It is said that it takes two tries to get it right when you build a home, and my experience certainly confirms that. Unfortunately, I still live in the first one, if you get my drift.
If you read the article on the history of Easy-Scout, you know our “second try” came quite some time ago. Software, unlike houses, is relatively speaking, has lower barriers for publishers if they want to seek perfection, and that coupled with competition usually makes the ”two try” rule irrelevent. When we built Easy-Scout XP a few years ago, we made “data portability” the first of our “continuous improvement” priorities.
One thing Easy-Scout didn’t handle as well as our customers needed was “synchronizing” game data entered in different places and on different computers. Sure, we had a Backup and Restore feature for moving the full scouting database from one pc to another, but our early windows programs (the 1996, 1998 and 2000 versions) built a very large following among Division II and III coaches, including a few DII national champions in the late 90’s.
It was typical for a college staff to ”split up” the data entry chore on Sunday afternoon and then consolidate the data at the end of the day to produce a 3, 4 or even 5 game consolidated tendency report. Easy-Scout included a utility for archiving and moving games around but it took some time to “master”, to say the least. So when we built Easy-Scout XP, we built data portability right into the software, and its there in a big way in our current products.
We realized that a side benefit of this design was that Easy-Scout was now in a position to have a “Palm” data entry companion, so we built Easy-Scout Mobile for the Pocket PC in 2004 and later Easy-Scout Mobile for Palm computers in 2005. At the time, there was only one product available to the coach who wanted to use a PDA for entering scouting data on a handheld, and the program ran only on Palm devices.
Easy-Scout Mobile 2005 was released as an optional, add-on, football scouting program for just about any handheld computer a coach might have – Palm, Compaq, HP, Dell, you name it. To make this simple, we included software for each in the package, so a coach did not need to worry about what type of operating system his “palm pilot” used. The PDA was optional, so a guy could enter a game or two on his handheld, a game or two on his desktop or laptop, and then combine them to produce a scouting report. The price… $100.
The thing about using the PDA is that it makes scouting “mobile”, not just portable. There is a big difference, really, in my opinion. Back to my building the house analogy, we came out with a new version of Easy-Scout Mobile for Palm computers early this year. Its better than the previous one, and we did not charge for the update.
Next up is our “solution” for owners of newer Pocket PC and Windows Mobile devices. The current Easy-Scout Mobile 2005 program (remember we include a Palm and Pocket PC version) works great on Pocket PC’s that run anything other than Windows Mobile 5. We’ll have one later this Spring for Windows Mobile 5 devices. It should be the best one yet. Stay tuned.
Coach Nick
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