To get an overall picture in the industry we developed a Web script that had spidered and parsed all pages of several famous Palm software archives and created a huge database with all software titles. Each record included category, number of downloads, reviews, ratings, supported OS versions, and other software attributes. The multidimensional analysis of this data allowed us to select the category, the type of the product, the features the users want to use, and the balanced price.

We refined the idea during two months by using numerous techniques: brainstorms, consultations, comparisons and focus tests. And, that product is really successful now.

Just do it
All the above cases demonstrate how the software ideas are born in developers' minds. Indeed, professional developers are not the only wizards who make software. All over the world, many doctors, scientists, teachers, musicians and other non-computer specialists are creating great PDA applications.

Their jobs and work environments are idea gold mines. Usually, they start to use Palm handhelds to make their daily work easier. They take notes, work with electronic documents, calculate and log values, and do all those tedious operations, which took a huge amount of work time or required sitting in front of PC all day before they started to use handhelds.

As they got more familiar with Palm devices and with their hidden potential, they understood that there were ways to make their jobs even more effective -- specialty-oriented software, which incorporates all required functions into a sole environment.

Some of of these people, who are programming enthusiasts, try to develop such application themselves. But programming for PDA is rather tricky and requires minimum a year of experience to be able to develop a simple, yet reliable and handy program. As most people don't have enough time, knowledge and resources, they send the application idea to skilled programmers, who then turn the idea into the windows, buttons, and checkboxes.

In most cases such software gets very specific and could be applied to company needs only. This is often called "custom software" and, in most cases, other Palm users even don't know about a given custom program's existence.

For instance, in November 2003, a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Nova Southeastern University, Florida contacted our company, UTracksSys.com LLC. He asked us to help them with their randomized control clinical research study examining the use of PDA for assisting the self-monitoring of an obesity treatment program.

Half of the study participants would be supplied Palms for tracking their progress and, between group sessions, recommended activities. The researchers had been looking for a tracking program that offers the flexibility of logging weight, activities, food, body mass index, and exercise data as well as some other very specific info.

Also, they wanted easily download the data into a Windows based spreadsheet for statistical analysis. We completed the project successfully and it's working well now. In spite of the fact that we used our Universal Tracking System's core as an engine, the software got very specific with rather exclusive settings. I doubt it would be successful in the general market and is only in use for this one project.