I was going over some updates to a slide deck I use in presentations – one where I mention the Tip Calculator/Bill Splitter I wrote for the Compact Framework that’s been quite popular on PocketGear.com and I did a little searching and found some interesting things…
On February 24th 2006 my little program was the “Pocket PC Freeware Utility of the Day” on About.com and while I thank them for their kind words about my simple app, I was left wondering why I found out only because it was the #9 link on Google when I typed in “Pocket PC Tip Calculator”.
It was also this way that I found out my little program was nominated for a Software Award on Howard Forums…I don’t think I won, but it’s nice to have been noticed.
I guess the cool thing for me in all of this is thinking that this little piece of code I wrote was essentially my .NET Compact Framework “Hello World!” because I didn’t want to do a literal “Hello World!” choosing instead to make something a little more useful to me, and that apparently so many thousand’s of other people have found useful too.
At the time I had written that I had just gotten a new cell phone that had a built-in Tip Calculator/Bill Splitter and thought “Cool – it’s easy to code and useful to” so I set off to learn about Pocket PC development with that. I learned how to work in the compressed screen space of a Pocket PC, how to work with the SIP, handle simple events and even how to make an app *really* close on the Pocket PC instead of using Smart Minimize.
Anyways – I’m in the process of updating that Visual Studio solution and will post the new code soon. Perhaps then someone else can learn how much fun it can be to write CF apps and the saga can continue!