PocketExtra™ Contacts
SYWARE, Inc. - www.syware.com
Reviewed by Chris Edwards
Review Date: November 14, 2001

Release Date: November 12, 2001
Price: $9.99


Background:

"For many Pocket PC users, the Contacts application is the main reason they carry a device," said Sy Danberg, President of SYWARE. "But who said a contacts program had to be a plain vanilla listing of name, address, and phone number? The PocketExtra series was created for people who want to extend the Pocket PC's built-in applications rather than develop a whole new custom database. With PocketExtra Contacts you can save additional information with your existing Pocket Outlook Contacts list, use color to draw attention to certain fields, track dates and dollar amounts, even further explain entries with drawings and written notes. It's everything you need to really 'manage' your contacts and at under $10, it's a no-brainer!"

For a full press release click here.

Getting Started:

I'll begin by adding an entry for MSN Messenger. By instinct I decided to use "MSN Messenger" as the Name for this field. When clicking ok, I was greeted with a message suggesting not to use spaces in the names of the fields. I did some research, and should have known from my previous database experience, that spaces in column names are a bad thing. PocketExtra™ uses a mini-database to store this information on the Pocket PC device. I renamed the field to "MSN_Messenger" and the warning went away. As you can see, PocketExtra™ offers a few different field types for the edit/note style -- text, float, integer, money, date, time, and date/time. MSN Messenger uses an email address for a login name, so a text field is what I chose. You can see in the screenshot to the right, that one can change the colour of the background in PocketExtra. I opted for a nice blue colour -- this blue looked good at the time :-).



To test out some of the other field styles, I decided to add a Pocket PC and Birthday field. The Pocket PC field is a dropdown list, which contains options of various Pocket PC devices.



I got addicted to the scribble field style, which allows one to do exactly that (scribble). I added a few notes for this contact, and after editing the field name from "Notes" to "Picture" I drew a nice happy face. There are more constructive ways of using the scribble feature such as maps, diagrams, and important quick notes.

Conclusion:

PocketExtra™ is simple, easy to use, fast, and efficient. The program takes up only 84k of program storage space, and does not interfere with the integrated contacts program.

There are a few small things that could be improved for future versions. I emailed SYWARE to make them aware of the few suggestions I have:
- Automatic substitution of "_" for spaces.
- Data should syncronize to the desktop.
- Field names get hidden behind the form objects sometimes. Maybe tapping and holding field name will make it display the full name (like ALT text in web pages)

- When modifying the field properties, one should be able to change the height.