Intel's Vision for Future Mobile Computers

Here's an interesting article about what's coming down the pipe from Intel in terms of "Ultra Mobile PCs". Imagine a device the size of a Pocket PC but with the same power as a modern desktop computer. Pretty amazing!

Export: MS Access File Format Now Selectable

A while ago one of the Alpha Testers reported that his company still uses MS Access 97. Unfortunately Pocket Pollster has only been able to export in what is known as the "Jet 4X" format. I just received some new information from Microsoft that showed how the format could be changed to the older version, "Jet 3X". So now in the latest version you can go into Tools -> Options and set whichever version works best for your organization.

Seeking Feedback on Target Markets & Uses

With Pocket Pollster Version 1.0 nearing completion it's now time to replace the current, temporary website with a new one that'll be more focused on selling & supporting the product.

From the customer's point of view, a huge advantage of the software is its versatility. There are no specific limitations on how it can be used. But this does pose a dilemma from a marketing point of view. As any marketing expert will tell you, in the beginning, trying to use a "shotgun" approach and going after every possible customer at once is a poor idea. So instead I've been advised to initially pick 3 target markets and focus exclusively on them (the so-called "rifle approach").

To this end I am contemplating the following target markets:

1. Market research firms


1. On the street interviews
2. In stores
3. At tradeshows


2. Political polling (polling firms & political parties)


1. Exit polls
2. House to house canvassing


3. Industrial companies


1. Safety inspections
2. Quality assurance surveys
3. HR surveys
4. Production/Process stats
   

If you have any suggestions about the choice of target markets or can offer suggestions for more sub-items, then please do leave a comment here!

Alpha 1.23 Now Available

Alpha Version 1.23 is now available. It includes the recent features just mentioned, plus fixes a number of small issues that have been detected in testing.

If you would like to be part of our testing program then please go here and send us an e-mail with the pertinent info.

Copy & Duplicate Questions & Answers

Pocket Pollster now has the ability to duplicate existing Questions and Answers. There are two ways you can do this. The first is the most flexible and involves Drag & Drop. When you start dragging a Question Button or an Answer Panel then hold down the "Ctrl" key and you'll see a little plus sign appear beside the cursor. Keep this key pressed when you let go of the mouse button and the item will be copied.

Another way to copy a Question or an Answer is to just press the appropriate "Duplicate" button. These function in exactly the same way as "Duplicate Slide" works in PowerPoint: The duplicate item will be placed directly below the original.

This new functionality should help speed up poll creation & modification.

Multiline More Info Textboxes

One of the best things about the ongoing Alpha Tester program is the excellent feedback I receive from people all over the world. Last week two suggestions came in from Joe D. in Cincinnati, Ohio. One of them involved the "More Info" textbox. "More Info" is a feature similar in nature to the extra space provided for a person to add more detail on a paper form. The difference is that it can be added to any answer, not just the last one. In certain circumstances, Joe wanted to use this textbox to add multiple entries.

So now, when you choose "Allow More Info" for an answer, you'll be able to specify whether you want the pollsters to have a 1-line or multiple-line textbox.

Pollster Privileges

Pocket Pollster is considered a "horizontal application" in that it can be used in a multitude of industries and has not just one specific niche. But there are subtle differences in the way every organization collects data. To satisfy these many needs, a number of different settings have been planned from the outset. This includes several "Pollster Privileges". These are settings that are set by the poll creator on the Desktop but only come into effect when the poll is used on a mobile device.

On the Settings page of every poll you'll see the following. Please focus in on the third section:

If the first one, Review Data, is unchecked then the pollster will not be able to review the data they’ve collected. This is useful in those circumstances when reducing the bias of the pollsters is of extreme importance. When selecting a file for review, those with this setting unchecked will have the international "Not Allowed" symbol beside them, as shown beside "Sample 4" here:

Can Abort Records – A pollster can press Finish to skip through a given set of questions. This is useful in those circumstances when the respondent leaves or for some other reason the current set of questions can’t be completed. If this item is checked then the pollster will be asked whether they want to abort the record (not save it at all). If the item is unchecked then every record will be saved, even partially completed ones. This is useful in those circumstances when auditing of a poll may be carried out to precisely verify what happened during the polling session. To use an analogy, if this setting is checked then it's like using a pencil on a paper form; if it's unchecked then it's like using a pen.

