In 1992, when the company finished developing the product and was looking for somebody to buy it, the first place they went was to the SPCUG's Davis chapter, and they used the Davis chapter as beta testers for the software.

"They were very helpful and helped us validate we had a good product," Carmel said. The work with Davis took place in early 1992. Later in the year, Winway could not afford to exhibit at Comdex, so Carmel spent the show putting fliers on the cars in the parking lot. "Apparently, that worked because we soon started getting orders," he noted.

"Selling résumé software is really different than selling other kinds of software. One time we went to Comdex when we had a booth and two people came to our booth: one's badge said he was the president of the company, and the other wore a vice-president badge. The president took our software and gave it to the vice-president and said, 'You need this.'

"We also get tips about mergers and acquisitions." Usually people who buy the Winway products are individuals, but they sometimes receive orders for 20 or 30 copies from a company's headquarters, and the next day hear on the news that the company was acquired or merged.

Winway initially tried to sell software at Egghead, then the leading retail software chain. Although there was résumé software for DOS, Egghead maintained there was no need for Windows résumé software because Windows was so easy to use.

"It took us about two years to convince Egghead to stock our WinWay Résumé software," Carmel said. "But now, obviously, people like résumé programs and that's keeping us afloat. WinWay is our primary product and we sell lots and lots of them and we help many people find a job."

Although other companies make résumé software, Winway's biggest competitor is Microsoft Word, Carmel commented. "Most people don't use résumé software to write a résumé. They use a word processor because that's what they have and they don't realize the benefits of using a résumé program as compared to a word processor."

Although résumés can be prepared with a word processor, Carmel said, the user must create both the content and the format. Winway, on the other hand, helps with both. It is very useful with formatting, but does even more to help with the content.

Winway comes with numerous samples which can be used as is or adapted. Carmel looked for a résumé format for a nurse. "Here you see all kinds of different nurses that we already have a résumé for— head nurse, floor nurse, office nurse, midwife, nursing assistant— and for each one of these there is already a résumé available with everything this person does. We have over 12,000 résumés built into the product."

"If I look for a job as a teacher, here are different teacher's résumés— art teacher, music teacher. If I enter "tree"— tree cutter, tree pruner, tree planter, tree surgeon. You can find everything in here. If you're looking for a résumé for a magician, we have one."

Continuing with a teacher's résumé, he went on, "Let's further explore. Continue using this résumé by adding your name and address, choosing a particular style from a list, and realize this is not something you can do in a word processor. The word processor may have a sample résumé, but you will not be able to manipulate it as well as you can in our program.

"When you actually write the résumé, there are fields available for the name of the employer, the location, and other pertinent data. We even have this feature called AutoWriter, which allows you to combine content from different résumés. If you remember, we chose a résumé for a teacher but I can choose the résumé of a preschool teacher, and I can take phrases from that résumé and add them to this résumé that I am writing. So, I have a full résumé for a teacher that I have created and I have not typed anything other than the name into the résumé. Everything else is already provided in the product."

Of course, a résumé also needs a cover letter to go with it. Winway includes cover letters, too.

"Here are different kinds of letters that we can write. There are talking letters called 'Call Office,' 'Offer Acceptance,' and 'Ad response.' And then we have 'opening body,' 'closing,' so you can just choose phrases from the selection and put them in the letter. So again, I am writing a cover letter to go with the résumé and I'm not really typing anything. I'm just choosing predefined text."

Once the parts of the résumé have been selected, there are many areas to fill in to make it specific to you. "Some of the phrases describe what the person does. But some of them have fields that you can fill, for example, 'chosen as the such-and-such' or 'created and implemented this thing and that.'

"We allow you to customize the résumé. We take care of all the grunt work. We put in everything that, say, a teacher or a tree trimmer does, but we also give you a lot of opportunity to highlight your own accomplishments. You must admit, this is a lot easier than staring at a blank screen of a word processor."

Carmel also demonstrated the various résumé styles available. "The styles are actually very useful because some people have a résumé that is very short and they are trying to fill space so they won't put their name in a very large font that takes about five lines. On the other hand, if you are limited in space you can put your name in small letters using only one line. Our product also has a nice feature that will fit a résumé to one page. It will do everything it can to tighten the résumé to fit one page."

