pda software

[simpson]

Hey Everyone,

I am a undergraduate business student and I am currently working on a group project wich involves coming up with a new business venture. My group has chosen to develop personal investment software which allows PDA users to manage their portfolios through their handheld devices. I am aware that this sort of thing already exists, so we are looking for ways to make our product different from all the rest.

My question is about operating systems... our plan is to write the software to cd, which is installed on a PC and from there, the user downloads the program onto their PDA. The part that is installed on the PC has all of the features of the program on the PDA, but is also used for archiving purposes so it has a larger storage capability.

Having very little experience in this sort of thing, this might sound like a really stupid question, but i'll ask anyways! Is it possible to have a single piece of software developed for Windows that is compatible with a wide range of PDAs (for example, BlackBerry devices, PalmPilots, etc)? Or do variations have to be made to the software in order to make it run on each type?

Also, if anyone actually uses personal investment software, if you have any feedback in regards to how to make this software better and/or different from what is currently on the market would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers!

[DeMan]

I can't give you a definite answer (aside from everything else, I'm unsure of the operating systems on many handheld devices).
There are a lot of things that can affect cross-platform portability, and there are many ideas/efforts to reduce differen aspects of these. As an example (and sorry I don't think this will help you in a major way ....but) is wxWidgets. The original idea of wxWidgets was to standardise GUI tools so that the code was portable (but atill needed to be compiled on the target machine). The idea was if you used it on a mac, it had a mac feel, if you used it on a Solaris system it was more Solarisy and if you used it on Windows, well, it worked the \same as anything does on windows. I think it has now been developed to a point where you can compile one source and it will run on any machine (but those here more familiar with it may correct me).
Likewise, I would imagine there are other similartools for different portability problems, but ultimately the best way may be to have differen applications for different systems (although you can share a lot of code between systems, because the logic is all the same).
If you want data to be compatible accross different platforms (or want to use consistent standards for storing information), you may like to have a brief look into how platform endianness could affect your system also....

[markmcgookin]

Hi,

I am an undergraduate myself, and I am in the final stages of developing a PDA application for my Final Project.

J2ME is Sun Micro System's Micro Edition for java software, which is available for use on almost all handheld devices. However, certain functions (i.e. text messaging and streaming media) are going to be operating system specific in their operation. Sun's catch phrase for Java is "Write once, Run Everywhere"

The other main alternative is Visual Studio (with appropriate SDK for the OS) however, programs developed here will only run on windows based PDAs and Smart Phones. This has many benifits with synchronisation with SQL Servers and Active Sync.

I have done some research into this field and will happily send you a section of my report with data on it if you want to PM me an e-mail. Although I must insist on you NOT plagorising my work as I have not yet submitted the documentation and my uni used an online plagorism detection system in collaboration with a network of other unis. However, if you wish to use the data gatehered or reference my work I am happy to help.