Thursday, January 12, 2006

New PocketMod Widget

PocketMod is a killer, killer tool.  Take an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, divide it into eight separate cells, put all kinds of goodness in those cells, say calendars or to-do lists or contact lists or notes or lines or create your own stuff and put it in there.  Fold up that sheet with one clever cut, and Poof! you’ve got a PDA in a pocket. 

You can build your mods on PocketMod’s website, or download a tool and build your sheets offline.  There are a number of extremely useful templates for the things I listed above, plus you can create your own templates if you like.  I used a PocketMode sheet when I went to the Detroit Visual Studio / SQL Server Launch and got tremendous value out of it. 

PocketMod came to mind as a great resource to hand out to attendees at our Code Camp: I could put the Camp’s schedule, Camp info, and list all our sponsors who supported the Camp, create a PocketMod sheet and hand that out to each attendee as they checked in. 

The only problem with PocketMod is that custom templates have to be built in Flash.  Ick.  I don’t know Flash and I don’t have experience with Flash (no, no, that thing at that party in Anchorage was years ago and it was a completely different flash and nobody got any photos anyway). Besides, I don’t have any Flash tools and the one freeware I tried was so confusing I gave up.

Chad Adams, the sole brainchild behind PocketMod, solved that problem.  He created a widget to convert PDF files to PocketMod format.  It’s pretty dang simple.  Use any editor to create an eight-page layout, then print that off to PDF.  (See PDFCreator for a killer GPL app which works as a printer.)  Use PDF2PocketMod and Poof! you’ve got a single sheet with each PocketMod sheet properly oriented.

Check out PocketMod.  It’s really a cool thing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bonjour,
I try the application, but i think there is a bug. If you have a white page the program don't work.
Sincèrement.
AB from France, Plaisance du touch.

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