I've been doing some work with windows mobile devices recently and I'm seeing what appears to be a big problem when programming for these devices in a manufacturing environment.
Where I'm working, these devices are used to scan material as it is moved from place to place within the factory, and they live a hard life subject to drops on hard concrete from high heights, scrunching between pallets, pulverizing beneath the wheels of forklifts, etc. This is to be expected and is not itself the issue.
Rather, because these devices have an indeterminate lifespan they sometimes have to be replaced. And when they are replaced, it is sometimes difficult to find an exact replacement. However, those scanners that are not destroyed in the line of duty frequently live to a ripe old age because ruggedized bar-code scanners with windows operating systems are expensive and it's difficult to justify obsoleting old equipment if the only issue is that the software is out of date.
So in our factory, we have windows mobile devices running a variety of operating systems ranging from Pocket PC 2002 to the latest version of Windows Mobile.
The challenge is to write applications such that they run on all of these plethora of operating systems versions, and it is indeed a challenge. It's made even more so by the fact that industrial windows-mobile scanning devices have extensions to support their integrated bar code scanners that do not exist in the Visual Studio windows mobile emulation environment.
The short of this is that I have three scanners on my desk now and am a bit frustrated that the environment that I'm working in (with all these different versions) prevents me from designing a more user friendly UI for my scanning application.
My present approach is to create the scanning applications as web pages. This is working for the moment as all of the versions of scanner that we have include some version of internet explorer. Of course, the versions of internet explorer included with the different flavors of windows mobile have varying levels of support for javascript. This, of course, just keeps things interesting. Wouldn't want my job to be boring now, would I?
A new New Year's resolution: I think I'm going to see if I can't think of some sort of ROI for obsoleting those old Pocket PC 2002 scanners.
Where I'm working, these devices are used to scan material as it is moved from place to place within the factory, and they live a hard life subject to drops on hard concrete from high heights, scrunching between pallets, pulverizing beneath the wheels of forklifts, etc. This is to be expected and is not itself the issue.
Rather, because these devices have an indeterminate lifespan they sometimes have to be replaced. And when they are replaced, it is sometimes difficult to find an exact replacement. However, those scanners that are not destroyed in the line of duty frequently live to a ripe old age because ruggedized bar-code scanners with windows operating systems are expensive and it's difficult to justify obsoleting old equipment if the only issue is that the software is out of date.
So in our factory, we have windows mobile devices running a variety of operating systems ranging from Pocket PC 2002 to the latest version of Windows Mobile.
The challenge is to write applications such that they run on all of these plethora of operating systems versions, and it is indeed a challenge. It's made even more so by the fact that industrial windows-mobile scanning devices have extensions to support their integrated bar code scanners that do not exist in the Visual Studio windows mobile emulation environment.
The short of this is that I have three scanners on my desk now and am a bit frustrated that the environment that I'm working in (with all these different versions) prevents me from designing a more user friendly UI for my scanning application.
My present approach is to create the scanning applications as web pages. This is working for the moment as all of the versions of scanner that we have include some version of internet explorer. Of course, the versions of internet explorer included with the different flavors of windows mobile have varying levels of support for javascript. This, of course, just keeps things interesting. Wouldn't want my job to be boring now, would I?
A new New Year's resolution: I think I'm going to see if I can't think of some sort of ROI for obsoleting those old Pocket PC 2002 scanners.
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