely needed work. But we are dealing with different form factors and almost exclusively smaller screens. Then people mention that the new SkyFox type browsers can do it better. Well but most people dont want everything they browse run through a server first. Privacy just went out the window and the idea just isn’t that ideal for Millions of phones…

And Programs like PointUI and the Touch Interface are neat. But they are the reason WM is an open platform. They can be developed or licensed as they are now. But a lot of them give slick simplicity and trade it for flexible power, Im not willing to do that and Im sure others aren’t either. And I think they can and will be done a lot better, hopefully in the new OS…

Now take iPhone. We still don’t have an API for it, but the promise of one has been more than enough for so many supporters. If Microsoft was dealing with 1 device in a single form factor with no 3rd party application support yet and only 1 set of drivers, well…Then they could ‘innovate’ faster as well. Instead they have to deal with Multiple Form Factors from multiple manufacturers and multiple carriers(consider all of the processors, memory, screen sizes, peripherals). And they understand the always overlooked need to protect the Large 3rd party developer base they have built up. So with flexibility they need to be a little more careful in their ‘innovation’.

And yes the Google Android OS API looks pretty. But it wasn’t complete on release and they are still working on the OS. It won’t even be ready and released for quite a while but yet it is almost considered “the next big thing” on word alone. I’ll be surprised if among any of the first devices there will  be a ’Home Run’. And the kinks will still need to be worked out. So… It may be BIG, in 2 or 3 years… But wait, WM7+ will be around then too…

People tend to think that the Mobile Phone market moves faster than it does, and want to see cool-ness now. But consider that some of the biggest selling Smarphones right now are still running the Antiquated Palm OS…  Windows Mobile 5 was already light years ahead of that… 

 

 

 

The Extreme Agenda Evolution…

In about 2003 after the success of my Student Planner “The Dog Ate It” I decided I have the development skills that I could easily compete with the “Big Boys” in the Personal Information Manager(PIM) world on Pocket PC(PI and AF). I had actually been around some of the development boards a couple years earlier when the first incarnations of these PIMs were just getting started with a Basic Week View much like what was found on the Grandaddy of all PDA PIMs, DateBK for Palm (Ive since met the Developer, a very intrigueing guy!). I don’t know why I didn’t see it then and just take over the market in its infancy!? It parallels why I sat on a nearly complete Extreme Agenda later on, both mysteries in ‘what was I thinking?’

 Anyway, they had both been around for a while, but I had some good base code and ideas and so finished up Ulti-Planner and in June of 2003 released it. Unfortunately I was the new guy in the already established “PIM Wars” and so having a couple years jump on me in development, advertising, and customer base well it was a tough little market to jump into. And so, while sales were “pretty good” I needed better to survive and so leaned on the dominant spot I had in the Pocket PC poker market, and went with 2 flagship products. Part of my problem I still believe was that somewhere in there I decided to be “the cheap alternative” with a low price and no upgrade costs. And while I had a lot of fans because I was also argueably ahead in ‘ease of use’ for the time the ‘cheap’ got me more sales, but maybe lost some credability as I now trully believe that people use price as more of a ‘quality’ marker than they even should. And as such, while I developed the heck out of Ulti-Planner in parallel to my other titles that first couple years, the revenue just wasnt coming that could afford me the ability to work more exclusively on it. I got it to where I felt I was very close to parallel to PI and AF in features(no small feat with them having a few year development head start). It even had VGA as I did splurge on an Dell x50v at the time and so added cool features like calendar text.

 And then Windows Mobile 5 came around, and while they had the budgets for devices and connections with Microsoft that you need Ulti-Planner didn’t get converted over as fast as possible. A lot of work was needed about that time as to be a good PIM you need to do a lot of cache-ing of data and direct access to the databases that Microsoft uses for Pocket Outlook( the development API just isnt fast enough). Well they changed that in WM5 which broke all of our Custom code. So during this time Ulti-Planner lost part of the market share it had captured. So the underdog slipped lower and lower. I eventually did get my x50v updated to WM5 for testing and with the emulators got there, but I was watching the other Developer blogs at the time and know they were ‘supposedly’ working on WM5 months before it ever saw the light of day… I didnt have WM5 support until May of 2006… Ouch…

I had some very good original ideas, some of which were even then used by everyone else, pretty cool! For some reason a lot of the PIM War forum discussions at the time degraded into ‘who copied who’. Essentially the truth of it all is that almost everything whether the developer also came up with it on their own or not, could be considered copied from DateBk and other earlier Calendars and Addressbooks on earlier PDAs. That being said, because I couldn’t work on it full-time for revenue reasons, a lot of the refining and even a lot of the big ideas weren’t fully explored in Ulti-Planner yet.

