This week JAMM Giveaway will give two of you readers a copy of PocketInformant, the award winning PIM software made by WebIS, on your platform of choice, be it BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or iPhone.

Be sure to give also a read at today JAMM Developer Interview, starring Alex Kac from WebIS, who is gently providing us the licenses.

Rules are the same: leave your comment below before 11:59 PM Friday, May 21 (EST), and tell us how you are going to use PocketInformant. On Saturday we will randomly pick two winners to grab the platform version of their choice.

I think this app doesn’t need any presentation, but just in case, you can find below a quick description of the Windows Mobile version of the software:

Pocket Informant 9 New Features

• Windows Phone 6.5 Support 9 offers support for the new Windows Phone User Interface and data formats
• Getting Things Done (GTD) support in Tasks
  • Inbox – Collect your tasks quickly
  • Context Groups
  • Project Groups
  • Next Actions
• Starred Tasks Allows you to set a hotlist of tasks that you need to get to or visit quickly across your filters
• New One month Date Picker Based off the full month view giving you easy finger friendly movement and actions
• Free Time Finder In the Month View use the F-T-F to find free time in your schedule for an appointment
• Touch mode improvements throughout the app
  • Editors are now touch friendly
  • 6.5 Only: Swipe left and right in Month View, Week, Date Picker to navigate between time periods
  • 6.5 Only: Swipe left and right in Editors to navigate between the editor tabs
  • Bounce Scrolling
• PNG support Gives you more and better looking icons as well as a size filter within the icon picker
• Many more! There are many new features all over the place in Pocket Informant 9 – try it out to see for yourself!

Features from Pocket Informant 8

• Tasks Filter The new 8.5 Tasks filter provides an iPhone like screen for picking a filter and then sliding into the Tasks View. Also each Task Filter now has its own set of settings.
• More Email Integration Contacts Summary can now show you emails from a specific contact
• vCard Send vCard from Contacts
• 12-Key Pad Quickly Find a Contact with your finger using the 12-Keypad
• Smartphone Support! Now brings near feature parity to the Smartphone!
• Events View Mark any task or appointment to be tracked and see how many days away it is. Track Birthdays, Anniversaries, Project Milestones, Vacations, and more!
• Journal View View your journal by date or by its parent. Log your calls or meeting notes. Track billable hours. See all your journals in one easy convenient view!
• Automatic Links Insert a contact name or phone number in the subject of a task or appointment and when you go to view it, they become clickable links!
• Scalable User Interface Choose between 5 different user interface roles from “Pocket Outlook with Benefits”, through task or appointment focused roles, and up to “Power User” to quickly configure Pocket Informant to your needs and only show the menus, dialogs, and actions you want to see
• Near 100% One Handed Interface Due to having one application for both Smartphone and Pocket PC devices, Pocket Informant 8 works fully in one handed mode. This shows up in all the dialogs, menus, and many other aspects of Pocket Informant including the completely redesigned main menus
• Franklin Covey We’ve added support for Mission, Goals, and Compass/Roles
• Filmstrip mode Designed especially for Landscape devices, the Month Filmstrip mode makes using the Month View far more productive
• Incoming Call Journal Turn on the Incoming Call Journal and whenever an incoming phone call comes a new Journal will popup
• Smoother Scrolling and Touch Finger scrolling and a Touch ABC side bar for Contacts

Go to the developer’s site to have a look at other platforms features.

You think you don’t need PocketInformant? Wrong!! If I were you I wouldn’t make myself too many questions and I would enter the contest, as you will never regret having PocketInformant on your device (and yes, I have it).

Left to right: Windows Mobile, iPhone and BlackBerry screenshots

By entering this contest, you authorize Just Another Mobile Monday, and its representatives, to provide your personal information (such as, but not limited to your name and email address) to the sponsors of this contest should you be selected as a winner. Your personal information will not be sold by Just Another Mobile Monday, or otherwise retained for any purpose except that described herein.

