.KEYWORD student
.FLYINGHEAD COOL TOOLS FOR STUDENTS
.TITLE Developer One’s ClassPro
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY In this first article of a new series, Windows CE Power contributing editor Dan Huber takes a look at helpful software for student users of Windows CE devices. But if you’re not a student, don’t despair. Read this series of articles anyway, because these fabulous products may help you too!
.AUTHOR Dan Huber
Some productivity-oriented software titles that come in handy for me as a student are available from Developer One. Developer One, which seems to have a niche for productivity software, offers such things as an agenda/homework organizer, a tool to graph spreadsheet data, an advanced clipboard of sorts (grossly-underrated terms for this tool), and a password-protected PIM (Personal Information Manager), among other things.
Whether or not you have the budget to afford a luxurious new H/PC or Palm-sized PC, or if you’re currently happy with whatever Windows CE device you have, the following product will bring new value to your device, no matter how old, as long as it meets the minimum requirements.
.H1 Developer One’s ClassPro
ClassPro is a convenient tool designed to track the progress of assignments in classes and your class schedules, as well as organize all of your classroom notes for you. Developer One created this program with an idea in mind called The Two-Tap ClassPro Concept. As you can see in Figure A, the interface behind this product is primarily tabular.
.FIGPAIR A Developer One’s design concepts are usually quite original and efficient.
The idea behind this is that all of your classes are given individual tabs along the top of the program, while such things as the class information, notes, and tasks are located along the side. With one tap, you’ll get to your physics class tab, while another brings you to the notes you’ve put together for physics.
Class information consists of all sorts of data, such as teacher, room number, and telephone number. In Figure B, provisions are provided to allow for separate data for a lecture and lab version of any class you have.
.FIGPAIR B I’ve never had a class with information that occupies all of these fields.
It’s also easy to configure your schedule for that particular class with simple numeric text boxes for entering the time range and checking off some boxes to set the days that you attend that class each week.
Notes are really just organized links to external files that are the actual notes. These notes can either be Pocket Word or Pocket Excel files. You can classify a note by type and use pre-built templates that suit each Pocket Office application to make it easier to enter data while taking the notes, which make for great time-savers. The files you create for each note are stored by default in your My Documents folder.
Tasks are also a major component behind ClassPro. You enter the name of the assignment and other information, such as due date, progress (shown on a horizontal bar graph), priority on a scale from a one to ten, the letter grade received, and the percentage of your final grade. Figure C showcases the sample task that’s included with ClassPro.
.FIGPAIR C That nifty progress meter is something I haven’t seen in Windows CE before.
Another great feature is the ClassPro Report Generator. You give the file a name and choose to build it as a .TXT file or a Pocket Word file. You can include options such as completed tasks, note summaries, and the time that the report was generated. You can build reports for all of your classes or pick an individual class. Upon creation, you’re prompted to confirm immediate viewing or not. I created a sample report using the included sample information and it was very comprehensive and formatted for easy reading.
If you want to view your schedule, use either the toolbar button, which looks like a calendar, or the All Classes tab. Here you’ll see a thorough overview of the classes you must attend, the times, room numbers, etc.
Finally, Developer One includes a database utility for managing the ClassPro database. There’s a button for viewing the statistics of the current database such as size, record count, and more. You can also delete the ClassPro database, or simply reset it. The choice is yours.
All together, ClassPro is a great tool for students, as its name implies. It covers nearly everything you’ll ever need. A more robust note organizer might be useful to some, and for such an item, I’d recommend CodeWallet or HPC Notes from PhatWare.
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.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information about Developer One’s ClassPro, visit http://www.developerone.com.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
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.BIO
