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DEVELOPER'S VIEW
How PDA software is born
By Dennis Crane
When you're syncing a new program to your PDA device, have you ever realized what people had created it, why they had done this and how they had caught the idea? Sometimes I'm asking myself these questions. Working in software development industry for years, I saw the life of many software projects from the inside. Each program had its own destiny, successful or not, but almost each time I thought -- "How did that programmer get the idea for the program?"
The human mind's work is real magic that I'm trying to learn all my life.
This article is just a set of my own observations. It's focused primarily on the idea's development rather than on actual coding (that's another topic for a special article that I hope to write one day). This article is definitely biased. But I'm sure that this could be interesting for all people who deal with PDA software -- users, developers, distributors, IT managers and writers.
All these ideas could be applied to software in general, but as I've worked with PDAs for the recent several years, I can fortunately use samples from Palm software industry. So, how PDA software is born ...
Eureka! Invent it
Likely, many of us have heard the story about a man who had seen in a dream a must-have program that pushed him or her into the Fortune 500. I've also heard a couple of the legends. Frankly, I don't believe it. Ideas don't appear suddenly. Everything in the world has certain reasons. Let leave this case for those who want to believe in legends. I'm going to focus on more prosaic things.
Clone it
Junior programmers flood the market with tons of programs. They got their first Palm just a week ago and they want to write something, no matter what, just to tell the world, "Look what a cool programmer I am!"
Usually, they don't worry about the original idea of the program. Often, they simply copy a first program they saw somewhere else. So, when we're searching a program in a software directory, we have to squeeze through the trash pile of ugly clones: useless notepads, awkward list managers, and poorly designed solitaires. I confess, being a college student in pre-PDA epoch of first PCs, I had written a couple of such useless programs for PC.
[For beginning programmers, building these "starter" programs are essential. But though they're excellent training tools for the developers themselves, early programs by any developer is often not necessarily commercial in quality. We encourage novices to program, but if you're purchasing a product, you should make the distinction between supporting a promising talent and purchasing a solution for a problem. -- DG]
Figure A shows two sample Tetris programs by different developers. Can you find 10 distinctions? Hardly!
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