Internal vs. External Polling

Two of the key features of Pocket Pollster are ease-of-use and flexibility. Further to the previous posting, work is now underway to expand the flexibility of the software so that it can be used as readily for "internal polling" (within an organization) as it already is for "external polling".

With the existing software, the fields on the Respondent info screen are all of the "freeform" variety. The pollster is prompted to fill in the following fields for each new respondent they interview:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Address
• City
• State/Province
• Postal/Zip Code
• Area Code
• Telephone Number
• E-mail Address
• Sex
• Age
  

This seems to be an appropriate set of general purpose contact fields for external polling.

But when surveys are conducted internally, it's clear that another set of respondent data is needed. To this end, I'm looking for feedback about what crucial set of fields would be needed for internal polling - that being those polls where all or most of the possible respondents are known ahead of time. Here's a preliminary list for consideration:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Company
• Department
• Employee ID
• Phone number
• E-mail

Remember that the whole purpose of such respondent info is to uniquely identify the subsequent set of polling questions with each respondent. And unlike external polling, internal pollsters will have the added benefit of being able to quickly pick a given person by identifying them from a list, something that just isn't possible when you're doing random polling of people you've never met before.

A New Idea

One of the Alpha testers called me today and offered several interesting ideas that definitely will be added to Pocket Pollster in the future. One of them involved adding a setting that would determine whether Respondent info is added like it is currently - namely freeform - or instead picked from an existing list.

This second method would likely be used by companies where all/most of the respondents were existing employees. Since their names are already known, there's no point in adding them anew every time.

There are many ways such a contact list could be added and maintained. But I got to thinking that the Pocket Outlook Contact List might perfectly suffice for this purpose. So rather than building another list, Pocket Pollster could just tap into the Outlook database.

I'd like to get some feedback from corporate users if this approach would suffice for them. I'm particularly interested in the answers to these questions:

1. Does your Desktop/Laptop Outlook contain all of the employees in your company?
2. If so, then approximately how many entries would this be?
3. Is this list of employees automatically copied over to your Pocket PC?
   

Alpha 1.2 Released

Thanks to excellent feedback from several Alpha Testers, some significant new features have been added. Here's an overview of them:

Export
An export engine has been added to the software. This first generation of export can save the data in the common MS Access MDB file format. It can be used manually by just clicking File -> Export. Auto-Export can also be setup by going to the Settings page of a poll and clicking on the "Enabled" checkbox in the green panel:

Since every poll is different, the big challenge with Export was to make it universally functional for everyone. To this end, it creates these 3 tables every time: Questions, Choices, and Respondents. Their internal structure never changes. It then creates one table for each question, with the name "Question_#", where # = 1, 2, 3, ... The structure of each of these Question tables varies depending on what Choices exist for it.

Once Auto-Export is turned on, whenever new data is brought into the poll, it is automatically exported to the associated MS Access database file. This means that once you’ve defined and published one or more templates, you may not find any need to go back into the Pocket Pollster software for some time because all of the data will be fully available in the external database file, which could then be accessed by other software applications too. Thus in some organizations Pocket Pollster will serve as a highly customizable (and completely seamless!) front-end mobile data collection tool.

Locking
As soon as you publish your poll template, it is “locked”. This is because subsequent changes to its structure or contents could cause data integrity problems. Imagine the situation where a poll template is published, distributed to several Pocket PCs, and data is collected using that template. If the original template is then altered, the incoming data may no longer “fit” into the changed version. It is the age-old problem of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

If you’re doing scientific polling, then it’s advisable that no changes whatsoever be made and instead a new poll template be issued. If you’re collecting data for an internal business process then there’s likely no harm in correcting a spelling mistake or improving the Instructions, etc.

In any case, once you’ve published your poll, if you then try to alter anything on the Instructions or Questions & Answers pages, a dialog box like this one will appear:

You are given several Unlock options or you can press Cancel to abort the change.

Unpublish
It became apparent that there are several circumstances under which one might want to "Unpublish" a poll. This feature can be accessed from the File menu. It simply removes the associated file in the “Templates” folder.

Abort Record During Data Entry
The mobile software has always allowed the pollster to instantly jump to the end of the questions. This was useful in those circumstances when the polling questions had to be stopped midstream - ex. Maybe the respondent didn't want to participate anymore. But the data record itself was still saved for historical purposes.

The option has now been given the pollster to decide where to keep the partial record or not save it at all. Note: If users demand it, the poll creator could be given the ability to override this pollster option, thus keeping all data, even when it is not complete.