The program also contains a contact manager to track all the companies you are applying to. Letters can be merged with the contacts "and this is by far the easiest mail merge you can use. Many people use our product simply to mail merge because it is so easy."

"We even give you an opportunity to fill in blanks on your envelope," Carmel said. "These blanks include 'ATTN' lines and custom lines that may say things like 'Experienced Engineer' or even pictures of recognized certification emblems. So these envelopes go immediately into a priority stack."

Carmel also stated that most people think a résumé should be designed to get the job.

"But that is not really true. The résumé only gets you an interview. While we can help you fake a résumé, and we can write the résumé for you, we cannot fake an interview. For an interview, you have to prepare and present yourself. You have to impress the interviewer.

"So Winway includes interview simulations that prepare you for over 200 of the most common interview questions. Each answer can be modified slightly for a custom response based on the situation. Each answer has hints as to what the interviewer is actually asking for and the focus of what your response should be."

Even without using most of the program, just watching the three hours plus of interview simulations would enhance your chances of getting the job. Winway hired quite a few professional writers and used government reference materials to create the job materials.

The program also covers salary negotiations. "We have included many scenarios that will help you during this phase of your employment application. We explain how to address this scenario and how best to toss the ball back into the interviewer's hands with respect to actual numbers."

You can also use Winway to connect to the Internet and search for jobs. It searches about 20 sites for jobs that correspond to keywords you enter. You can also post your résumé to those sites using Winway.

Winway Résumé can be downloaded from their Web site. Although there is no demo version, there is a money-back guarantee. The product sells for $39.95.

Palm Essentials
The evening's other speaker was Tom Waters discussing Palm PDA devices.

He began by asking how many Pocket PC users are in the audience. Those that raised their hands were then asked to leave. ("Just joking," he says.) His presentation is about the Palm but admits that, in all likelihood, the Pocket PC does represent the future. But for the present and the immediate foreseeable future, the Palm is the device that offers the most in stability and functionality in a handheld device.

"Just for the record, if you do have a Pocket PC device, then you already know you are the beneficiary of some mighty fine resolution— there are some multimedia implications in a Pocket PC that don't really exist as a practical matter in a Palm. The resolution on a Pocket PC screen is double that of a Palm, so if you're sharing photographs, it's a lot more fun. To that, I say, 'Sony Clié.' The multimedia concept, and the high-resolution screen, and the fact that you can listen to MP3s and watch videos on your Palm, and a number of other things that might well indicate that you have missed the handheld boat— that can all happen on a Sony and you still benefit from the Palm OS.

Waters said he prefers the Palm OS to the Pocket PC because of the multitude of programs available for it. He cares less about the multimedia on a Pocket PC and more for the Palm benefits.

"Palm users no doubt realize that they can beam addresses, business cards, and other snippets of information to other Palm users and newer Pocket PC users and back. Like many things that are Palm-related, the way that you beam an address is that you get 'on' an address. You have to click on a particular record (tap on it) that you want to beam and then you tap the menu, then tap the option you want to do. That's pretty much how you do everything on a Palm.

"There are a couple of advantages to making a particular address record a 'business card.' Typically it's your own address. Regardless of what record you are actually viewing, beaming the business card will always beam that pre-selected address. Even better than that, you don't even have to go into a menu. In fact, you can have the Palm turned off. Pressing and holding the 'Phone' button for about a second and a half automatically beams the business card record."

Benefits of SilkyBoard
"One of the big subjects I want to talk about is SilkyBoard. SilkyBoard, among other things, replaces Graffiti. Regardless how proficient one becomes at Graffiti, SilkyBoard users will always be twice as fast. The SilkyBoard is a durable plastic overlay that covers the Graffiti area of the display (but does not prevent one from using Graffiti). There is a corresponding suite of utilities and drivers that correlate the tap positions of the display to the diagrams on the overlay. It really works well and is a nice solution.

