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PRODUCT REVIEW
The virtual wallet
By Clifford Brooks
There are a number of virtual wallet programs in the Windows CE marketplace. These programs allow you to store replicas of the items you carry in your physical wallet, such as your credit cards, bankcards, memberships, and even your photos. In addition, they allow you to store other important information, such as those pesky serial numbers and registration IDs for all your software programs. Furthermore, most of these programs are fully configurable, so you can modify the program to meet your personal data needs.
All of these programs provide some level of encryption, allowing you to protect sensitive information such as credit card and bankcard numbers. And with the IR capabilities of the current hardware, my guess is that it's only a matter of time until we're able to beam our information directly to the cash register, making these virtual wallets even more complete replacements for the real thing.
The program I use is CodeWallet from Developer One, Inc. (available at http://www.developerone.com), a very nice implementation of the virtual wallet concept. It has served me well, and my Cassiopeia has virtually replaced my wallet, as I now carry my driver's license and credit cards in my Cassiopeia case. It is just so liberating to get rid of the wallet in the back pocket!
So CodeWallet works for me, and works well. But it didn't stop me from checking out MediaWallet, the latest offering from Applian Technologies, Inc. (available at http://www.applian.com/mediawallet). MediaWallet is much like the virtual wallets from other manufacturers, but it adds a few multimedia bells and whistles to the mix, allowing it to stand out from the crowd.
Talk to me baby
What are these multimedia features? Well, for starters, Applian went one better on the wallet photo concept. In addition to the ability to display photos, you can attach a sound file in .WAV format to each photo, so now, when you select a photo, you not only see the image but also hear a recorded sound. You can use the built-in voice recorder to create sounds in a jiffy. To link the sound file to the image, all you have to do is give it the same name (i.e., Cougar.gif and Cougar.wav). I took my favorite picture of my cat, Cougar, and added it to MediaWallet, then recorded him purring. So now, every time I select his picture, I hear that inimitable purr. Check out how cute Couger is in Figure A. Really nice. In fact, this feature works so well that I could see people using this to create mini-presentations. Just imagine a salesperson putting together a sequence of slides to outline the key features of the product. Talk about closing the sale!
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