If you're not yet a Pocket Pollster Alpha Tester and would like to try out the software then please contact us.

Data Transfer Monitoring Tool Added

A few Alpha testers are still experiencing problems with the data transfer process. So to help resolve their problems, I've added a Monitoring screen to the Desktop application. It can be accessed from the Tools menu.


This feature was added to the July 14th version of the application aka Version Alpha 1.15.

Improved Response Time on Mobile Devices

When you are selecting a poll to start, resume, or review, the mobile application has historically just queried the file to get such information as the summary, the number of questions, and the number of responses. On a newer mobile device, this poses no problem whatsoever and occurs almost instantaneously. However, on older units it actually takes quite a few seconds to retrieve this info. On some really old units, the delay was completely unacceptable.

So I introduced an indexing scheme that involves new code in each of the Desktop, Data Transfer, and Mobile modules. The system now caches all of the necessary summary info of the Template files, which are the ones used to start new polls. The speed improvements on the mobile device are dramatic.

Data Transfer Video

A few testers have had a "less than perfect experience" with the Data Transfer component of Pocket Pollster. The fact is that Data Transfer is supposed to be absolutely simple and straightforward, with almost always no interaction required by the user. Just sync your device, as you normally would with ActiveSync and then everything after that is taken care of automatically.

I thought it would be helpful to provide a short video of what should happen in a typical Data Transfer operation. To view this 7.04MB video, please click here.

The speed of the entire procedure is most dependent on the speed of the mobile device. In this video the device was an older Pocket PC 2002 model, quite slow compared to today's units.

FAQs 2 - Pocket Pollster Setup Files

If I use Add/Remove Programs to uninstall Pocket Pollster, will my Data files be removed too?
No. All of the files & folders in your "Data" folder will remain intact. So, in fact, will a personal preferences file called "SysInfo.xml". So when you install a newer version, all of your files & settings will be exactly the same as before.

Do I have to first uninstall the old version before I can install the new one?
You did before but beginning with Alpha Version 1.1, you no longer do.

What has to be installed on my computer before I can setup Pocket Pollster?
Just 3 things:

• A working version of Windows, with the latest service packs installed.
  
• The dotNet Framework, either Version 1.1 or 2.0 or both installed.
  
• A working version of ActiveSync 3.8 or 4.1. Newer versions will likely work too, though have not been tested yet. It's of critical importance that the synchronization with ActiveSync is working properly before Pocket Pollster is used, since the latter does not have the ability to correct any problems with the former.
  

FAQs 1

An Alpha Tester asked some excellent questions today. I thought I'd start posting such questions, along with the answers, as they may benefit others too:

What exactly happens when I press Publish?
The master/working copy of a PP file resides in the "Data" folder. Pressing "Publish" simply puts a copy of it in the Templates folder, cleaning out any collected data it may have.

When collected data is transferred back to the Windows computer, where is it stored?
All collected data is stored in the files in the "Data" folder.

What's the Archive folder for?
Nothing at the moment, actually. The collected data, downloaded from the mobile device(s), is first appended inside the master copy of the files in the "Data" folder. But then each individual file is archived inside of the "Archive" folder. This is done purely for historical purposes at the moment. In fact, other than placing the files there, the program currently does not use them at all. At least not at the moment. But a future auditing feature will be available to interrogate these files, producing a detailed report of the data within. This won't be necessary for everyone but will likely be useful for certain clients with specific legal or accounting requirements.

Can Pocket Pollster adversely effect ActiveSync?
No. Pocket Pollster is a self contained application that in no way modifies any files or functionality connected with ActiveSync. But the opposite is not true. The current version of Pocket Pollster absolutely depends on ActiveSync working properly. There's an inherent assumption that a mobile device already properly syncs with ActiveSync. This is easy to test before Pocket Pollster is ever installed: Just sync your device and see if ActiveSync interacts with it normally.

European Success!

I received word back from the tester in England and the one in Portugal that the Desktop component of the software is now working on their computers! With that said, the English fellow is having synchronization issues but we're going to figure out why that's occurring.

The new version they installed is a preliminary version of Alpha 1.1. There are a few more changes to be made and then a newer version of 1.1 will be released to all active Alpha Testers.

Pocket Pollster on an Old Pocket PC

An Alpha Tester in Colorado informed me that he wanted to try out Pocket Pollster on an old Pocket PC 2000 device, namely an HP Jornada 540. This device uses an "SH3" processor, the files for which are not currently included in the MobileCabs installation package. But I compiled a special set of CAB files for him. He reported that it seemed to install okay but then he was getting an error upon startup.