There is no denying that the iPad makes a fantastic Bible Study tool. Up until recently, some of my personal favorite Bible apps had not been optimized for the iPad. PocketBible has been the main Bible app that I have used since my Windows Mobile days. I use it regularly on my iPhone and since I bought my iPad, I have been using it, pixel doubled. So, when I checked the App Store and saw that there was an update for PocketBible, I immediately downloaded the update and fired it up.

Now, it is one thing to update an iPhone app into a universal app that works on the iPad as well, but Laridian didn’t stop there. They also included some new features for iPhone/iPod Touch users like the ability to open multiple windows at once and they also implemented a synchronization feature to back up notes, highlights, and bookmarks to Laridian’s iPocketBible.com web server.

From Laridian:

New for iPhone/iPod touch:

• Open two windows to view multiple Bibles or books at once or multiple passages in the same book (open up to five windows on iPad)
• Synchronize and/or backup your personalized data such as notes, highlights and bookmarks (you’ll use our iPocketBible.com server to do this)
• Calculator style go-to for Bibles

New features exclusive to iPad:

• Control panel (Keeps search results and lists of notes, highlights and bookmarks available all the time.)
• Library search (All searches search your entire library, not just the active book)
• Notes search (Search your notes using Boolean operators, just like you search the Bible)
• Book notes (Add notes to non-Bibles)
• Edit note while using program (Makes it easier to copy/paste verses into your notes)
• View search results, lists of highlights/bookmarks while using program
• Lock panes so they don’t sync to content movement (Handy while writing notes or following cross-references out of a search)
• Additional margin and leading in single-book view (Makes for a more pleasant reading experience)

Head on over to the App Store to download PocketBible now.

Those hoping to port WP7 to their HD2 or similar device are in for a rude awakening.  ND4SPD posted this bit of information for anyone wishing for the port.

I don’t mean to deride the on-going efforts, but if you’re trying to port this to the HD2 – here’s some things you’re going to need to take into account:
You can’t just use the Mondrian XIP – even with a similar processor and specs, you can’t expect memory boundaries to be similar – e.g. Touch Pro2, Diamond2 share most of the same internals yet if you were to flash a rom without porting, you would not go past the bootloader. If you’ve ported a XIP manually, you definitely know this
Drivers!! The HD2′s drivers are compiled against the CE5.2 kernel. In the past, this wouldn’t have been a problem. However, since MS has changed the driver model with CE6 and CE7, drivers need to be rewritten and compiled against CE7. Unless you have access to HTC’s Board Support Package for the HD2 or you are willing to reverse engineer everything, there’s a problem.
Kernel and Bootloader – Somewhat related to the drivers, you’ll need these 2 very important parts compiled against WP7. The kernel layout has changed and the bootloader needs to work with WP7 (the current one will not)
This is somewhat more trivial – you can’t flash a WP7 ROM to the current bootloader. To even write over the old bootloader, you’ll need create a JTAG interface to the device and flash via it.

there are some other technical aspects that I’ve missed or forgotten. But trust me that there are others as well

On a lighter side they did find some other information in the device that boasts a 1.3 Ghz processor from Qualacomm.

It is still my humble opinion that they will pull out some seriously awesome moves to get WM7 ported over to WM 6.5 devices.  And all before the first real device is released.

What’s your money on?  Can the #1 site at making Windows Phones better do it again?

As our Developer Interview Series continues this week, we find ourselves chatting with Alex Kac.  Alex is the man behind WebIS, the company responsible for the PIM management app Pocket Informant.  Alex was kind enough to answer several questions for us, sharing his thoughts on Windows Phone 7, the current generation of App Stores and WebIS’ plans for the future.

As you read through the interview, please note that JAMM’s questions are in bold, while Alex’s responses are regular font.  When finished, please feel free to submit any questions you have for Alex.  We’ll be sure he has a chance to respond.  Finally, be sure to check out the JAMM front page for our Pocket Informant contest, where you can win one of two copies of Pocket Informant for Windows Mobile, iPhone / iPod Touch or Blackberry.

Enjoy!

Hello Alex.  Thanks for agreeing to this interview.  To start with, can you tell the readers of JAMM a little bit about yourself and WebIS?

