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Interview: Bachmann Software
September 13, 2001
I’m proud to present this interview with the founders of Bachmann Software, the “PrintBoy people”— Glenn Bachmann and Dan Reuvers. But you’ll soon see that they have much bigger plans than that, as they are interested in developing several other utilities for the Palm OS Platform.
Please tell us a little about your company and how it got started.
Glenn: I founded Bachmann Software in 1993, with a charter of creating useful commercial software products for computer users, both as our own Bachmann-branded products, as well as products created on behalf of Bachmann’s clients. In 1998, we recognized that mobile computing was going to be an important area of computing, and we decided to focus ourselves
exclusively on software for handheld devices and wireless communications. Although we are platform-neutral, we have accumulated a significant amount of experience on the Palm OS platform, and in fact we recently celebrated the completion of our 50th Palm OS software project, which we think is a fairly unique accomplishment in the relatively short history of the Palm platform.
When I think about Bachmann Software and Services, I think PrintBoy. How did you get the idea for the program?
Glenn: Well, we had a lot of printing development experience on other platforms such as Windows, and we well understood that even in the digital age the customer need to create paper output remained critical as a business function. In the early going we were quite surprised to find that there was no printing support at all on Palm OS, making it a rare computing device indeed. We felt that few users would tolerate a laptop or a PC without the ability to print, and our thinking was that if PDA users begin putting important data on their devices, odds are they will need to print it.
So we set about building a robust print engine that would be small enough to run comfortably on a PDA with little memory, but functional enough to provide the printer compatibility and graphical formatting that PC users have come to demand. Our first version of this print engine was called Print Manager, and we sold is as a drop-in print engine for the platform as well as an SDK for programmers to incorporate printing into *their* applications. It wasn’t long before we realized we had an opportunity to create our *own* printing applications as Bachmann Software products and market them to Palm device customers as off-the-shelf software. Thus PrintBoy was born!
You’ve integrated PrintBoy well with Quickword and WordSmith, and I recently heard of added support for MiniCalc. What other applications will you be supporting in the future?
Dan: The list of applications that PrintBoy supports today continues to grow. In addition to Quickoffice, Wordsmith and ThinkDB (which all launch PrintBoy directly from within their own applications), we have created support for MiniCalc/MiniWord, as well as any document saved in Palm’s “.doc” format. We are looking forward to supporting more database, document and spreadsheet applications. We have also announced pending support for PatientKeeper’s healthcare application. We will be introducing PrintBoy integration into several other vertical specific software applications.
FilePoint certainly seems to be a departure for you. How does it relate to your overall vision of handheld computing?
Dan: Ultimately, our vision for Bachmann Software is to become similar to a “Norton Utilities” for handhelds. While many take the utilities available for the PC for granted, they are precisely why PC use has become so pervasive. Webster defines “utility” as “something useful”. If we are successful at fulfilling our vision for our company, our products will indeed make handheld computers more useful. Printing certainly fits that bill, as does file management. There are a number of other utilities that we envision that will further add to this. What’s more, the more dependent people become on their handheld computers, the more they need creature comforts like the ability to print their content, the ability to find it easily, organization tools, and anything else that you’d be lost without on your PC. We have a friend who works at BASF and we love their company tag line could fit us too; “we don’t make things, we make them better.”
What secrets and surprises can you share with my readers?
Dan: If they want to include PrintBoy among their holiday shopping list, they will be able to find a full featured version on the retail shelves just in time. We have made arrangements to ensure PrintBoy will be easy to find for the fall shoppers via a number of retail channels. The InfraReady adapter will also be available on shelves through the cooperation of one of our newest channel partners, along with discounts tied to adapter purchases on stand-alone software sales. Finally, you can assure them that we have a very “expansive” view of what subsequent versions of FilePoint will be capable of.
Thank you very much for your time. Now on to the latest Bachmann Software application, FilePoint. I was privileged to be a beta tester for this program, which focuses on a completely different concept than some other file managers I’ve seen for the Palm OS. Instead of just listing your files, it allows you to organize your applications, spreadsheets, Palm DOCs, databases, and other files into folders for quick and easy access. This is a huge help to anyone who does a lot of project work or who works with clients and needs to be able to access their information quickly and easily. And the handy little icons allow you to open, print (with PrintBoy, of course), beam, delete, or find any file on your Palm OS device. If you need some organizational help and have lots of document files on your handheld, you really should try FilePoint. The price seems a bit high right now, at $19.95, but the program is being very actively developed— two maintenance releases have already come out that tweak the interface a bit and provide some nice enhancements and support for additional programs such as Bonsai. Once this program is completely optimized for speed, you just may find it replacing another program launcher you may currently be using- it’s that powerful.
