FRAMINGHAM (02/18/2000) - Handheld devices are great for workers who gather information in the field, but creating an interface tailored to the requirements of a specific job still requires an application developer's time, right?
Nope.
A U.S. Navy technician and an election campaign consultant recently found that at least one tool designed to build applications for 3Com Corp. PalmPilots is simple enough for non-information technology people to use.
Nine months ago, Bill F. Ragatz, an aviation warfare systems operator, developed an application to help Navy Seahawk helicopter pilots in San Diego gather flight data.
And Rochelle Day, president of Seize the Day Solutions in Las Vegas, wrote an application that campaign volunteers in Nevada use to poll voters in their homes.
Both used Pendragon Forms by Pendragon Software Corp. in Libertyville, Ill. The tool, which sells for $149 per developer and up to $45 for each user, is in use at 5,000 companies, Pendragon officials said.
"I picked Pendragon because it was easier to work with for accessing databases than other products," said Ragatz. "I started using it with absolutely zero development experience."
Ragatz said it took 20 minutes of training on Pendragon Forms and only a few additional minutes to build the first application.
Both Day and Ragatz said they tried to use CodeWarrior by Metrowerks Corp. in Austin, Texas, but found it too complex and time-consuming.
Ragatz said he got the idea last year to replace paper forms that required pilots to spend about an hour after every flight typing flight information into PCs. Today, he estimates he has cut input time at least in half.
"That's a huge time savings for a pilot coming in at midnight after flying for seven hours who wants to get home and might need to fly the next day," he said.
Pilots and technicians use about 14 PalmPilots while flying or working on a fleet of 10 $16 million Seahawk helicopters that are flying almost constantly on a variety of missions, including search and rescue.
Day has a development background, but she said she likes Pendragon Forms because it takes her only a couple of minutes to change a form on a handheld when she updates questions used in polls.
Day's volunteers carry PalmPilots that are loaded with the names, addresses and party affiliations of voters. They ask residents questions about their candidate preferences based on that information, and Day sells the raw data and her services to candidates to help them plan their campaigns. The surveys can be updated easily to garner opinions on hot topics, she said.
Campaigns have long used what are known as "walking lists" to poll voters in key precincts, but voter data sheets are often photocopies of handwritten information that are hard to read, Day said.
She buys the voter data on floppy disks from election officials and tailors questions to provide information for a campaign manager. Sometimes those questions change daily or weekly during a campaign.
The PalmPilot IIIx that Day uses costs $226. Ragatz acquired Palm V's for less than $350 each through a Navy procurement program.
Analysts called both applications good examples of how people can use inexpensive, relatively simple tools to make their jobs easier. "If all you need is a front-end client to retrieve and post data that's not tied to legacy code, it makes a lot of sense to use these products," said Jim Cummisky, an analyst at Mobile Insights Inc. in Laguna Niguel, Calif.