It turns out that I had an old HP Jornada 545 (same device, albeit with 32MB RAM) in storage. So I found it, charged it, and tested Pocket Pollster with it. The problem was quickly revealed.
As is often the case with such things, it was one seemingly innocuous line of code.

The mobile component of Pocket Pollster examines the hardware and makes a distinction between a Pocket PC and a Smartphone. Unfortunately the hardware identification string retrieved from these old Jornadas is not "PocketPC", but "Palm PC2". A minor distinction but the app didn't know what to do with it and raised an exception. I laughed when I saw this string because it made me recall that Microsoft had originally used the moniker "Palm PC" before they lost a lawsuit to Palm Corporation and had to adopt the new name, "Pocket PC".

Anyhow, I quickly got the application running. Certain parts of it run really slow, but with only a 133 MHz processor, compared to today's 600+ MHz models, it's little surprise. Still, once one got into the poll itself, it worked pretty well. Whether I support this device permanently is really dependent on customer demand. But it was an interesting trip through memory lane nonetheless!

The International Culprit: Dates!!!

As the Alpha Testers in England and Portugal know, the current version of Pocket Pollster will not run properly on their computers. Today I found out at least one of the reasons why. It's the handling of the dates.

Here in Canada (and the U.S.) June 21, 2006 is stored as "06/21/2006". But in a country like England, it's stored as "21/06/2006". So when Pocket Pollster is running on a computer in England and sees "06/21/2006" it thinks "The 6th day of the 21st month". And then kicks out an error!

This is a little more tricky to resolve than one might think at first glance because we have to be sure that a file created in England can be properly viewed & used in the U.S. and vice-versa. But at least the error is now tracked down and obvious. I just have to find a solution that works for every situation.

Significant Mobile Installation Improvements

That older Toshiba e330 Pocket PC 2002 I was loaned by one of the Alpha Testers has proved invaluable. Since I need to send it back tomorrow, I did extensive testing with it this weekend. This consisted of complete uninstalls and reinstallations - over & over & over again. What started becoming clear is that the OpenNETCF 1.4 CAB file would not consistently install its contents; sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn't. Though this isn't my "fault" it simply isn't good enough to tell a customer this. I hate it when one department or company blames another and then says, "Sorry, but there's nothing we can do." Nonsense! Customers just want the product or service to work properly. Period. And they're right!


The strangest thing is that this problem never seems to happen with a newer, faster Pocket PC. I considered removing the functionality that the OpenNETCF libraries provide but they offer some good features so I quickly dismissed the idea. I then went on a long walk and considered my options. I suddenly realized that OpenNETCF is merely a series of DLLs, so why couldn't I just incorporate the ones I need directly into the Pocket Pollster CAB file? I researched this on several developer forums and some anecdotal evidence suggested it to be a viable approach.

So I implemented the idea. And lo and behold, it worked perfectly each & every time! A side benefit is that the overall installation is now about 25% faster because the entire OpenNETCF library doesn't have to be installed.

Another lesson I learned (read "was reminded") from all of this testing with the old Toshiba was how much the Pocket PC hardware has improved in the past few years. The speed of installation is dramatically improved with the newer devices. For example, once the NetCF CAB file is copied to my Dell Axim X30, it only takes 2 - 3 seconds to install itself. But on the Toshiba it takes well over 10 seconds! The original version of the Data Transfer module never accounted for such a slow installation process. It's now improved dramatically. It now goes through 10 iterations of 2 seconds each, checking each time to see if the CAB file has done its work. This flexible approach works equally well for the older devices as well as the new ones.

Not a very exciting weekend - especially with the World Cup going on - but it feels great to have accomplished a lot! These improvements will hopefully address all of the mobile installation issues brought to my attention so far.

Pocket PCs a Plenty!

Today I had the great pleasure to meet one of the Alpha Testers from Seattle. He, his wife, & his brother were visiting Vancouver and agreed to meet me ... and brought a lot of their hardware with them!
I thought I was a mobile technology afficionado but now realize that my collection pales in comparison to that of others! Shown here is a Dell Axim X5 on the left and 3 identical iPaq Pocket PC Phone Edition units. Very, very cool technology.

The ensuing discussion was very interesting. They gave me some great marketing tips about educational institutions, GIS applications, and a host of other things. Thanks, guys!