CEBIT BETWEEN THE TEETH

Dick Pountain/02 April 1997/Idealog 32

A couple of months ago I wrote here about my high hopes for the USR Pilot, as a possible replacement for the ubiquitous notebook that lives in my back pocket, but I must confess now that as I put the last words to that column, I didn't in my heart of hearts believe that the Pilot would last the course. In my study is a shelf, inches thick in dust, containing the corpses of all the portable computing devices that have failed to make the grade, right back to the Sharp 1500 of 1981. However things have turned out much better than I expected, and all thanks to trip to Germany.

It's true that I lapsed for a month or two, taking no notes on the Pilot and then discovering I'd forgotten enough Graffiti strokes to make the process a chore. Then along came CeBIT time. As well as the august organ you're reading now, I work for a well-known American publication, and part of my duty to them is to spend a week every March at the Hannover mega-show, helping to judge their 'Best of CeBIT' awards. I took along a laptop computer to type up my report on, and I took my Pilot purely as an electronic phone book, and so left its cradle at home.

At a pre-show meeting to allocate our subject areas (I drew Development Software and Multimedia Software), Udo Flohr one of our German editors announced that he had become a fervent Pilot user, and hence had pursuaded USR Germany to loan us six Pilots for the duration of the show - whereupon he plonked the six boxes on the table and proposed that we all use them to take our judging notes on. These six machines turned out to have the German ROM, but the Pilot software is so simple that this hardly mattered, except in one amusing respect. I was trying to demonstrate to the editor-in-chief that if you couldn't remember a Graffiti stroke, you could always access the on-screen keyboard by writing <command>K. Problem was that it didn't work, causing me considerable embarrassment. Then in a flash of inspiration I twigged that the German for keyboard is 'Tastatur' and sure enough <command>T worked perfectly. (Then I remembered that a long upward stroke achieves the same effect far more simply - USR ought to engrave that on the case somewhere.)

The details (firm, contact name, product, hall and stand number) of all the award entrants existed in a Word file on Udo's laptop - 54 of them in my two judging categories - and we all spent a merry hour or two that afternoon trying to massage our portions of this file into some format that the Pilot would import in a vaguely readable way. I chose to import my 54 entries into the Memo application, but soon discovered that though this will import comma or tab delimited files, using either resulted in one field, rather than one record per memo. I found the workaround, which was to make a comma delimited file (ie. a comma between fields and a newline between records) but then to import it as tab delimited, which fooled the Pilot into putting one record per memo, with commas separating the fields. Another irritation was that Pilot's built-in Memo application doesn't sort (reminding me that you need the SuperPad addon, which I hadn't installed, to do that) - however sorting them in the Pilot Desktop before synchronising fixed that.

Now I had 54 memos whose first lines displayed a hall, stand number and name, on my Pilot's screen. I should point out to anyone lucky enough never to have visited CeBIT that the show takes place in 29 halls, each bigger than Olympia, spread out over the area of a small town. Through the bleak spaces between these halls moans a freezing gale straight off the Baltic, which keeps the brass monkey population firmly under control. As on an Antarctic expedition, your very survival depends upon planning the most economical route between these halls, to minimise your calorific expenditure - missing someone and having to revisit that hall could be the final straw that tips you into hypothermia and/or gibbering madness. By keeping my entrants list sorted by hall and stand number I was already winning, compared to the alphabetical paper list we'd used in previous years.

For the next three days I plodded around the halls, visiting each entrant and submitting myself to a ten minute demonstration of their product, noting my impressions in the corresponding memo on my Pilot. Each evening I'd drop it into the cradle and squirt all these notes into my laptop. The whole procedure worked like a charm. The first morning I found that my Graffiti was rusty but after a day of front-line use I was flying. On day two I discovered that you can use the Pilot's Shortcut macro feature to create simple forms - I'd erroneously believed it only worked for single words, but you can create multi-line paragraphs - and that saved me a lot of writing. On the third day I realised the significance of the Edit Categories menu item; inventing your own categories gives you customisable views of the data. I created Dev and MMedia categories to view these groups separately, while still keeping them in one list for geographical purposes. I've observed over the years that 'horizontal' (ie. general purpose) features are in the end always more powerful than 'vertical' (ie. highly specialized ones) and these two Pilot features provide a nice illustration of this rule. What you can do with them is limited only by your ingenuity, but you do have to think about it - at first sight they will seem simple-minded and insignificant.