Sure. I’m 33 years old, married with three kids, and am usually pigeon-holed as a typical geek until people get to know me. My interests and viewpoints tend towards the more Texas Hill Country average. I like to play paintball (I’m not the best player out there but recently was part of a 4-man team that was going to play at Oklahoma’s DDay until I found out Apple’s WWDC was the same week), fly R/C airplanes, train in martial arts, and play XBox video games. I’ll always pick family over anything else when it comes to that and I’m also well known around here for my ribs and brisket. I love to entertain, though my poor wife who has Fibromyalgia can’t take too much of it.

How did you come up with the company name “WebIS”?

WebIS started as a web-application development company back in the late nineties. We started with Pocket PC development as a hobby but in less than a year it overwhelmed all of our other business activities that we focused exclusively on mobile development.

Pocket Informant is a powerhouse in terms of PIM management.  How did the program get it’s start?

With Pocket PC 2000 the platform had a really good start and at the time I was reading the forums and seeing that many people wanted a 7 day week view. So I whipped one up and called it WISAgenda. We asked for donations and it became so popular that within a few months I decided to build a full-featured PIM. And that’s how PI was born

What other programs do you offer, and what makes them unique?

Note2Self is a fun one that we wrote because of Jason Dunn’s suggestion. FlexMail for Windows Mobile is one I enjoyed using. What makes them unique is they fulfill niche areas of Windows Mobile missing features. Unfortunately FlexMail also falls into an area that MS does not provide a lot of integration points for so that makes it also uniquely challenged.

Over the years, there has been a steady evolution of functionality introduced and refined in Pocket Informant.  How do you continue to integrate new features, deciding which ones are worth the effort and which ones will take the program a direction you don’t intend?

That’s a really hard one. I have a vision for what feels right in the product and I usually go with my gut. Sometimes I’m wrong, but a lot of times I think it ends up well. I also keep a very strong user-based community where I take feedback – and I think almost more importantly – discuss that feedback. Sometimes I don’t agree with a feature request because I can’t see how it will be used or its purpose in the overall design but then someone convinces me. Usually its not just one person but a flock of people.

The hardest part is realizing you made a mistake and then removing that feature. I try hard to never do that, but occasionally I have had to.

We’ve all heard the initial news about Windows Phone 7; what it will and won’t offer to users and developers.  What are your impressions of the operating system?

The OS itself I think is very good. I’m not fond of the Metro UI specifically as implemented, but I do think its got some extremely good ideas. The problem I see with the OS is the extremely limited APIs for doing anything useful. Its a near opposite situation with Windows Mobile where you had an expansive API set for doing work, but hardly anything for UI. However I believe this will get better over time and is simply a matter of MS wanting to get WP7 out now and sacrificing specific functionality to meet that goal. Android and Apple did the same things and so have I so I don’t have a problem with that. Its just a little bit frustrating.

How well do you believe Microsoft communicated their plans regarding Windows Phone 7 to existing Windows Mobile developers?

This one is hard to answer because so much of our communication is under NDA. I do not feel like MS has done a great job of communication at all frankly. They are tweeting and doing some communications here and there on their blogs, but that’s a far cry from the type of discussions, beta access, documentation, and more that we get from Google, Palm, and Apple.

Honestly I don’t feel like they as a company care all that much. Or that its a skunkworks project that the brass don’t feel like it will succeed. But that may also be just my own experience only.

You’ve recently introduced a version of Pocket Informant for the iPhone / iPod Touch operating system.  How does this version compare to Pocket Informant for Windows Mobile?

It’s a complete redesign of the app from a UI and fundamental feature-set perspective that we started with our original BlackBerry version. Many major features of PI for WM are missing, but then again many new features exist. I like to think of it as a reboot of the app with today’s usage models in mind. There are a lot of features in PI for WM that are extremely interesting to a small subset of users and just clutter to the rest. Some of that is not due to the core purpose of the feature but because of how it was implemented. Linking is an example. In PI for WM linking is extremely powerful and open-ended. It also doesn’t sync to anything and most people don’t bother.

