Yuku free message boards

Here are some comments I made in a thread a good while back regarding this issue:

I wrote an IDPA scoring app for the Pocket PC. We used it for a bunch of indoor matches where we had wireless connectivity and it worked OK. We used it as a trial in a couple of our outdoor matches and it did not work out that well. The device was a HP Ipaq running Windows Mobile 6 that I purchased on eBay for $200. The first problem was battery life. It would only run 3-4 hours before it needed recharging. So now you would have to buy extra batteries, but there was no way to charge more than one at the time and the battery had to be in the device. To run a big match with 12-13 bays you would need the same number of devices ($2400) plus extra batteries and then you would have to charge up all the batteries in advance. The app had lots of cool functionality, but it required training. Since the device is so small, you don't have much real estate to make the app intuitively obvious to an untrained user. At the club level, just about anyone available holds the clip board, so training everyone is not an option and at a sanctioned match you would need a training session. Weather is an issue since the Ipaq does not like water/rain. Finally, using a handheld scoring device means that you no longer need a score sheet which should be good, right? Wrong. The shooters still want their yellow copy of the stage score sheet. So, now you have the time keeper writing the score down and entering it into the PDA. This is a cumbersome process even if you Velcro the PDA to the clipboard. The time keeper would end up using the ink pen for a stylus and that would get ink all over the PDA's touch screen making it hard to read. Now if you had two time keepers on every stage this would not be a problem, but who can find that many volunteers?

It sounded like great idea that would make scoring a match fast and easy, but when you added up all the problems, the headaches outweighed the benefits. We went back to the old way of scoring the match from paper score sheets. I'm still looking for a way to solve all of the problems described above, but I'm not there yet.