"Eliminating Graffiti isn't the only objective here. It also gives you macros on a Palm. For example, slide the stylus along the width of the space-bar (a space-slide), then choose 'E' for e-mail. (I happen to have a Bluetooth card installed on my Palm, and I have a Bluetooth-enabled phone, which is connected to my Bluetooth-enabled headset. I can dial the phone with my Palm and instead of going to my phone, I can tap the little button on my Bluetooth headset and carry on a conversation.)

"In this case, I chose 'E' for e-mail, which dials up on the phone's GPRS to the Internet and makes the connection for me. It then pulls down my e-mail and logs off for me. In one stroke, it's all done. The point here is that SilkyBoard allows me to do this in one stroke.

"It's also a launcher. I use AvantGo a lot so if I do space-slide-A, it brings me right into that service. AvantGo is a great way to synchronize information and content into your Palm. Go to AvantGo's site and sign up for a free account. Indicate what subjects you are interested in, what Web sites you want to pull down, and every time you hotsync when connected to the Internet, it goes out and gets those pages. You can browse those pages using just your thumb. Hint: Go into the menu and from Options, choose 'Enable hard keys.' What that will do is make the first button the 'Back' key and the second button the "Forward" key. Now you can navigate the pages using nothing but your thumb.

With both Pocket PCs and Palms, the synchronization issue is "huge," Waters said.

"If I have a dozen users and they all want to share the same database, that's when I turn to a product like Act! We can have them all sharing the same database in Act! even though they have separate calendars. They each sync to their individual calendars but they're accessing the community database.

"There is what I call the 'secret keystroke.' It has nothing to do with SilkyBoard, but rather with MagicText. There is a specific, sweeping stylus stroke that brings up a pop-up menu. That pop-up menu does all kinds of things. There's a 'phone lookup' feature— for example, if you are in the Calendar on a certain day (other than today) and you tap 'Contacts,' you would lose your place in the Calendar. Upon re-entering the Calendar, you would be back at today's date. The 'phone lookup' feature lets you access information from anywhere in your Palm. Do the secret keystroke and choose phone lookup, you are taken to your address book where you choose the desired record, and all that information is automatically transferred back to where you were. You can double-tap a last name to highlight it, do the secret keystroke, choose phone lookup, and the record matching that last name is automatically captured and copied to the task at hand.

"I also use Launch 'Em as my program launcher. It makes so many complex issues drag 'n' drop. If I want to delete an application, I drag it to the trashcan and let go. It's gone. If I've got a game that you want, I can drag that game over to the beam tool, let go, and it beams over to you.

"I also have drag 'n' drop icons as a result of Launch 'Em. That means when I tap the Menu button, I have tabs that are organized along the side. They're called Apps, Extras, Games, PQA, System, TOM, and Utilities. They're nicely organized and I organize them with drag 'n' drop. You can take any program and drag it to another tab and drop it and it disappears out of the group that it's in and joins the group you dragged it to.

Useful Hacks
"Does everybody know what a hack is? You can't use a hack unless you have a HackMaster. HackMaster is a free program that either is on your Palm or should be on your Palm, and when you have HackMaster installed, you are free to load and utilize hacks. I'll give you an example of a hack that nobody but a SilkyBoard user would care about. There's this free program called MiddleCaps. For people who are using Graffiti, if you precede any graffiti stroke with an upward motion, that makes the next letter capitalized. With MiddleCaps, the left side of the Graffiti area makes lower-case letters, the right side is numbers, and right on the line between is all caps. So it saves that upward stroke.

"I use only one hack regularly: it's called MagicText. It gives me another kind of drag 'n' drop. People who have a Palm know they can't just select text, then drag it somewhere and drop it. And yet, with MagicText enabled, that's exactly what you have. You can double-tap a word, or a sentence, or triple-tap a word to highlight the paragraph, or quadruple-tap a word to highlight the entire field or memo, pull it where you want, and it's moved.

"And of course there is AvantGo. I stay reasonably informed as a direct result of AvantGo. I don't have a subscription to a newspaper. I've got the Sacramento Bee and Wall Street Journal synced into my Palm. These are scaled-down versions of these products, but I notice that after I'm done reading my Palm in the morning, there's nothing new on the radio for me. There's news from MSNBC, Yahoo, and other different sources you can sign up for and it just gets synced into your Palm. You'll never be bored at the doctor's office again.

