Access Softek's Mobile Experience

Access Softek has been one of the leading developers of Windows CE software since its earliest days. We have created applications for the original palm size PC, the H/PC, and the Pocket PC, including CE.NET, for clients such as Microsoft, Franklin Covey, Audible, and Symbol. We also have significant experience with the Symbian and Palm platforms.

Projects

• Microsoft Money for the H/PC, palm size PC, and Pocket PC. The first CE versions of Microsoft’s flagship financial management application were written entirely by Access Softek.
• The Audible Player for palm size PC and Pocket PC. Audible.com is a provider of premium audio content, such as recorded books, newspaper content, and radio shows, that can be played on various types of computers, PDA’s, and mp3 players. The Pocket PC based player written for Audible by Access Softek supports the proprietary Audible audio codec, as well as Audible’s Digital Rights Management system.
• Franklin Covey Planner and Franklin Covey PlanPlus for the Pocket PC. These Franklin Covey products sat on top of the existing Pocket Outlook Tasks database, and then added new fields and databases supporting the Franklin Covey task management system. They synchronized with desktop software written by Franklin Covey that similarly extended Outlook.
• Microsoft/Symbol Event Check-in. This project was a showcase for Microsoft’s new Pocket PC 2003 platform, and involved coding in C# within the new Compact .NET framework. (When the project began, the framework was still in Beta release.) The product was a barcode scanning system for registering conference attendees, who could register online in advance, and then print out barcodes that would be scanned at the conference site by Symbol devices equipped with barcode scanners, significantly streamlining the registration process. The software running on the devices read the scanned information, then printed out badges and other documents for each attendee to onsite printers over Wi-Fi connections.
• OmniSky for the Pocket PC. The OmniSky service for the Palm brought many cutting edge conveniences to the Palm user, such as faster e-mail through the user of a proxy e-mail server that compressed data, access to web content specially formatted for the smaller display, and One Tap™, a keystroke saving feature that allowed the user to interact with online content and the device’s PIM data with simple taps of the stylus. Access Softek wrote the Pocket PC versions of all the OmniSky software, as well as the installers for all the OmniSky Palm based software, and collaborated with OmniSky on the development of new One Tap features.
• DataPlay Installable File System. DataPlay developed a high-density, removable optical disk system for mobile devices. The disks were about the size of a quarter, and their USB based drive units contained built-in support for Digital Rights Management. Access Softek implemented an Installable File System driver that allowed these disks to be seen by the Pocket PC, and also created a simple media player for demo purposes.
• OFX Client for Pocket PC, Symbian and Palm. OFX is a standard HTTP based protocol for conducting financial transactions over the Internet. It is the protocol used by applications such as Microsoft Money, or Intuit’s Quicken to access a user’s bank account online. Access Softek is the creator of an OFX Server product, and has also written OFX client code for a number of platforms. Access Softek implemented OFX client modules that were to be integrated into the Pocket PC, Symbian, Palm, and Mac versions of a cross platform personal financial management software product.
• Nino Expense Manager. One of the first palm size PC software applications to be written by a third party developer, the Expense Manager was bundled on the CD that came with the Phillips Nino.

Technologies

• C++/.NET/C#. Although the bulk of our CE development has been done in C++, we also have significant experience coding under the Compact .NET framework in C#, with our first Compact .NET project beginning while the framework was still in Beta release.
• Active Sync. Writing a Windows CE Active Sync provider can be difficult when the data to be synchronized is at all complex. Access Softek has implemented providers in two very difficult cases:
  1. Microsoft Money's copious relational data.
  2. The double synchronization required by Franklin Covey’s PlanPlus: between the Pocket Outlook tasks database and the Franklin Covey extensions, and then between the PDA based software and its desktop counterpart.
• POOM (Pocket Outlook Object Model). Access Softek used this Microsoft Pocket PC library to access the Pocket Outlook task and calendar databases for the Franklin Covey Planner and PlanPlus projects, and the contact database for OmniSky. In some cases, we had to combine use of POOM with direct access to the databases, since neither POOM nor direct database access was sufficient to create every type of record that could be created through the Pocket Outlook PIM apps. (The Pocket Outlook PIM apps do not use POOM, and store some data in proprietary binary formats.)
• Pocket Internet Explorer. Access Softek has expertise in creating Javascript and ActiveX controls that run within Pocket Internet Explorer, in one case creating an ActiveX control that interacted with both pIE content and the device’s Contacts and Calendar databases.
• CE Mail Transports. We have experience with both the older mail transport mechanism used by the first Pocket PC devices and the simplified system that replaced it.
• Pocket Outlook "New" and Context Menu extensions, and Today Screen plug-ins. We have experience in all these areas that involve extending the Pocket PC UI, having written a Today Screen plug-in for the Franklin Covey products and created modules implementing custom entries to the global “New” menu and the Pocket Outlook context and Tools menus for various clients.

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