Archive for September, 2003

A very nice surprise came into my mailbox today as I discovered Ecpc has almost reached the Top Ten of the Handango People’s Choice Awards in the category Best Education Solution! 🙂

The Handango People’s Choice Awards are designed to honor those applications that offer customers the best quality available in the mobile software world. Handango Members have the opportunity to vote for their favorite software in numerous categories.

Need to say more? I’m amazed I’ve reached the 11th place in such a short time frame, so first of all I’d like to thank the people who cast their vote for Ecpc.

Handango has just reopened voting for next year’s People’s Choice Awards and the next group of winners will be announced in March 2004, so if you like Ecpc now you know exactly what to do: just go to the bottom of the Product details page and vote it in the Best Education Solution category.

The next time we‘ll do much better than the 11th place, won’t we? 😉

Today Frédéric Botton, Chef de projet of the French PDA Magazine, has kindly sent me a scan of the article about Ecpc appeared in the september-october issue of the magazine. 🙂

As you can see in the picture below, I’ve sort of censored the URL address pointing to the french Special Demo of Ecpc which I build for his readers, since it’s currently on my website and at the moment I can’t afford bandwidth problems. So if you want it you have to buy a copy of PDA Magazine. 😉

A couple of notes: the price in the article refers to the first promotional version of Ecpc and the french Special Demo has already been updated to the latest version 1.1.

The standard Demo version of Ecpc should have been included also in the Cover Disk of the current issue of the british magazine PDA Essentials, but I’ve not been able to get any confirmation of that so far.

Update: Ecpc appeared on the Cover CD of issue 16 of PDA Essentials with a review in the CD pages also. Now I can’t wait to get a copy of the magazine!

Have a nice weekend!

I’m not an expert web developer, so I was pleased to receive the tips by Quintin Riis, a young web designer from the USA, in particular about the weird way I used JavaScripts to open the external links in a new browser window.

Now I’ve changed all the external links, but feel free to alert me if something doesn’t work properly on your browser.

I’ve just added a new great feature in the Wishlist, the compare collections feature, which will be included in the next version of Ecpc since I’m already working on it. 😉

Finally I’ve uploaded the collection file of Mariano in the swapping page. His swap list file should be soon ready.

Most probably the german translation of Ecpc will be the first one to be released since now two people are working on it, including a kind german from Hamburg, Heiko Heubach, who not only purchased a regular copy of the program, but also offered me his help for the translation! 🙂

He also has a website in german with information about the Canary Islands, so be sure to check it out!

Another new kind italian user, Mariano, from the beautiful city of Naples, reported a small bug related to the variants description of the german 2 Euro coin, year 2002, Mint mark A.

The bug has already been fixed and the fix will be included in the next release of Ecpc, but for those of you who can’t wait, feel free to contact me and I’ll send you an updated executable. 😉

Yesterday I did some swapping with a friend and Ecpc betatester, Stefano, so now I’ve uploaded his collection and my updated swap list in the swapping page.

Ecpc got its first award from Softonic.com, the biggest spanish website offering shareware, freeware and commercial software for multiple platforms including Pocket PCs.

You can see the Ecpc page right here, along with the nice icon that means “Excelente! ¡MB!¡MB! : Destaca entre los que son muy buenos, dentro de su clase son esenciales.” 🙂

Also Ecpc has been listed in the italian Solopalmari.com.

Both websites have been added to the Links page along with two important new ones, Pocket.ws a german Pocket PC portal who recently published a new about Ecpc, and Pocket PC Soft, who listed the program in its Sport and Hobbies section.

So far so good, but there’s much more to come! 😉

As you can see in the top left of each page I’ve just updated the links to the translations by adding some little flags and I’ve also fixed the incorrect Google translations links in the FAQ page.

The lucky owners of the Special Edition of Ecpc will be pleased to look at a whole new customization feature that will make their Special Edition even more unique. In fact I’ve added the possibility to choose a customized background texture to use as skin for all the menus of the program.

Take a look at the new screenshots in the Special Edition section to see the results with custom skins. 🙂

Remember that the Special Edition is only for people supporting me in different ways, first of all with the translations.

Thanks to Marco, an italian friend who just returned from Spain and translated in spanish the press release and the product details page, Ecpc is now is available on Handango en Español.

At the beginning of this week I struggled with a failed hardware upgrade to my PC.

I tried to install a brand new Athlon XP 2200 on an Asus A7V133 motherboard.

I did expect problems, but I tried it nonetheless and for a couple of days I feared the dear motherboard was gone…

That problem delayed my schedule for this week, but now things are back to normal and who already purchased the first version of Ecpc is getting the updated Full version 1.1.

After hearing about the PC disaster a couple of friends told me: get a Mac!