Somewhere in there, mostly for All-In development, I did purchase a MPX-220 WM Smartphone. It was a pretty cool and advanced flip phone for the time. And during and after the development of ’All-In SP’ I also did a ton of work on converting the code of Ulti-Planner (which is based on MFC, a C++development library popular on the desktop and Pocket PC) over to the more generic Win32 (for some reason MFC is on PPCs but not Smartphones), and re-coded it so everything would draw on the smaller 176×220 screens and with no stylus. Luckily a lot of the back-end classes for data and database stuff was re-usable, but it was a lot of work. So way back in November of 2004 I actually had a non-touch Screen Calendar application working. I even posted a page on our site asking for Beta Testers in June of 2005 showing some early screenshots seen here…

 And then another great mystery happened. Why I waited so long. Now part of it was some other development that needed to be done and some was that I just had some development left on Ulti-Planner SP that needed to get done, but I did sit on the project for a while until the hints of great devices like the Q were coming… Why I didnt just release UP for SP before Papyrus(the only other real SP integrated task and calendar solution) ever came out was a mystery to me. But another top notch developer did  see the light around that time(I hope not by seeing my Beta Page??) and released a pretty good product in this gap(Papyrus). Developer One had some ok non-integrated offerings that were the only other real alternative, and I’m sure just an early experiment into the market. Why I didn’t just go for it then is beyond me…

But in June of 2006 I finally had Ulti-Planner for Smartphone finished, and obviously renamed, and Extreme Agenda was born.

This time I saw a much better return at a little nicer price-point and that’s all it took for me to dive whole-heartedly into doing what I had always wanted to do with it. I quickly integrated Tasks(it appears I only had it out a week without it) and then within a month had the Photo Contacts List in there. Features came fast and furious and I quickly out-distanced the features of my competition. Version 2.0 was out by November with a built-in “Secure Wallet” and so many other features that I was easily the market leader on Smartphone.

Also In November my main rival came out. Developer One released Agenda One. It really felt like Extreme Agenda in that it had been completely re-written to run well one handed(without a stylus), and show the data in a lot of the same ways as XA did. I actually liked a lot of what they did on that and they did do a few really cool new things that made things even simpler and more refined. And Mostly Pretty(it depends on a lot of fancy icons)!, But a lot of the success I attribute to the partnerships, advertising money, and fan base they already had with Agenda Fusion. They have a little better connections! :(  

They did do something that I wanted to in releasing it to TouchScreen devices very quickly afterwards. Which shocked a lot of the PPC world, as why would you intentionally compete with your own product… I now know the answer that John, the owner of DevOne, gives and its a thinker… He’s a good guy that I enjoy talking to and he definitely has a more business type mind than I can take credit for… And I will say that Agenda One has pushed me to Innovate even further even faster.

In 2007 I made strides to get XA to where I really wanted it to be as far as features I could foresee before moving it over to touchscreen and phasing out the Ulti-Planner Product. I worked all summer (and it was prolonged do to weird things like floods and stuff around our town) on getting version 3.0 out the door. It has some great things in it like our Spin Selection screen which is so popular it may be built into other products, and the integrated Project View, based off our product “Project-ing”.

And the end of the year(complicated by our family moving and…) it was finally time to build back in all of the touchscreen features, Square Screen Pro device handling, and add “Finger Friendly” things so that Extreme Agenda could be our one PIM moving forward. With Win32 and the new development behind it, it is Lighter, Faster, and more Refined.  At the same time as our Pro/Classic additions in the 3.1x releases we also went to a really cool List Based Editing scheme which not only looks good, but makes everything easier to manipulate on our end which will make new feature development that much faster… We just have 1 more update that will add a few more things in that Ulti-Planner had (Master Tasks, Journal, VGA, Drag -n- Drop) and we feel that we have actually pulled ahead(ok, for you skeptics or other PIM fan-boys) EVEN in the Windows Mobile Organizer Market. Yes there will always be a few features that we have that they dont and vice versa… And yes we will add features if that is what is important, we do it all the time… 🙂

