Here we are at the end of a year that has been really crackling for me to say the least.
I hope all that’s happened in the second half of the 2003, from the release of Ecpc to the beginning of my collaboration with the local newspaper La Provincia, from the Mobile Fun Awards to the TV interview at Netc@fé, will serve as a solid launch pad for the incoming 2004.
As always all of this couldn’t have been possible without the help of my friends and the good people I had the chance to meet in this short timeframe and who helped me in a way or the other.
I’d like to sincerely thank them by saying that I can almost hear them whispering a few but intense words, the words that Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) tells to James Ryan (Matt Damon) in the last touching scene of one of my favorite films about World War 2 I re-watched on DVD just a few days ago, Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg: Earn this… earn it.

As Christmas is closing in, thanks to the staff of the Italian magazine Il Mio Palmare, their readers can find a nice review of Ecpc on the December issue and even a little present: they can buy the software with a special discount of 20%. How? By reading the review on the printed magazine of course!
During the last week I also wrote an article for the local daily newspaper La Provincia about my friends at Wise-lab, a new promising web-enterprise based in Como.
You can read the article at this link in PDF format or at this one in RepliGo format. They have been so pleased about it that they promptly added a link to Ecpc on their very professional website.
A Merry Christmas to them, to all Ecpc users and to anyone who likes reading my weBlog!

Yesterday, together with the first shy snow flakes, a rushy UPS courier delivered to me my new Pocket PC, a brand new Dell Axim X3!
It’s a really nice piece of hardware and the good design and that “sheet of paper” effect almost surprised me, since it’s so light weight. I can’t say how much hard earned it is for me!
I opted for the standard model with no wireless connectivity, but adding to the order a 64Mb SD card, to keep the expense low, since I’m going to spend something else in software and maybe accessories.
Hardware is nothing without software after all, isn’t it?
I can finally update the My Pocket PC page with the new Axim and I can’t wait to test its great graphics performance with my own code, an area in which it excels as you can read in the recent review appeared on The Register, but now I’ve got some heavy work to do on the incoming version 1.3 of Ecpc.
And it looks so good on the 16bit Axim display…

It took a while, but I’m pretty satisfied with the final result. The forum is now officially opened!
It’s powered by phpBB version 2.0.6 and customized with the Aeolus style theme created by Vjacheslav Trushkin, a graphics style I really like, although you can choose to use the default Subsilver style.
There’s also the multilanguage support including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Finnish languages integrated with the language auto detection mod.
Then, something I really like a lot, you can select the flag of your country from your profile and it will be displayed just below the avatar in your posts, thanks to the country flag mod.
I hope you’ll like to forum structure since, as you can see, you may post comments about all the news I write here on the homepage, both in English and in Italian, which I appropriately renamed to weBlog, as well as discussing about Ecpc in the Products section and swap Euro coins in the Swapping section, which will include more languages once there will be a sufficient number of requests for a new one.
The rank titles system is based on the experience levels of my favorite wargame, Combat Mission, with a couple of additions and the rank indicator bar is built with the Ecpc icon.
The forum is an important service both for users of my software and for any visitor of my website, so I hope you’ll have fun posting there!

I’m happy to announce that the Portuguese translation of Ecpc is almost complete, as you can see on the Wishlist page, and I’ve already started working on the next 1.3 release.
I’ve also updated the Links page adding a few new websites who have been kind enough to publish the latest Ecpc press release, such as for example Nederlandse Pocket PC-club, on which followed some nice comments you can read in Dutch obviously.
Then in the Reviews page I’ve added the nice little new about Ecpc appeared in the November issue of the Italian magazine Il Mio Palmare, which is only an anticipation of what you’ll find in the December issue, and finally I’ve added the positive comment wrote by Heiko Heubach on Pocketland.de.
That’s all for now!