Tag Archives: FCPlus

Introducing FastFigures Mobile for iPhone and iPod Touch

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I’m very proud to announce the release of FastFigures Mobile, our first iPhone/iPod Touch application and the first release of our companion to FastFigures Online. FastFigures Mobile runs on iPhone and iPod Touch devices without requiring an Internet connection. FastFigures modernizes the calculator.

In my time running Infinity Softworks, there have been three defining products. The first was FCPlus Professional version 2, which came out in 1999. This product really introduced the template format to mainstream financial calculator users, making it possible for them to drop their HP-12c and HP-17b and carry a Palm handheld instead. This product was also a great marketing success for us as its younger sibling, FCPlus, was the first of our products bundled with Palm handhelds. We had product bundled on pretty much every Palm OS handheld from that point on, including Sony and other Palm OS manufacturers. During this time, bundling became our main marketing strategy.

The next defining product was powerOne Graph version 4, a full-fledged software graphing calculator for Palm OS devices. This was our key product to go after the education market. Educators loved it because their students weren’t spending their entire class time trying to remember which buttons to press and students loved it because they got to carry around a computer. Our education efforts, unfortunately, didn’t work out so well for us. Our three years of effort were killed off when Palm decided to exit handheld computers.

FastFigures is our third defining product. It revives the vision I had for the company’s products in 1999. Calculation is an integral part of many of our lives. We use it to calculate mortgages and investments and concrete slab materials and IV drips and pressure conversions and … well, you get the idea. And we all have our own specialities and needs, independent from everyone around us. But we don’t just run calculations. We need to retain results and share them with co-workers and clients. And we need to be able to run these numbers everywhere and recall these results everywhere, whether in the field or at our desk.

The Online version of FastFigures is already in beta and works with an Internet connection on Windows, Macintosh, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Palm computers. And now, with the release of FastFigures Mobile, we release our first version of FastFigures that runs without an Internet connection on iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

I hope you will give it a try (you can buy it here) and tell me what you think.

Happy Birthday Infinity Softworks

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12 years ago this month, Dane Avilla and I, in essence, founded Infinity Softworks. It wasn’t called Infinity Softworks at the time, but that’s what it became.

Dane and I were both majoring in something different than what we should have. (Dane was in Chemistry; I was in Accounting.) Both of us were getting a minor in Computer Science and I approached him because he was doing tech support for a software publisher and I wanted programming experience to see if that’s what I’d prefer to do when I graduated. The publisher was looking for someone to write for this new device called a PalmPilot. I said what the heck and started working on a project for him, with visions of experience and cash in my 24-year old head.

Working for the publisher didn’t work out for either of us and by the Spring we had left the publisher and was working for ourselves. Dane’s father worked in the tech industry and helped us get our first deal with Macmillan Digital Publishing. Our first product, FCPlus, was published with them in a retail bundle in March, 2008. In the same month, we released the advanced version of our financial calculator software, FCPlus Professional.

Dane stayed on for another half year until he was almost done with his Master’s in Computer Science and then moved to the East Coast. Obviously, I decided to continue moving Infinity Softworks forward. I never really expected to still be at it 12 years after starting our first product.