 

Competition

Agenda Fusion is still a good product but is very stylus intensive and Im not sure of its true future as obviously Agenda One as stepped in by the same company. AO is a very neat application with a lot of things going for it, but they are not as free with innovation. Yes the product was neat and innovative, but the extended features you recieved and had to pay an upgrade free for in their Version 2.0 wouldnt have even been enough to make a .x upgrade in Extreme Agenda by itself. For example, we put in the [Contact Linking] feature, that was one of the big major features they advertised, in our free 3.1 upgrade and you might not have even noticed it mentioned.

And yes we noticed Pocket Informant just came out with version 8, and yes it does some good things and always has. But PI, as our advertising for Ulti-Planner used to point out, has always felt like it has outgrown its interface. There are just too many features in it that you will never use which makes the options, menus, and use just plain too confusing and a large learning curve.  And PI8 tried to address this but I (yes I’m biased) think it fell a little short, and had some very substantial growing pains that went along with it… And going from stylus to no stylus is much harder than the other way around. We’ve essentially done both with this product. :)  But, Ive always liked PI the best of the rest, and their development won’t rest so… Im glad we’re back to competing with them and they’ve gone away from marketing someone else’s product as PI for Smartphones…

And yes, Agendus has come over to join the party… But I think even a year later they haven’t quite got down Windows Mobile development, and so have released some rather peculiar and problematic versions of the product which is not what you want to do. Im sure they have picked up a lot of people making the move from Palm OS to WM with the “promise” of familiarity… But I really hope most of those people are trying the other offerings out there as well. Im sure they will be pleasantly surprised by the more refined and native WM 3rd Party PIMs…

As I hope you all do too… On Windows Mobile Try the Trial Versions of all the Great PIMs and then decide which you like best… Don’t just go by what you see first… You may be sorry… 

The Future of Extreme Agenda

Believe me I have pages and pages of ideas for Extreme Agenda.. I hope now Im on the right road to taking over the Windows Mobile PIM world, and that WM keeps growing and growing…!!! It appears that with the continued success on Standard Devices and early new success of the Pro/Classic Version we can. And some of the ideas are just plain Awesome… So if you haven’t already, come Join the Windows Mobile Organizer Revolution!!

And the design and thinking has now changed. Utli-Planner was designed with consistancy and ease of use in mind and that has carried over. But Extreme Agenda, it was like somewhere in there we were enlightened. So everything is based on Great Controls, Good Looks, Effortless Usability, the best default options… Its amazing going back and looking at the stylus heavy Ulti-Planner and thinking, wow why didn’t I just do this and this and this and it would have been so much more friendly… Well, XA is…

Thanks for reading this… And I hope you aren’t offended if I was too candid anywhere… It’s a blog and I’m an honest guy. That’s what happens…

Enjoy!

The Windows Mobile developer community little secret..

Ok, I dont want to scare anyone off by being so open that there is only one guy at Birdsoft and he is wearing many hats… Dont think your support or product quality will suffer from this… 

The truth is a lot of the companies, even ones that are percieved as ‘big’ in our rather small Windows Mobile software industry, are actually basically just one guy. Yes, a few of them have grown beyond that but less than you’d think. And some do lean on “volunteers” to do things like moderate forums and cover basic support questions( and believe me I love it when it happens with my users and my support), and some do do some code outsourcing which give them the perception of being ‘bigger’, but mainly its the one or maybe two guys.

 And if they are beyond 4 or 5 then usually they have other income coming in from “consulting” type things, which I have too(Birdsoft has done work for some big companies including Kodak and …). And I know a lot of well connected people including both of my brothers(which are both in Software Development) that I can go to if something comes up and so it hasnt been all me all the time…

And unfortunately in watching some of these companies, their support seems to suffer as the companies do grow…

Yeah, I know it not a real shocker. But I have this feeling that a lot of the companies try to use smoke and mirrors to make you think they are bigger than they are for some sort of trust factor. We aren’t, so you’ll get personal Service!!