"Since I'm connected to the Internet on my Palm, I use Blazer to browse. Blazer is much, much faster than AvantGo for browsing. But of course, typically when you're using AvantGo, you're not browsing. You are perusing cached content.

Documents to Go
I think it's kind of ironic that in a world filled with Pocket PCs, that the Palm would so outdo the Pocket PC on the subject of compatibility. As you know, you have Pocket Outlook, Pocket Word, Pocket Excel. If you take a document with any kind of sophisticated formatting at all, and you sync that document to a Pocket PC and make changes, there's a pretty decent chance you are going to lose some or all of that formatting when you send it back to the PC. If you do exactly the same thing, you sync a document to your Palm that's still in Documents to Go, you make changes to that document and sync it back, it doesn't lose any of that formatting. It's just a remarkably tight interface into Word and Excel, and it also does Powerpoint.

"So, this PowerPoint presentation you're seeing is also on my Palm. Admittedly a little bit useless there. What are you going to do? I suppose you could be on a plane sitting next to somebody and give them a presentation.

"This right here is a Navman. In my car, I plug the adapter into my cigarette lighter, so I don't use up the battery power. When I snap the Palm into it, and plug it into the cigarette lighter, it charges my Palm.

"Have you ever gone to a client's house in a residential neighborhood, and when you're ready to leave you are too embarrassed to go back and say, 'I can't get out of your neighborhood? Can you help me?' Here is my chosen tool: Trip Pilot. I don't use the software that came with my Navman, because it requires me to route myself when I'm at home. This is completely useless for a guy like me who spends a good 30% of his life completely lost. I need to be able to do it in the field. I've got a Bluetooth connection, I've got a wireless connection to the Internet. When I get lost, I look at the nearest address and I punch it in.

"Trip-Pilot also lets me select addresses from the address book in the Palm. Other products allow you to get your routes while you are out in the field. This particular product is the only one that let you select your 'to' and 'from' address from your address book. Which is awesome— just tap your client, tap your other client where you happen to be, and it routes it. And then you have the maps that lead up to that trip in the device, you put it into the GPS system, and it creates an overview route. Using GPS, I can step through each segment in detail.

"Trip Pilot doesn't require GPS but with GPS, I know that your address is coming up in 2000 feet… 1500 feet… 200 feet… oh, there it is! For me, it cuts down on my u-turns.

"Then there is the phone and a variety of ways to work it. This is an Ericsson T39. There is a lot of hype over the T68i product that has a little camera attachment. That same camera will attach to this—but seriously, a real digital camera that takes real digital camera pictures— only takes up this much room anymore. This is a Minolta DiMage 10. What's great about it is that when you turn it on, it takes less than one second for it to be ready to take the picture. And the picture is stored on a postage stamp-sized SD-RAM module. SD-RAM is the reason I don't own a Sony. I would have a Sony Clié if they would just get off the memory stick thing. They want you to have a memory-stick Clié so you will have to get a Sony laptop that has memory stick support, so that you'll buy your next home stereo with memory stick support, etc.

"If you recall the BetaMax days, Sony created a far superior VCR playback concept. It was better sound, it was higher resolution, and you couldn't say enough good things about it. But they were so interested in making sure that nobody would steal from them that they cut their nose off to spite their face. "That's not the standard." We just said, "You know what? It is better, but we're Americans and we don't care." And we just went and did our own thing. [Ed. Note: That's not quite how it went down.]

"So I don't know why they make such a fine product you can't use. I had to ship to Japan when I had a Clié to order Bluetooth. Which means I didn't get the Palm software that comes with the Bluetooth, which seamlessly integrates a dialer that can dial your phone from your Palm. If you are into Bluetooth at all, the Palm product is really good. But I'm going to take out my Bluetooth, and I'm going to put in my picture, and just inserting the card causes the product that comes with Documents to Go to automatically display any pictures. Of course, this would look better on a Sony Clié, but this memory card wouldn't have fit in a Sony Clié Now you have to buy a Sony camera, and you get where I'm going there.

"Regardless of what all can be loaded, added, appended to a Palm device, realize that it's main function, which it does very well still today, is to manage your personal contacts and other information."