In PI for iPhone and the other platforms we plan to include linking, but with purpose so that its immediately obvious what its for and why you’d use it. That’s a small change in our direction which is to give purpose to features – not just include them.

On the topic of marketplace’s, or online software stores, you’ve had the opportunity to have software in the Windows Mobile Marketplace, the iTunes App Store and Blackberry’s App World.  Which of the three is more developer friendly and why?

Apple’s App Store is by far the most friendly – which goes against popular wisdom right now I know. Let me add – Palm and Android stores too. Both of those are near equal if not equal to Apple’s app store. BB App World is better than Marketplace in a lot of ways and my beefs are more specific to some policies they have.

WM Marketplace (Most of this is fixed in WP7 Marketplace):

• Lots of limitations with version numbers. We can’t have a 9.11. Or a 9.21. It has to be 9.1. 9.2. Etc.
• Annoying requirements with icons and bitmaps.
• Resubmit for each localization. This is one of the killers for me. Its a huge pain in the butt.
• Sales are a pittance compared to MobiHand, PocketGear, PocketLand.
• You can only submit x number of apps per $99 registration. And if you mess up on a submission failing a cert or something, you lose a slot.

BB App World:

• Not very customer oriented with upgrades and reg codes.
• Doesn’t allow apps like eWallet.

How does dealing with these type of distribution methods compare with the old giants of Handango and PocketGear?

Sometimes I miss all the fun I had working with my friends at those two places creating marketing plans, specials, and all that. On the other hand the App Stores make management of distribution dramatically easier.

On the whole I’m really happy with the App Stores.

What is your handheld of choice right now, Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Phone or something different?

iPhone for now. I just prefer its discoverability and smoothness. Its got its issues (notification system is horrid), but overall that’s my favorite. Second favorite would be the HTC Sense enabled Android phones, though I’m kind of interested in Dell’s new Android phone. We’ll see. Unfortunately for me, WP7 would be like going back to 3 years ago on the first gen iPhone that it holds no interest to me at all. In its current incarnation at RC1 its more of a feature phone than a smartphone. I know there will be some cool apps that break that opinion in some ways, but overall I think the first release of WP7 will feel like that. That’s not a knock on Microsoft because they have to start somewhere and they had to release something now. I think by the time of BB 7.0 and iPhone OS 5.0 – WP7 should have a major revision or two done and be making major strides.

Are there any sneak peaks into upcoming projects that you can share with us?

Well…we are working on Android PI and I think that’s going to be very successful. And my son is writing a space adventure game that he hopes to release under the WebIS label when he’s done. Its funny because I actively discouraged him from programming because I just wanted him to focus on the outdoors and not keeping his head in a computer all day. But even with a fairly strict 1 hour time limit on the computer a day he’s learned to program in Ruby, Java, and Python (to varying degrees), designed and written a big part of this game. I’m fairly impressed

Final question.. Is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you want to share with the readers of JAMM?

Well I’m pretty open about almost anything, but I would like to share a few tidbits. First, I got my Black Belt in Taekwondo at the end of March recently and I’m very excited about that. Secondly I am not a guru and don’t know everything there is so just like any person my opinions are just that – my opinions based on the fact I have 24 hours each and every day and a limited amount of time to research everything that comes up. And finally, feel free to ask more questions at @webis_mobile on Twitter. I’ll answer what I can and tell you I can’t answer the rest

Question of the Day:  How do you manage your PIM data?

With today’s installment of the Developer Interview Series focusing on Pocket Informant developer Alex Kac, it seems only appropriate to go all in with Question of the Day.  So… how do you manage your PIM data?  You know, the contacts, tasks, memos and appoinments that make up your life?

For me, Pocket Informant 9 plays a huge role in managing these on my Touch Pro.  Additionally, I use Phatware’s Phatpad / Phatnotes for memos and Ilium’s eWallet for secure information.  On my Today screen, SBSH’s PocketBreeze provides a dynamic and well done hub for managing and tying it all together.