Where we’ve been and where we are at…

Birdsoft is now located in the 4th bedroom of our house in Cottage Grove Wisconsin, just outside of Madison. We recently moved here from Stoddard Wisconsin which is right on the Mississippi and right in the middle of where all that rain fell and flooded this summer(Our house didnt get affected). Stoddard is only six miles south of the city of La Crosse Wisconsin. I started Birdsoft at a desk in our living room, and then for over a year had an office in La Crosse near the university. That building went to “non-profit” only so I eventually had to leave. I then remodelled an area of our basement in Stoddard into a pretty cool office. But my wife got a great new job down here, so here is where I am, and I haven’t had time to figure out what is out there for office space in Madison(have been too busy turning out XA and XT updates). So this is Birdsoft’s Corporate Headquarters… For now…

The main development computer for Birdsoft is now(and has been since about 2005 I believe) a Dell Inspiron 600m Laptop(pictured above). As such Birdsoft is actually very mobile, and so coding and technical support has been done from places like a cabin in Northern Wisconsin, my parents and in-laws living rooms, The Luxor in Las Vegas, Conferences in Miami, San Diego, and Santa Monica, and even various airports… Arent laptops great… And yes, I use my Motorola Q to answer support emails on the go if I have a chance… Mobile is rather cool…

I know, Im about due for a big powerhouse development CPU with dual monitors and the works… At least Ive had the cool big widescreen and dock for a couple years to ease the pain a bit… 🙂

 

Welcome to Birdsoft.

 Welcome to Birdsoft.

 Birdsoft is basically a one man Software House with a mobile and desktop software catalog that has grown to be quite popular in the Windows Mobile world.

 

Our History…

 It started out just a hobby as I was lead developer on a couple of pretty cool Windows Desktop applications. The first being a Flight Planning Software for pilots that was #2 in that market. It was and still is a trully awesome application. At that time, way back around the birth of Windows CE, we experimented with a Port to those devices which was my first exposure to the Handhelds(mainly emulator) in about 1997-98. We never ended up doing anything concrete with it and I eventually left there to pursue other things.

My next job I started working for a GIS mapping company and quickly moved up to take the lead. At this company our management was very poor, so with no direction from above I wrote most of what would become their next generation product and still having so much spare time to fill then noticed that with their well compressed map and data system, it would be perfect for Utility type companies to access the data and maps in the field from the cheaper Pocket PC platform. It was a way cool Application on the Pocket PC but I somehow didn’t get as much credit as I deserved for it(I wrote 90% of it, and THEN my boss took credit for and got permission to write an already written product from the higher-ups) Oh well… Still a very cool application and lead me here…

   Around that time I experimented on my own time with writing some other small games and applications and sold them using Handango and Pocketgear, one being a Poker game.  So when I left the company in 2003 it was right about the “Moneymaker” time in the poker world and so I took it as a perfect oppertunity to write a more advanced Texas Hold ‘Em specific game. I already had the best poker game in the market, but I knew that people wanted more from the graphics and more from the AI, as did I.. So I spent 6 months studying the game, rewriting my poker engine, and making new graphics(I had the least experience in this but have grown a lot since the orginal All-In). And a hit was born. Since then I have written a few other applications that have taken off including Ulti-Planner, PokerTimer, Extreme Agenda, and now Extreme Text. And I evolved some of my earlier applications into great vertical market seasonal hits, including FairwayWatch Golf Scorecard and The Dog Ate It student planner.  Its so much fun that though I know Im sacrificing in some ways, the freedom is great and Im striving to perfect my products so that I get another hit or two and can expand the company into what I really see it being… If I had even two more developers and some help covering support and marketing… WOW!! It will come…

Oh and why the name “Birdsoft”? Well my nickname throughout high school, college, and to this day was/is ”Bird” or “Birdman” or any other of several variations, so one night having a drink with some guys I said something about having my own software company some day… And a buddy said something to the effect of coming to work for “Birdsoft”… So I kept it… And he doesnt work here yet… I dont really have a need for a Civil Engineer quite yet…

So what will be in the blog…

Im not sure.. Im a techie and I have a feeling a very few of you wonder, what goes on in the 1-man shops? There used to be a lot of us in this market, sadly a lot didnt make it…  Anyway, I might try to change it up and run ideas out there, or blog on exactly what Im doing coding wise or other business wise, decision wise, or even gadgets or whatever… Ive come across a few things lately that I might share… We’ll see…

Thanks for reading..

 

Brian